Music has a deep connection to the workings of the brain. In his new book “Musicophilia,” literary neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about how rhythm and melody can trigger symptoms of neurological disease in some patients and help ease the conditions of others.
To see our recent conversation with Sacks, click on the video window at left.
He describes how music helped him heal from a serious injury. He also connects the role of music in his own recovery with its role for patients stuck in a trance-like state decades after a sleeping-sickness epidemic. Their miraculous but temporary recoveries (prompted by a drug, not by music) were described in his book “Awakenings,” which was later made into a movie.
And Sacks explains how listening to music activates the region of the brain associated with motion–suggesting deep biological roots of dancing, or tapping our feet to music. Even when we imagine music, the brain’s motor cortex is activated. Imagining music, Sacks says, “is very real.”