For “Musicophilia,” his latest foray into the mysteries of the human brain, Dr. Oliver Sacks (“Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat“) collects anecdotes from patients with music-related conditions maddening and rhapsodic, from hallucinations to newfound talent, the inability to hear music to the ability to remember nothing else.
“Musicophilia” is a fascinating, frightening ride, and it puts the annoying refrain of that Kylie Minogue song in its place.
» EXPRESS: I think most people feel that their experiences with music in their heads are very intense and therefore unique, but your book disproves that.
» SACKS: Well, certainly I’ve been giving a few talks here on the West Coast, and it’s always come up as a subject. Whether it’s become commoner or whether one has introduced it as a topic, people are saying to me, “Wow, yes. I have that, too.”
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» EXPRESS: Many of the subjects in “Musicophilia” are musicians. Are they more susceptible to musical hallucinations than non-musicians?
» SACKS: Yes, I mean, for example, with the composer who was somewhat deaf at the high end and hears his tones distortedly, I can imagine that a less musically acute person might have that and not notice it. But a lot of the people I see with musical hallucinations are not particularly musical, and I think that involuntary musical imagery of one sort or another is universal even among people who have difficulty singing or consciously holding a tune.
» EXPRESS: It’s interesting that the patients you write of in the book all come to accept musical intrusion, and even depend on it.
» SACKS: Yes. By chance a few days ago I was speaking to a blind man with visual hallucinations, and his experience of this was strictly analogous to the musical hallucinations of other examples. … That part of the brain gets hungry for stimulation, and if it’s not getting it from outside, one will make it from inside.
This man said it had become integrated as part of his own life and he would miss it if it wasn’t there. And with people who sort of have had anything for a fairly long time, I think — Temple Grandin, whom I wrote about in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” said, “If I could snap my fingers and be non-autistic, I wouldn’t, because being autistic is part of who I am.”
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» EXPRESS: Then that’s not an old wives’ tale.
» SACKS: Oh, no. You can show in blind people that the visual cortex, which is huge, does not remain vacant. … The finger that reads Braille, for example, has a large representation in the visual cortex. With people who are born deaf, the auditory cortex is reallocated for visual use. … So there are good compensations. With a hallucination or whatever, then it’s sort of got out of hand.
» EXPRESS: But even those patients will say they miss the hallucinations when they’re gone.
» SACKS: Sometimes as a result of a head injury or a stroke, one may lose the music in one’s head and feel that as a real bereavement. Like the sense of smell, it isn’t something one gives much thought to, but it is part of the background of life — it enriches.
» EXPRESS: I love the thought of you obsessively playing the jazz-vocal band the Grunyons.
» SACKS: I was quite surprised myself, because its not at all my sort of music. But an unexpected enchantment came upon me. It was partially one of those mechanical semi-brainworm things, but all the same, I had never heard a cappella groups of that sort.
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» EXPRESS: Human beings invest so much amour proper in the music they choose to listen to, earworms almost rob us of that choice, even that identity.
» SACKS: Music like that was designed to manipulate you and to hook your brain, and a lot of mischievous research went into devising it. And one feels used by this. The music that goes into movies — is used to move and manipulate one — is devised for the same reason.
» EXPRESS: If you had to lose a sense, which one would it be?
» SACKS: I suppose the sense of smell.
» EXPRESS: But what about food?
» SACKS: I do enjoy my food and I’m a big eater, but if I had to lose something, I would be much sorrier to lose the world of sight or sound, I think. I shouldn’t like to lose the vestibular sense.
» EXPRESS: I don’t think that counts.
» SACKS: I suppose not. But someone actually sent me a book called “Terra Infirma” [A Life Unbalanced," by Anna Jean Mallinson], and losing one’s vestibular sense — crawling and reeling — can be a devastating thing.
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» EXPRESS: The book is a lovely stroll through the range of ways we respond to music — it’s not diagnostic or alarmist.
» SACKS: On the whole, I don’t have any general theory of music and don’t really have any general theories of the nervous system, but I feel that my role has always been to listen to people to convey their experiences and to tell their stories … and to hope that this will be material for further exploration. So I do think of myself as a sort of naturalist.
[Sacks pauses] I will sacrifice ambulation so long as I can continue to swim. I love swimming. My father lived to 95, and he’d been a swimming champion when he was younger. And past 90, he had very bad arthritis, and in later life, he had to be wheeled to the pool and just sort of tipped in, whereupon he would take off like a porpoise. So, even if I am not ambulatory, I hope I am natatory.
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» Click here to watch videos of Dr. Sacks discussing “Musicophilia.”
Photos by Elena Seibert
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