He shows how these cases, combined with state-of-the-art neuro-imaging technology, might illuminate what we mean by hearing “music in the head.” Sacks, who described a related case in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, in which a patient heard the songs of her Irish childhood playing inside her head decades later, also gives examples here of deaf patients who have musical hallucinations. Richard Wagner claimed that the prelude to Das Rheingold came to him as a hallucination, and Sacks himself had a similar experience when he heard Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, despite loathing the composer. Drawing on the work of the neurologist Macdonald Critchley, whose studies of music and the brain stretched over half a century, and patients of his own, Sacks discusses music as a cause of seizures, of what Critchley termed musicogenic epilepsy.Īnother fascinating section deals with the subject of musical hallucinations, something that is much more common than might be supposed. In other cases Sacks looks at music as the cause rather than the symptom of crises. He took up piano lessons and now composes in a Chopinesque manner. When he recovered, Cicoria, who had never had any particular interest in music beforehand, became obsessed with Chopin. The book opens in dramatic fashion with the alarming and fascinating case of Tony Cicoria, who was struck by lightning while using a public payphone in 1994. His most recent book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, is in a format familiar to readers of Sacks’ work, mixing as it does humane observation of patients with up-to-date neurological diagnosis and explanations of brain function, this time with cases all related to music.
A Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, where he moved from London in 1965, Sacks’ bestsellers such as Migraine, An Anthropologist on Mars, and The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat have given a general audience insight into a wide range of neurological conditions such as Tourettes, aphasia, and amnesia in a way that has illuminated the physiological basis of human consciousness and behavior.
In a series of books since the 1970s, he has more or less invented a new literary subgenre - neurological anecdotes as a branch of belles lettres. But then Sacks, who was played by Robin Williams (under the name Malcolm Sayer) in the 1990 film Awakenings, has achieved a degree of public attention that music scholars with aspirations to be public intellectuals can only dream of. The neurologist Oliver Sacks must be one of the few authors reviewed in musicological journals to have been portrayed in a Hollywood film.
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