Sound effects

Dr. Oliver Sacks brings his scientific curiosity and deep humanity to Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. (Rosalie Winard/Random House)

Did you know there’s actually a name for those irritating jingles and melodies that get stuck in your head, playing over and over again like a mild form of torture? According to Dr. Oliver Sacks, the New York neurologist and bestselling author of the books The Island of the Colourblind, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, they’re called earworms. And our brain’s susceptibility to the “sticky” quality of certain tunes exists on a continuum with conditions like epilepsy, with its sudden-onset seizures, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which the mind gets stuck on certain words and behaviours, like a needle skipping on a vinyl record.

Sacks’s new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, a study of how music acts upon our heads and gets under our skin, is full of such intriguing medical phenomena. In his previous works, Sacks introduced readers to people with neurological disorders like Tourette syndrome, autism and synesthesia. Likewise, Musicophilia offers up an endearing array of patients with a variety of exotic musical ailments: from a non-musical surgeon who discovered a love and talent for the piano after he’d been struck by lightning; to a severely amnesiac musician who can briefly regain his memory while performing; to a woman who has seizures when she hears modern, dissonant compositions.

His interest in describing these novel cases has earned him some criticism: British academic and disability rights activist Tom Shakespeare has called Sacks “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.” Yet, in the best of his writing, Sacks’s scientific curiosity is inseparable from a deeply felt humanity. For him, medicine is “a romantic science” and he is not a detached practitioner. He will, for instance, sway with the masses at a Grateful Dead concert to try to understand the band’s hold over a brain-damaged patient.

In fact, in Musicophilia, Sacks’s own long relationship to music is as much under the microscope as his patients’. The son of two doctors who were music enthusiasts, Sacks’s childhood home in England “was a neurological house as well as a musical one,” he says. “Both my parents trained as neurologists and my father was extremely musical. In between seeing patients, he would read a score of music and the whole orchestra would play in his head.”

Seated in a sterile hotel meeting room, the trim, 74-year-old doctor, with his signature white beard, round glasses and sporty running shoes, still seems wonderstruck by his father’s ability, a talent he regrets was not passed along to him. Though he confesses to being “somewhat deaf and somewhat exhausted” — the previous night he read to a sold-out house at a Toronto theatre and he is just a few hours away from boarding an overnight flight to London — on the subject of music and the brain, he is voluble and obviously enthralled.

In the late 1960s, Sacks first saw the effects of music on the brain when he was working with a group of Parkinson patients in New York, an experience he chronicled in his book Awakenings. “People who couldn’t initiate any movement at all could be mobilized. Music seemingly lent them its flow and its go in the most amazing way. Although I’ve seen this hundreds of times now, it’s still stunning to witness it. Any kind of movement is completely unimaginable and then suddenly, with music, they move perfectly and gracefully.”

Sacks calls musicophilia — that is, a passion and sensitivity to music — “a given in human nature. Our brains are very much wired for the reception and decoding of rapid, complex, segmented streams of sound, whether it’s speech or music, just as our voice boxes are designed for issuing such streams. Music is central to every single civilization that we know of, with dozens of different uses: there’s religious music, martial music, work songs, play songs. Music is a very powerful force for bonding people together.” The only culture, or rather “anti-culture,” as he puts it, that he can think of without a musical tradition is the Taliban.

(Random House)

Some of Sacks’s most enchanting subjects in Musicophilia are a group of young people at a music camp who have Williams syndrome, a rare heart condition that also involves “a remarkable, hardly believable, constellation of mental and personality traits.” Despite low IQs and cognitive delays in areas like math and abstraction, people with Williams are “verbally precocious, have large vocabularies, adore storytelling and are helplessly sociable, and they’re enraptured by music,” Sacks says. “They swoon when they hear it. They’re overwhelmed by it.” (A Canadian boy with Williams had recently contacted Sacks with the hopes of attending his talk in Toronto, but opted out at the last minute when he found out that Stevie Wonder was playing a concert that night. (“He chose Stevie over me,” Sacks says with a laugh. “Good on him!”)

With Williams, parts of the brain associated with sociability, musicality, emotion and speech are all enlarged. It’s clear, Sacks says, “that the defects arise from genetic problems, but it’s not entirely clear whether the pluses are direct genetic effects, or compensations, in the same way that blind people have a heightened sense of sound and, in many cases, perfect pitch.”

It wasn’t until recently that the effect of music on the brain could be quantified at all. In Musicophilia, Sacks cites the work of Harvard University neurologist Gottfried Schlaug, who has been using MRI technology over the last decade to measure parts of the brain. Schlaug found that, among musicians, the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is enlarged. As well, there is an asymmetrical amplification in the auditory cortex of those who have absolute pitch. “People have been looking at the brains of exceptional people for a long time,” Sacks says. “When [mathematician Carl Friedrich] Gauss died in 1845, they grabbed his brain exactly as pathologists did with [Albert] Einstein’s brain 100 years later.” But nothing “shows the power of music on the brain, or the brain’s ability to respond to music more clearly than Schlaug’s work.”

Sacks isn’t the only scientist popularizing these theories. This Is Your Brain on Music, the 2006 bestseller by Montreal musician and cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin, is a primer on the emerging field of music and neuroscience. The two books might be considered companion pieces. Sacks’s interest is in classical music, he’s a “Mozart and Bach man,” while Levitin, a former record producer, is devoted to rock and pop. “Dan is as hot for the music of the last half century as I am for the music of the three centuries before that,” Sacks says. “Though my work with patients has largely been with classical music, talking to Dan and talking to others, when it comes to genre, there are no radical differences in how brains relate to music.”

What matters to Sacks is that our brains relate to music at all. Of the many unusual conditions he lays out in his book, the one that seems to perplex him the most is amusia, a total inability to recognize music or understand it. “I just can’t imagine life without music,” he says. “I think most of us have tunes going through our heads all the time.”

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is published by Knopf Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.