Music of the Hemispheres

From Steven Poole, Guardian Unlimited:

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks 367pp, Picador, £17.99

Sacks's deeply warm and sympathetic study is about pathologies of musical response and what they might teach us about the "normal" faculty of music. It reports on fascinating new findings from anatomy - a musician's brain is easily distinguishable on a scan from those of others; and the passage from ear to brain is not a one-way conduit but works both ways, the brain being able to tune the ears, as it were. But mostly Musicophilia is about the more mysterious, and currently inexplicable, ways in which music affects the brain, for good or ill. And when it affects the brain, it affects the whole person, as Plato knew, seeking to ban some types of music from his Republic for the health of the citizenry. Shakespeare's Richard II, meanwhile, could have provided an epigraph to Sacks's book - the King at one point complains: "This music mads me. Let it sound no more; / For though it have holp madmen to their wits, / In me it seems it will make wise men mad."

Link