Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Music and the Brain

Michiko Kakutani reviews Oliver Sacks new book Musicophilia in the NY Times today, which is high on my list for a read over Christmas break.

Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in afflictions, and to adapt to loss and depreviation.

Sacks writes on the relationship of Williams syndrome and music, of music's ability to aid memory, and of the way music therapies can help those with aphasia and Parkinson's disease. Although critics feel that Sacks' essays are more dramatizations than case studies, I have always felt that his knowledge as a neurologist could be shared with so wide a public because he was a humanist first.

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