答案 [Forecast Q1-2025] - Book review on Musicophilia

A review of Oliver Sacks's latest offering on music

A  Being a neuroscientist with expertise in auditory learning and memory, I think the brain and music are both enthralling subjects, and the duo seems especially fascinating. Consequently, 1I had high hopes from Oliver's latest work, Musicophilia. But with a sense of guilt, 1I admit that my reactions to the book are rather ambivalent.

B  Sacks himself is a neurologist and prolific author. 2-5He has sumptuously chronicled his life in the book and unveiled a number of highly personal events. 5The cover of the book features him wearing headphones, with eyes shut and deeply submerged while Alfred Brendel performs Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. 5-6This cover aptly summarises the contents of the book, or I can say, that it is borne out of it. Throughout the book, his language is lucid and erudite, but at no point does he sound pompous, self-promoting or bigoted.][5]}

C   Sacks has beautifully explained the insights that he gathered from the wide and fast-growing body of work of neural quintessence of musical perception and imagery, in addition to the intricate and eccentric disorders that these are prone to. 3He also accentuates the value of the art of observation as well as the human context and looks to blend the two with the latest diagnostic method in the tech world, in order to penetrate into the experiences of his patients and subjects. Besides, if you read his Musicophilia, you will realise that though he has been practicing neurology for one-third of a century, he is torn between the age-old method of observation and the contemporary high-tech approach; he is aware that the modern version is more apt, yet, his heart lies with the traditional one.

D  7The book has comprehensive accounts of cases concerning the patients that Sacks had seen during his practice. Multiple contemporary neuroscientific reports have been generously sprinkled in the form of brief discussions in the book. In the first part, the ‘Haunted by Music’ part, one particular case of Tony Cicoria is especially fascinating, as he is a middle-aged surgeon who is completely nonmusical, but one incident of being struck by lightning produced a deep passion for music in his heart. He began having a sudden urge to listen to piano music, which he had never even bothered about before. His love for music gradually culminated into playing piano and composing music, which came naturally to him, in a deluge of notes.

E  But 8what could be the reason behind this sudden interest or musical skills? It might be psychological, as he had had a near-death encounter when the lightning struck him. Or perhaps, there might have been some direct impact of the incident on his auditory regions of the cerebral cortex. The initial Electroencephalography (EEG), conducted immediately after the incident and when his love for music became apparent, declared that his brain waves were completely normal. Though more sensitive tests could have dug deeper into the mystery, Cicoria refused to undergo them.

F   4In part two of the book, Sacks covers an array of topics, but regrettably, most of the chapters have little to nothing remarkable or nothing we do not already know. For instance, the thirteenth chapter simply reflects on the knowledge that the blind have a better sense of music than the rest. Certainly, the strangest cases capture maximum attention. The eighth chapter pertains to ‘amusia,’ an inability to hear sounds like music, and another specific impairment that eliminates the ability to hear harmony while the subject still retains the ability to understand melody, which Sacks termed as ‘dysharmonia’. There are several more cases from his experiences that you will find throughout his Musicophilia

G  The third part ‘Memory, Movement, and Music’ is all about the unrewarded field of music therapy. He has explicitly mentioned how ‘melodic intonation therapy’ comes to the aid of 11those suffering from Expressive Aphasia (a condition that inhibits a person from expressing their thoughts verbally generally as an aftermath of a stroke or other cerebral incident), to regain their fluency in speech. In another chapter, 12Sacks illustrates how music can bring life and movement into patients with severe Parkinson's disease or other body movement disorders that confine them to specific postures. This extraordinary power of music has so far not been rationalised in terms of any scientific phenomenon.

H  However, for those who are not familiar with the concepts of neuroscience and music behaviour, Musicophilia is full of mesmerising information. Nevertheless, it fails to satiate the taste buds of those hungry for the cause and implications of the phenomenon, as Sacks mentions. Moreover, Sacks appears to be more comfortable with discussing patients than discussing experiments, in addition to being somewhat imprudent in trusting scientific findings and theories.

I  9While the reasons behind music brain oddities have not been precisely understood, Sacks could have done a little more to outline all the successful treatments that he and other neurologists have performed and the implications of their careful observations. For instance, 9-13Sacks could have divulged the many specific dissociations among components of music perception, as in the case of losing the ability to comprehend harmony 13but not melody, signifying that the music centre in the brain is missing. And since many readers of the book will assume that all mental functions are located in specific parts of the brain, i.e. brain localisation, he probably missed a great opportunity to educate the masses.

J  One may also conclude that there is no cure for neurological problems that involve music. One drug may have some effects on one patient and different effects on another; it might relieve the pain of one and worsen in another, or perhaps it may have a set of positives and negatives in the same patient. 10Most treatments mentioned by Sacks are exclusively antiepileptic medications, which slightly axe down the excitability of one's brain in general，though their efficacy varies extensively.

K  Lastly, in Musicophilia, in most of the cases, patients have been reported to have a normal EEG result, irrespective of the variations in their music brain symptoms. Though Sacks is well aware of many new technologies that are much more meticulous than the neurological EEG tests to study the brain waves of a patient, he does not call for their use. In fact, despite conveying a clear passion for the patients, he does not display or call for any urgency to pursue innovative avenues in the diagnosis and treatment of music brain disorders. This is somewhat visible in the very beginning of the book, in Preface, where he voices his concern that ‘the simple art of observation may be lost'  if we lean on the modern technology a bit too much. However, he vouches for both mechanisms, and we can trust the neurological community to respond.