The most satisfying essays find Sacks, who has written nine books including Awakenings, doing what he does best: presenting cases of uncommon neurological conditions that alter a patient’s relationship to music. If you don’t mind that, you’ll enjoy Musicophilia. But at the end of some of the 29 essays, you’re left feeling like what Sacks is doing is akin to sucking the glee out of a magic trick by explaining the science of the illusion. It’s not that his explanations don’t fascinate or that they aren’t written in his usual clear and engaging style. Lost here for the most part is the novelty of learning about patients like the one with the unusual disorder that inspired the title of one of Sacks’ most well-known books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.Īt times, Sacks’ clinical dissection of the way the brain experiences the joy and rapture of music can leave one feeling cold. Sacks does examine neurological oddities related to music in several patients, but he spends a lot of time trodding less exotic ground, like music’s impact on the depressed and on patients with speech impairments and how having two ears allows us to hear music in three dimensions. In his latest book, he takes on a more difficult endeavor: deconstructing the brain’s reaction to listening to music, an act all of his readers will be familiar with. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, described as the poet laureate of medicine, has had his greatest literary successes when detailing cases of patients stricken with uncommon disorders and deconstructing the pathologies of the brain that cause them.

Musicofilia oliver sacks