Perhaps the "revised and Expanded Edition" has overcome the original failings of repetition and failure to hold together. This book felt link a compendium of short articles.

My wife thoughtfully purchased this book for me. I had read about it and was very excited to dive right in. Unfortunately I ended up really having to convince myself to finish it, as it became redundant fairly quickly. Sacks presents (too) many case studies regarding music and the brain, but the presentation feels random and somewhat unfocused. Had his editor suggested grouping the studies by themes or urged Sacks to provide more neurological background information it perhaps would have better kept my attention. It felt as if the reader had to do a lot of work to pull together some of the concepts.

As for the perceived redundancy, I kept waiting for the conclusion or wrap-up that would provide the overarching theme to all the seemingly disconnected patient stories, but to no avail. It almost felt as if the stories were starting to repeat themselves but with different patient names. The length too felt far too long, almost as if everything presented in the first half were just recycled for the second. Additionally, the writing style is very informal and easy to digest, which is not necessarily a positive. The book begins to feel as if the author were afraid to intelligently, academically, and thoroughly dissect the subject matter for fear of alienating too many readers. The result is a glossy feeling, like you're reading the U.S.A. Today version of something that could have really offered some insightful perspectives.

Promising topic, but presented without much organization, background information, or conclusion. I'm surprised that an editor would allow such breadth to be published without any true depth.

"Music hath qualities to charm the savage breast."

Congreve's familiar line reiterates the legend of Orpheus who used music to control nature and living creatures.

Whether true or not is a matter of conjecture. But there is a rising body of evidence music stimulates intellect and eases the learning process. And Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist, enforces that argument in his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. He also stresses the healing power of music. Sacks calls the ability to appreciate music a defining quality of our humanity.

Sacks' love of music and his empathy and compassion for people whose lives have been transformed in some manner of other by music shine through his words, offering insight into a myriad of worlds most of us wouldn't have imagined. He reveals that music is so integral to our being we search it out even in the midst of the most disturbing trauma.

In the waning days of her existence my mother suffered musical hallucinations. I wish I had read Dr. Sacks then so I might better have understood what she was going through.

Sacks explains how we tend to take music for granted, to trivialize it in our daily lives, and yet it can be the most restorative factor in our health and life. It reminds me some religions teach that it is music which keeps the world in flux.

Mr. Stack has made an important contribution to the fascinating world of brain working , it helps to understand the enormous possibilities inside us

Considering the part music plays in the recovery of extremely mentality disabled patients, which is not a new phenomenon, it has recently been explored once again by Oliver Sacks, physician and author, in his new book Musicophilia Tales of Music and the Brain.

There are remarkable examples of patients who were considered feeble, unable to care for themselves, unable to walk or do anything other than sit, and yet these same people when exposed to music were able to astonish those who cared for them either by family or professionals. Sacks explored many different methods of treatment, but in his unique style of writing has been able annotate the case histories of many types of patients who had been virtually given a hopeless life sentence of being institutionalized.

Parkinson sufferers have been given L-Dopa as a medication to relieve the stutter problems they encounter when making movements. The introduction of music as therapy for these diseased people has given back to them smooth movement which the drug could not accomplish.

Oliver Sacks tells of a music therapist who played piano at a hospital who created musical treatment for a patient singing Old Man River using only three words. This man had not spoken for long time and was considered a lost cause. She heard him sing and realized playing songs he knew, she could communicate with him. Dr. Sacks was greatly encouraged by patients progress and then expanded the use of music to other patients.

Also, there are cases described showing the relationship between color and music. Many who have lost their sight after years of seeing describe they can see different colors when they hear specific notes. Even though they are blind, the colors become vivid in their minds. For example Middle C is green.

The general audience will find this textbook style of writing to be somewhat awkward to understand. However, if you are searching for solutions to conditions which afflict members of your family or close friends you will find them described in Musicophilia!

Clark Isaacs
Reviewer

Is this guy saying there are people who want to bone innocent music? That'd be pretty hard; e.g., no friction.

As a musician and a teacher, I found this book to be a fascinating read. It's accessible without a lot of twenty-five dollar words found in some medical texts.

Ulysses Grant knew two songs: one was the Yankee Doodle, the other was not. That's my kind of pun. Sacks has plenty of them. I keep telling my Chinese friends that I do not believe in their tones, the tones are just a trick to fool dumb foreigners like me into thinking that Chinese is an unlearnable language. Nabokov, one of my primary literary heroes, said in his memoirs that music for him was just an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. In other words, I am not entirely alone with my amusia. I am not even the first a-musical hermit: Sacks quotes a French neurologist called Francois Lhermitte as having confessed a total inability to recognize tunes.
I am happy that my affliction is not that bad. I do enjoy listening to music, and I love concerts. I just don't hear tones and I was the worse singer in living memory in my high school. Only the Bundeswehr appreciated my voice for marching 'songs'. Reading Sacks' book shows me what else could have happened.
The multitude of possible problems is huge. Sacks tells us dozens of cases, some studied intensively, some just based on correspondence. Music can be the cause of problems, like in epileptic attacks, or the consequence of problems, like in hallucinations. The disappearance of music can be a problem as much as the intrusion. Music can be used for therapies for many problems. The book covers them all, unless one or the other problem has been overlooked.
Herewith I have already implied my mild criticism: maybe it is not Sacks' fault, but after some time, the telling of case after case wears you out.
I developed the attitude of complaining that the explanation was not forthcoming. Of course the real issue is, that science has found a lot of pieces for the puzzle, put is still far away from a comprehensive understanding of our brain and mind.
One chapter with special fascination for me is the one on synesthesia. Again Nabokov comes up, who had synesthesia as a child; I learn from Sacks that not only Nab's mother had it too, which I knew, but his wife and his son as well, which I did not know. Of course Nab's synesthesia was not involving music, but his son's probably did or does.
One hint to Mr.Sacks: ETA Hoffman, a great German writer/composer, was not a man of the 18th century, but 19th; please correct that in the next edition.
Also: as far as I know, Beethoven wrote only one violin concert, hence the patient in one of the cases could hardly have heard notes of 'a Beethoven violin concert'.
Concluding on music: a very popular painter/poet/comedian in Germany is Wilhelm Busch, of the late 19th century. One of his hundreds of constantly quoted lines is: Music is often considered disturbing, because it is always connected to noise. Which rhymes in German.

It's hard to rate this book, because it aims for both a scientific and a popular auidience. So, it depends into which audience you fall. I fall into the latter, so I found the book lacking. The book really is written for a more scientific audience and the casual reader soon finds himself bogged down in medical terminology, endless footnotes, etc. Reading the whole book was an arduous task for me. Like his other books, Sacks here describes individuals with various pathologies regarding the way their minds respond to music. But the case studies were less interesting than those in his other books. But, I guess there was no other way to write a book like this. So, in many ways, it was educational. In many other ways, boring.

Whenever my daughter has a tune in her head that she can't shake, she has an interesting solution. "Turn on the radio," she says, "I gotta hear some different music." In effect, she tricks her brain and diverts it from one musical function to another. In this his tenth book, Oliver Sacks, Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University, explores how the brain processes music. As in his other books, Sacks compiles dozens of "clinical anecdotes." These are informal, inherently fascinating, and deeply human case histories of his patients. In addition, he shares at length from letters that he has received, scientific studies, the results of brain imaging techniques, and his own personal experiences.

Rooted in his own deep love for and skill in music, Sacks examines how music impacts "almost every aspect of brain function." If that sounds far-fetched, consider the range of his topics. There's musical imagery, whereby you "listen" to a tune in your mind even though there is no sound. As experience shows, this can be either voluntary or involuntary, sometimes an obsession or even something like a "possession" by the music. A long chapter explores "musical hallucinations." There are forays into amusia, dystimbria, dysharmonia, perfect pitch, and musical savants. He analyzes the relationship of music and blindness, music and color, music and speech, Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, dreams and dementia. Sometimes musicophilia results from a seizure; at other times music induces a seizure.

Sacks's book is an extended case study of the brain-mind relationship. And most mysterious of all is the question whether music even has any meaning. "While [music] is most closely tied to the emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representation whatever. We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love -- but music, instrumental music, can tell us nothing about these. Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty. . . But it does not have to have any 'meaning' whatever" (37). Such is the mystery of music, that although it conveys no inherent meaning, no one would question its power.

Sacks looks at music and the neurological basis for music within the mind. He presents a variety of case studies.

People who are obsessed with music, some born so and others becoming so late in life. We read of victims of dementia who have lost all mental functions but somehow keep a sense of self through music. We read of an amnesiac man with no memory stretching beyond the moment yet who can play long pieces from memory. Victims of Williams syndrome who have very low IQs but are highly social, very outgoing, and genuine lovers of music.

And we are told of people with odd conditions but who are otherwise perfectly normal. A woman with perfect pitch, who can play instruments well, but who doesn't care or emotionally react to music at all. A woman for whom music has absolutely no meaning: any tune is to her no different than the clanking of pots and pans thrown on the floor. A man who cannot stop musical hallucinations from coming unbidden. People with synesthesia who see colours whenever music plays and who associate specific colours with specific notes.

Sacks presents all his case studies in such a way as to convey what these people feel like. Here and there he sprinkles slightly technical concepts, such as the location of the brain's speech centers behind the left ear, how lesions in this or that area can release musical activity, how blindness can induce strong auditory hallucinations because the now unused visual areas of the cerebral cortex are taken over by auditory functions. Through these technical details we come to discover hints of how our brain creates our mind and how music in most of us is deeply embedded in our sense of self.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Sacks books are enjoyable and informative reading, but this one just didn't tell me what I bought it to learn. Uncle Tungsten, by contrast, made my friends ask "WHY are you reading THAT?!?" Well, I'm a chemist, but the anecdotes made that book a delight.
I had hoped Musicophilia would give more insight as to the interplay between musical melody and lyrics, that occipital-temporal thingy. Maybe we just don't know the answers to why people must sing along while others are annoyed by it, why relative or perfect pitch work, and what elicits the emotional response to chord structures and dissonance.
Instead, I found the book to be rather clinical (no faulting Sacks on that one) and entainingly anecdotal (why his work is popular) but not insightful with regard to musical and amusical issues.
Still worth reading this and all his books! This one didn't move me.