“His work is luminous, original, and indispensable. but the underlying authority of Musicophilia lies in the warmth and easy command of the author’s voice.” -Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times “Oliver Sacks turns his formidable attention to music and the brain. book not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. But the power of music goes much, much further. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. “Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.” - Oliver Sacks
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