The fascinating theme that emerges from this book is the simultaneous independence and interdependence of music in our minds. It is clearly associated with distinct physical regions of our brains, but the perception of music engages our entire brains. Musical abilities and disorders often occur without similar effects in language or other auditory perceptions. At the same time, music can intensely affect or be affected by other processes in the brain. Some people with synesthesia literally see notes or chords as having color. Music can give people with severe neurological conditions the ability to speak, move, learn, remember...to overcome otherwise insurmountable disabilities.
It's all pretty deep, but the best parts are the amazing individual cases. Like one guy who is struck by lightening, and though he was previously uninterested in music, becomes obsessed with learning the piano and composing.
Or this story about the author, who heard some music in a dream that continued into a musical hallucination when he woke up.
...I found something deeply disturbing and unpleasant about the music, and longed for it to stop. I had a shower, a cup of coffee, went for a walk, shook my head, played a mazurka on the piano--to no avail. The hateful hallucinatory music continued unabated. Finally I phoned a friend, Orlan Fox, and said that I was hearing songs that I could not stop, songs that seemed to me full of melancholy and a sort of horror. The worst thing, I added, was that the songs were in German, a language I did not know. Orlan asked me to sing or hum some of the songs. I did so, and there was a long pause.
"Have you abandoned some of your young patients?" he asked. "Or destroyed some of your literary children?"
"Both," I answered. "Yesterday I resigned from the children's unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written....How did you guess?"
"Your mind is playing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder," he said, "his songs of mourning for the death of children." I was amazed by this, for I rather dislike Mahler's music and would normally find it quite difficult to remember in detail, let along sing, and of his Kindertotenlieder. But here my dreaming mind, with infallible precision, had come up with an appropriate symbol of the previous day's events. And in the moment Orlin interpreted the dream, the music disappeared; it has never rucurred in the thirty years since.
Unfortunately, there isn't really any unifying thesis in the book. In the end it is just a collection of individual stories, without much in the way of psychological theory. I'm too much of a geek. I think I liked my former psych-major roommate's textbooks better, haha. Sacks isn't the greatest writer, but I'm still glad he put all these stories together, as someone who always prefers music to a silent room...
