Musicophilia

 Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, c. 2007, 425 pgs.

This was our first book of 2025 for the Rhythm n' Books music club. I'd read this before a long time ago--I don't usually read a title more than once--but a lot more seemed to stand out to me here. Book discussion was good overall, most were kind of 'eh' on the book as a whole. I thought they might like it more than the Levitin book we read because that book focused more on the science and this was written very down-to-earth. The entire book is a collection of Sacks' encounters with neurologically induced, music-related maladies, some minor, some life-altering. Brain worms that never go away, pianists who suffer from dystonia in the hands (a muscle disorder), musical hallucinations, aphasia (loss of speech by brain damage) and more. All of these case studies are tragic in their own ways, but in his observations, Sacks sees the plasticity of the brain adapt to this challenges. I love the way he kicks it off with a man who survives being struck by lightening--only to awaken with an intense, inescapable newfound passion: to learn how to play piano. Overall, the message is that the science and understanding of music as a working treatment for many ailments in life deserves much more study. There was a recent documentary at Sundance called Alive Inside that talks more about these treatments and even features interviews of Sacks before his death in 2016.