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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007)

by Oliver Sacks

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  1. 20
    This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin (kjforrest)
    kjforrest: Another excellent book about music and the brain.
  2. 10
    Forever Today: A True Story of Lost Memory and Never-Ending Love by Deborah Wearing (bernsad)
    bernsad: Fans of Oliver Sacks will find this interesting as it is one of his case studies.
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Interesting stories of people with music hallucinations, musical amnesia, synesthesia, et cetera. Not nearly as good as Sacks has done in the past but good enough. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
This was interesting, but I felt like it was kind of a rehash of a lot of things that were already in his other books or on Radiolab or something. I kind of skimmed it. ( )
  JenneB | Apr 2, 2013 |
Probably my favourite of the many Oliver Sacks' books I've read throughout the years. Sacks is always fascinating, but in this book he is even more passionate and more personal than usual and as a result my usual Sacks afterglow (for some reason his books always leave me ridiculously happy and hopeful about the complexity and beauty of humanity [which is pretty much opposite to how I usually feel:]) was amplified ten times. Oliver Sacks is probably now officially one of my heroes: he's just so graceful and insightful and empathetic and fascinating all at once. ( )
  aliceunderskies | Apr 1, 2013 |
Interesting. ( )
  canadianbill | Apr 1, 2013 |
I enjoyed this, but not as much as I had expected. I thought it might get more into the depth of why we react to music the way we do, but it's more of a collection of cases where with an array of musical issues. A fascinating collection all the same. ( )
  h_d | Mar 31, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 65 (next | show all)
The gentle doctor turns his pen to another set of mental anomalies that can be viewed as either affliction or gift.

If we could prescribe what our physicians would be like, a good number of us would probably choose somebody like Sacks (Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001, etc.). Learned, endlessly inquisitive and seemingly possessed of a bottomless store of human compassion, the neurologist’s authorial personality both reassures and arouses curiosity. Here, Sacks tackles the whole spectrum of the human body’s experience of music by studying it from the aesthetic as well as medical viewpoint. Fantastical case studies include a young boy assaulted by musical hallucinations who would shout “Take it out of my head! Take it away!” when music only he could hear became unbearably loud. Less frightening are stories about people like Martin, a severely disabled man who committed some 2,000 operas to memory, or ruminations on the linkage between perfect pitch and language: Young children learning music are vastly more likely to have perfect pitch if they speak Mandarin than almost any other language. ..
added by MsMixte | editKirkus Reviews (Aug 15, 2007)
 
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What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call "music." (Preface)
Tony Cicoria was forty-two, very fit and robust, a former college football player who had become a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York.
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0330418386, Paperback)

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 05:05:14 -0500)

(see all 4 descriptions)

"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. Dr. Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people who are deeply disoriented by Alzheimer's or schizophrenia." - Back cover.… (more)

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