Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself—its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and ‘will’—and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations, mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multilevel neural circuitry that underlies musical perception and replay, we do not yet know.”

In listing the various characteristics of music and the neurological responses that go with them, Oliver Sacks uses poetic language including rhyme and word play, alliteration, and subtle consonance. The rhythm in this style of writing is reflective of the topic he discusses: Music. The opening of Sacks’s book is filled with intrigue and mystery as he points out how little is known about this important part of human existence.

“What could be the neurological basis of this?”

Sacks regularly poses direct questions such as this, and they are illustrative of both his own personal queries and wonderings, as well as his hope that his readers will ask these questions themselves. Since much of musical neurology is still unknown, Musicophilia becomes more of a partnered exploration of the topic between Sacks and his reader than a statement of fact from the knowledgeable to the ignorant.

“He went on to say that his epileptic music—seemingly contextless and meaningless, though hauntingly familiar—seemed to exert a frightening and almost dangerous spell on him, so that he was drawn deeper and deeper into it.”

Subtle repetition and dramatic diction gives Sacks’s writing an emotional tone that reflects his deep love and appreciation for music. Many of Sacks’s patients and correspondents had a conflicted relationship with music, including those who experience musical seizures and are unable to control the music, its volume, or its