![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveOlver Sacks "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" (Picador)
A diverting look at music and the brain. Some chapters were a bit shorter than I would have liked (one was only two pages long), but at least there are plenty of topics to choose from. Of particular interest to me were the chapters discussing musical hallucinations, musical synesthesia, and the positive effects of music on patients with dementia. This last chapter was oddly heartening (I say "oddly" because the idea of dementia is absolutely terrifying for me), because when the dementia patients listened to their favourite music, they seemed to come back for a bit and act more like their old selves. This is a common theme in the book, that music appreciation and recognition is something buried deep inside the brain and diffused so that it's not easy to get rid of entirely. It's an aspect of the self that endures long after other brain functions such as language and episodic memory have deteriorated. As someone who immerses herself in music, I was glad to read that.
The book is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes about Sacks himself (he has led quite an adventuresome life), patients discussed in previous essay collections and cases taken from elsewhere in the scientific literature. If any of the chapters whets your appetite for more information, there is a long bibliography at the back to browse.
It's a good book to read a chapter or so at a time, perhaps with some background music. Recommended for music lovers.
A diverting look at music and the brain. Some chapters were a bit shorter than I would have liked (one was only two pages long), but at least there are plenty of topics to choose from. Of particular interest to me were the chapters discussing musical hallucinations, musical synesthesia, and the positive effects of music on patients with dementia. This last chapter was oddly heartening (I say "oddly" because the idea of dementia is absolutely terrifying for me), because when the dementia patients listened to their favourite music, they seemed to come back for a bit and act more like their old selves. This is a common theme in the book, that music appreciation and recognition is something buried deep inside the brain and diffused so that it's not easy to get rid of entirely. It's an aspect of the self that endures long after other brain functions such as language and episodic memory have deteriorated. As someone who immerses herself in music, I was glad to read that.
The book is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes about Sacks himself (he has led quite an adventuresome life), patients discussed in previous essay collections and cases taken from elsewhere in the scientific literature. If any of the chapters whets your appetite for more information, there is a long bibliography at the back to browse.
It's a good book to read a chapter or so at a time, perhaps with some background music. Recommended for music lovers.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2026-05-23 02:38 am (UTC)