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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
by: Oliver Sacks

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.11
EAN: 9781400033539
ISBN: 1400033535
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: September 23, 2008
Sales Rank: 154
Studio: Vintage

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Product Description:
Revised and Expanded

With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls “musical misalignments.” Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans only seven seconds-for everything but music.

Illuminating, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable, Musicophilia is Oliver Sacks' latest masterpiece.

Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, December 2007: Legendary R&B icon Ray Charles claimed that he was 'born with music inside me,' and neurologist Oliver Sacks believes Ray may have been right. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain examines the extreme effects of music on the human brain and how lives can be utterly transformed by the simplest of harmonies. With clinical studies covering the tragic (individuals afflicted by an inability to connect with any melody) and triumphant (Alzheimer's patients who find order and comfort through music), Sacks provides an erudite look at the notion that humans are truly a 'musical species.' --Dave Callanan

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Considering the part music plays in the recovery of extremely mentality disabled patients
Considering the part music plays in the recovery of extremely mentality disabled patients, which is not a new phenomenon, it has recently been explored once again by Oliver Sacks, physician and author, in his new book Musicophilia Tales of Music and the Brain.

There are remarkable examples of patients who were considered feeble, unable to care for themselves, unable to walk or do anything other than sit, and yet these same people when exposed to music were able to astonish those who cared for them either by family or professionals. Sacks explored many different methods of treatment, but in his unique style of writing has been able annotate the case histories of many types of patients who had been virtually given a hopeless life sentence of being institutionalized.

Parkinson sufferers have been given L-Dopa as a medication to relieve the stutter problems they encounter when making movements. ... Read More

Rating:

- Symphonic!
Is this guy saying there are people who want to bone innocent music? That'd be pretty hard; e.g., no friction.

Rating:

- Very informative
As a musician and a teacher, I found this book to be a fascinating read. It's accessible without a lot of twenty-five dollar words found in some medical texts.

Rating:

- Disturbances
Ulysses Grant knew two songs: one was the Yankee Doodle, the other was not. That's my kind of pun. I keep telling my Chinese friends that I do not believe in their tones. Tones are just a trick to fool dumb foreigners like me into thinking that the language is unlearnable.
Nabokov, one of my main heroes, tells us in his memoirs that music, for him, was just an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.
In other words, I am not left alone with my amusia.
I am happy that my affliction is not quite as bad as Nabokov's (whose son became an opera singer, by the way). I do enjoy listening to music and I love concerts. I just don't hear tones and I was the worse singer in living memory in my high school. Only the Bundeswehr appreciated my talent for marching songs. Reading Sacks shows me that it could have been much worse.
The multitude of possible problems is huge. Sacks gives us dozens ... Read More

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