SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH NEUROLOGIST OLIVER SACKS
'I Think of Us as a Musical Species'
SPIEGEL: You are obviously aware of your own passion for music. However, in your latest book, "Musicophilia," you claim that music can strike even completely unmusical people out of the blue.
Sacks: Yes, that's how it was with Tony, a patient of mine. Tony was a busy surgeon who had no particular interest in music and no special talent for music. But then, in fall 1994, he was transformed after he had been struck by lightning and was clinically dead for a brief period of time. He had a cardiac arrest probably for 30 seconds, and his brain didn't get enough oxygen. And, since then, he has been a changed man, in that he now has a passion for music, and he's discovered a considerable talent for music. He is also, to use his own word, 'obsessed' -- or 'possessed' -- by music. It comes with a certain mystical or religious feeling that it is a gift from heaven....
With Tony, though, it's not clear.SPIEGEL: Has Tony been possessed, or has he become a good player?
Sacks: He is no (acclaimed Russian-American pianist Vladimir) Horowitz, but he can play Chopin scherzos well enough to fill a concert hall and attract an audience, and he will always play some of his own compositions. His own latest composition is called the "Lightning Sonata," an attempt to put in musical terms some of the strange events of 1993.
SPIEGEL: Can such people suppress their musical urges for years and then have it set free by dementia or even a bolt of lightning?
Sacks: I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait -- or even a sudden musical passion.
SPIEGEL: And how is this expressed? Do affected people sing all day long?
Sacks: The powers that tend to come out are of a highly concrete and sensory quality. There will typically be a flow of patterns, perhaps musical patterns, perhaps visual patterns, perhaps numerical patterns. People affected by this will probably enjoy it because it seems to be a gift, something which has been added to their life, although it could be intrusive in the way that hallucinations can sometimes be intrusive.
SPIEGEL: What does the human way of dealing with music tell you about the human mind and its workings?
Sacks: What is apparent is that there is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony. So, if you do brain studies, you find that the same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.
SPIEGEL: How is it, then, that some people can be prodigies, while others go that extra mile and practice every day but always remain average?
SPIEGEL: How do you treat patients with music hallucinations?
Sacks: I may suggest some further tests, but basically I think my role is a reassuring one, to say: You're not crazy, and there is no similarity between this and hearing voices, like psychotic schizophrenic voices. Sometimes very small doses of tranquilizers or anticonvulsants can be useful. They just generally dampen the excitability a bit.
SPIEGEL: You quote the German Romantic writer Novalis, who wrote that every disease is a musical problem and every cure is a musical solution. Can music be a cure?
Interview conducted by Samiha Shafy and Jörg Blech.
Oliver Sack's "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" will be published in German in June.
Galantarie, what an interesting, edifying
post! Many thanks for sharing this with us. My sister has bought the book and I hope to borrow it from het sometime...
