Yesterday, I finished reading Oliver Sacks’ most recent book Musicophilia. The book is a fascinating look at the patients Sacks has encountered in his forty-plus years as a neurologist. The specific theme is about brain injury and disease and developmental disorders that cause otherwise healthy people to experience music in unusual ways.
Sacks describes each case in wonderful detail which helps the reader connect with his patients. This book shows those with and without neuroscience backgrounds the amazing possibilities of the human mind and how music seems to be more deeply encoded in our memory and minds than our own day-to-day life experiences.
Some of the most amazing cases concern Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder that causes mental retardation, heart problems, and usual facial features. Individuals with William’s Syndrome are extremely friendly, have large, fluent vocabularies, and often have a passionate love of music. One woman with an IQ of 70 (which is the cutoff for mental retardation) is a professional opera singer with a repetoire of over 2000 songs in 35 languages, yet she cannot add 5 and 3.
Some other phenomena/disorders discussed in the book are musical hallucinations, absolute pitch, amusia, amnesia, aphasia, Alzheimer’s, synesthesia, autism, and Parkinson’s disease.
"I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it." - Robert Sapolsky
I think that this has always been my philosophy, but it took the right amount of time and self-reflection to come to this conclusion. For those of you wary of science yet still curious about what science may have to offer us concerning the complexity and mystery of the human condition, I suggest checking out any of Oliver Sacks’ books. My other favorites are The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The Island of the Colorblind, and An Anthropologist on Mars.
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8 comments:
I will definitely have to pick up a copy of this Sacks' book!
William's Syndrome sounds unreal, that example reminded me of an autistic person.
William's Syndrome is similar to autism in some senses because savant-like qualities are common in both groups. But, while autistic people are generally antisocial, people with Willams Syndrome are incredibly social and trusting. Also, kids with autism generally show delays in language abilities, while kids with WS have surprisingly rich vocabularies and have highly developed narrative abilities.
It really is quite fascinating to read about the way they characteristically respond to music as well.... Autistic people are generally more tuned into the technical aspects of music, yet don't always connect with music emotionally. Obviously, some people with WS are very technically proficient, but it seems like they are very deeply moved by the emotive qualities of music.
It really is quite fascinating to read about the way they characteristically respond to music as well.... Autistic people are generally more tuned into the technical aspects of music, yet don't always connect with music emotionally. Obviously, some people with WS are very technically proficient, but it seems like they are very deeply moved by the emotive qualities of music.
so if we rule out emotion we could absorb more. goddamn feelings
very interesting. from what i've seen, sometimes people with autism seem to enjoy specific parts of individual songs / specific words - i remember one kid in a special ed classroom rewinding this tape of animal songs to a specific part where a lion roars, mimicking the roar as it happened - he would do that over and over unless someone told him to stop.
Your comment raises an interesting question.
What would music be without the emotion? I'd imagine it'd be like some complex math problem or something.
Every Mus Theory major/enthusiast i have encountered is a system loving robot. So I think it would be just a system totally routed in logic.
I think a good question here would be is the distinction between form and expression a plastic one or is it a necessary reality?
I just finished Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann and it's a fictional biography about a composer who is based on Arnold Schoenberg. The composer's, like Schoenberg's, mission is to overcome sentimentalism as well as formalism by removing all accidents and forging a whole new structure of harmony and tonality out of which emerges an emotive realm yet unfelt that is painful in its complete lack of irony. His success is still debated (somehow), but the character in Mann's book achieves this, for more ill than anything else (as the title suggests).
It seems an inevitability; perhaps despite this distinction being plastic, we still consistently find ourselves trying to surpass it (it = irony) unsuccessfully. However, in our Sisyphus-like effort, we continually shed light on the infinite ways in which form and expression are constantly informing and reinvigorating the other.
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