Hearing music
The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, wrote and spoke eloquently about people with various injuries to their brains. His fascination was with how people with such injuries behaved before and after, about how such injuries altered their personalities and their perceived realities. His fascination was infectious.
I’ve only read a couple of his books, but had heard his discussion introducing his books Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain at the time it was published in 2007. One of my topical hobby horses is the limitation of knowledge, perception, understanding, so I decided to refresh my recall of the discussions around this book—partially in the hopes that I’ll get around to reading it. Someday…
Since music comes up in comments here often enough, I thought I’d link to Sacks talking about music and people with unusual experiences with it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that was short, so I’m just going to post a YouTube video of a talk he gave on the book that goes on for about 110 minutes (you can slide through the introduction to about the 10 minute mark to pick up where Sacks starts speaking). And there’s also a link to an audio podcast version of another presentation he gave of similar length. So, if you’ve got household chores and would like something to listen to, I’ve got you covered. The presentations include Sacks’s remarks followed by audience Q&A.
For those unfamiliar with Dr. Sacks, he wrote books in which he described people with a wide range of personal experiences with brain problems that include aphasias, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimers disease, Tourette’s syndrome, autism spectrum disorders, traumatic brain injuries from accidents, and so on. He told these patients’ stories with vivid descriptions of how they came to experience the world. In these discussions, for instance, he describes a woman who has hallucinations of music: that whole songs or symphonies are going on around her when there’s nothing making any sounds. He describes another woman who has been so a-musical her entire life that she’d never been able to perceive music as anything more than unpleasant racket—she couldn’t even identify the tunes she grew up hearing in a musical family: the songs were all just formless noise. He tells of a physician who was struck by lightening and months later became obsessed with making music every waking hour of his life, believing he’d been called to a new purpose by a higher power.
What Sacks presents isn’t a freak-show, in case that’s that my short descriptions suggest. Rather, he tells these stories and wonders how the problems arise in the brain, and what they tell us about how our brains work. And by implication, his descriptions make you wonder what limitations we have in our experiences individually or collectively that we’ll never be able to recognize—or what potential there is in our brains that goes untapped.
Apologies, then, if these items are too long. But for those who have the time: enjoy!
We should mussel in on his racket
The brain and how it works and why has always fascinated me. I don't have time to listen right now, but, I will bookmark it. I am also fascinated by the idea that there is actually a lot we still don't understand about how it works, and I love to read about new discoveries about it.
Boy, am I whooped...was a long, physically straining day yesterday...and we have more to do today, and at the least we organized everything in the attic, we know where it is and I packed up in garbage bags and boxes a ton of stuff to give away, discovered things I forgot I had, and things I don't even remember buying or why...lol...some really cool stuff. Rick had also put all the books, cds and dvds, and vhs back in their places and we have a list of them all also. ( we arrange Dvd's and Cd's alphabetically and books by genre and author...
There is less to go through today, thank goodness. And there are still hard decisions to to be made as to what to keep out and what to store and what to give away as far as my collectibles
Happy Martin Luther King Day and hope you all have a great one