Oliver Sacks's Music Lovers and Others
A brain infection transformed English musician and musicologist Clive Wearing into an amnesiac, as recounted in "The Abyss," a chapter adapted for The New Yorker from Oliver Sacks's forthcoming Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, October 16). The case is close to harrowing. Wearing is unable to remember where he is or what he is doing from moment to moment. At the same time, he has a remarkably complete musical memory and can conduct a choir, play Bach on piano and organ, and sing as he did prior to his illness. According to Sacks, "It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present."
Elsewhere in Musicophilia, Sacks describes a man who becomes obsessed by music, a true musicophiliac, after being struck by lightning; epileptic seizures induced by music; those sticky tunes known as "brainworms"; and how music therapy can benefit sufferers of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Steve Silberman, who has written one of the best profiles of Sacks to date, interviewed the doctor for Wired magazine. He asks him about the ways in which music can aid healing.
The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else.
Sacks also describes for Silberman the most vivid moment he's ever had on music—and on drugs:
Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall - the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo - they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.
It took a mountain of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis to launch me into that space. But Monteverdi did it too.