Not Sacks best work. This book is mostly a series of anecdotes about music and the brain. The first story is about a man struck by lightning that suddenly becaomes obsessed with music. That is the most interesting story and it seems each one is less interesting after that. ( )

Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. He tells many stories of people with modes of perception radically altered by disease, injury, genetics, or even the unexplained. I thoroughly enjoyed his previous works such as "Awakenings" and "An Anthropologist on Mars" as well as his recent departure from neurology to autobiography in "Uncle Tungsten".

This book, dealing with the neurological impact of music, is a bit of a disappointment in several ways. The first that struck me is how much of a re-hash of his old books it is. He is constantly referring to cases covered (in much more detail, to be sure) in his previous books. As someone who has read them I found these reprises interesting, but only to a point. Far too much of the book is spent reviewing these and not really covering new ground, I can only imagine that for someone who has not read the referred works, reading this one might be very frustrating without the depth of background one gains from reading the more detailed account.

In Sacks' previous works, he puts the disparate pieces of the patients' stories together to paint a detailed and always sympathetic portrait of his subjects. Due I suspect to the terse nature of the retrospectives in this book, that never happens. To make matters worse, the last section of the book contains some anecdotes that suggest some of the conclusions he drew in the previous chapters may be incorrect, yet he does nothing to integrate these into the rest of the book. The reader is left with a collection of mostly unrelated anecdotes which Dr. Sacks does little if anything to integrate int a whole.

The book si not al bad. There are some new stories and even some of the old stories get some retrospective in light of new scientific data, and some of the analyses of composers and musicians are rewarding. These rewards are scattered throughout what, in the end, is a rather disjointed and scattershot book. ( )

Largely skimmed. The title is very misleading, which led to my disappointment. The books is mostly case studies of people with brain problems who see the world (including music) differently than the rest of us. The highlights are: brainworms are catchy tunes that get into your head, some people can see colors in music (often having perfect pitch), Freud resisted hearing music because he couldn't explain to himself why it was so powerful, Tolstoy resisted music because it was so powerful (he wrote a story of a woman seduced by violin music). ( )

Fascinating anecdotes written by an eminent neurologist in an accessible and personal style about the amazing and unexpected ways that music works on people.

There's the man who got struck by lightning, and then a few weeks afterwards suddenly found that the creation of new music was flowing through his mind, "like turning a radio on". There are musical hallucinations; interesting stories about music and synesthesia (when one hears the key of D for instance, one sees a colour - plainly, not just in imagination); about how people trapped in parkinsonian spasms suddenly move freely and easily to music; about absolute pitch, the ability to hear a note and know exactly what it is, as plainly as we see green and know that it is green. Stuff like that, told with a human warmth and interest in the people being discussed.

I came away from the book with the sense that music is more than we think it is - far more than a series of sounds. It's something that different people understand on such different levels (regardless of education and training), and something of extraordinary power. It's as if music is already out there, existing on its own without human intervention, and it's only our own varying perception that enables us to access or understand it.

I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks for many years. His books are extremely well written, although they can be a little esoteric at times. His insights into the neurological aspects of mental deficits via injury, illness, or other circumstances really bring to light the reality of how incredible the human brain is. In Musicophilia, we learn how music really is the universal language and how our brain can use it in spite of debillitations such as Parkinson's. He introduces us to the phenomenom of synthesia, the remarkable story of Clive Wearing, and other instances of the incredible plasticity of the mind. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the relationship between music and the brain - I promise you'll find it fascinating. ( )