Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

Do you know a music lover who is interested in how music and the brain relate? This may be just the gift for them!

"Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain" is a fascinating collection of stories that explore a myriad of surprising connections between neurological disorders and music.

The collection begins with the story of a 42-year-old orthopedic surgeon who, struck by lightning, experiences death for a few moments. The surgeon survives and recovers most of his memory, but becomes afterwards inexplicably obsessed with an unquenchable (and unprecedented) desire to constantly listen to, play, and compose piano music.

Other stories involve memory and music. One amazing account tells of a student who was able to memorize whole segments of a college lecture nearly word by word so long as the words and sentences were set to music. Another person was able to hold very long strings of numbers in his head after only a single hearing by converting the numbers into music notes.

There are also moving accounts of dementia and music therapy. For many patients whose brains have been ravaged by disease, rendering their memory and speech useless, music appears to provide an intact space of peace, support and meaning for them.

It is an intriguing adventure to follow Sacks in his neurological studies and be impressed at the surprising roles music plays in case after case of amnesia, hallucinations, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and more. In the end, however, it seems that the deep emotional power of music on human beings continues to remain a scientific mystery.

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"Powerful and compassionate....A book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind." - The New York Times