Word: musicophilia
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...don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that music is a wonderful thing. But being a neuroscientist might help, at least according to Oliver Sacks. Sacks, it’s true, is no ordinary scientist, and his latest collection of essays, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” is not simply a dry scientific exploration of the connection between neurology and music, as we might expect from other scientists-turned-writers. Rather, it is an original, elegantly crafted, and inspiring investigation of the distinctly human obsession with all things...
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks knows all this - and too much else besides, to attempt any glib definitions. On the first page of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he writes that music "has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world." His book is ostensibly just a survey of research and case histories of patients whose inner lives have been fundamentally changed by music. Yet in revealing the exquisite complexity of the ways in which our minds are attuned...
...Musicophilia, as in the books that made his literary name, Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks dives into the crevices of the human mind in search of a cure and surfaces with enlightenment for us all. We are irritatedly familiar, for example, with the phenomenon of earworms - catchy tunes that loop in our heads, even when we detest them. This "defenseless engraving of music on the brain," Sacks suggests, is a result of the precision with which most of us can replay music internally; built to seek stimuli, the brain rewards itself...
...simple joy of life, but even that can be overwhelming, as Sacks found with Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who survived being struck by lightning only to find himself possessed by an all-consuming, life-disrupting passion for listening to, playing and composing piano music. After grappling with Cicoria's musicophilia for 12 years, Sacks decided to let things be - to acknowledge that some of music's eternal riddles are better left unsolved. "His was a lucky strike," writes Sacks, "and the music, however it had come, was a blessing, a grace - not to be questioned...
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