WATCH NOVA'S "MUSICAL MINDS" ONLINE
Only available online from July 1-7, 2009
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/program.html------------
OUR BRAINS ON MUSIC: THE SCIENCE
By Mike Hale
New York Times
June 29, 2009
Original Link“Musical Minds,” the season premiere of “Nova” on PBS, is based on the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s most recent book, “
Musicophilia," a collection of case studies of people whose brains have unusual relationships to music, cases in which, as Dr. Sacks puts it, “music gets them going to an extraordinary degree.” A one-hour program can’t approach the depth and texture of Dr. Sacks’s book, but it does get at one question that nags the reader: What do these musical savants sound like? Or put another way: Are they really as amazing as they’re cracked up to be?
Music isn’t my area, so I’m not going to hazard an answer other than to say that Derek Paravicini, an autistic and blind 29-year-old who is described as an “astonishingly, almost bafflingly brilliant pianist,” and Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who began playing classical piano and composing after being struck by lightning, would be awfully impressive at your next party.
“Musical Minds,” which with the season premiere of the newsmagazine “Nova ScienceNow” is inaugurating a Tuesday-night science block for PBS, looks at four cases. In addition to Mr. Paravicini and Mr. Cicoria, a third exceptional performer, Matt Giordano, uses drumming to help control his Tourette’s syndrome.
Anne Barker, however, sits at the opposite extreme: she suffers from amusia, an inability to hear or respond to music. The narrator, the BBC reporter Alan Yentob, mentions that Ms. Barker has the condition despite the fact that her parents own a store specializing in traditional Irish instruments. Viewers are free to draw their own conclusions about cause and effect.
(Those who follow Dr. Sacks’s dispatches in The New Yorker will be disappointed to hear that no mention is made of Clive Wearing, the British musician whose profound amnesia was the subject of a heartbreaking excerpt from “Musicophilia” in that magazine in 2007.)
Dr. Sacks’s trademarks as a writer are evocative storytelling and, just as important, a deep compassion for subjects coping with both the practical difficulties and the alienation caused by brain disorders. When those subjects are packed into 10-minute television profiles, an air of the carnival sideshow can set in, and “Musical Minds” is not immune to this, particularly in its depiction of Mr. Paravicini. His autism has caused speech patterns like those of a particularly loud talk-show host (an impression reinforced by his physical resemblance to the ubiquitous British presenter Graham Norton), and his hands, while striking the keys with impressive speed and precision, have a suspended look, as if attached to a marionette. Unfortunately, those are the impressions a viewer is likely to be left with.
The best moments in “Musical Minds” tend to involve the program’s fifth subject: Dr. Sacks, who not only is interviewed by Mr. Yentob but also enthusiastically submits to having his own brain tested. These scenes are diverting, if not revealing.
In one Dr. Sacks is scanned while listening to his professed favorite, Bach, and then to Beethoven. A Columbia University researcher shows him the scans: many more areas of his brain light up during the Bach, which proves that he indeed prefers the Baroque master to the Classical firebrand. But does it? As the program acknowledges, science still has little idea what those red and green flashes on the M.R.I. screen really mean.
Which, in the meantime, makes Dr. Sacks’s work documenting the strange adaptations of our brains all the more valuable and mysterious. “Musical Minds” may barely scratch the surface, but it’s still full of fascinating information. Like this: Mr. Paravicini and Mr. Giordano each first demonstrated his unusual musical abilities at 2 -- one by playing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on the piano, and one by playing “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” on the drums. There’s a dissertation right there.
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WATCH JOHN STUART INTERVIEW OLIVER SACKS ON THE DAILY SHOW
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POWER TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST AND ANIMATE THE HEMISPHERES
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
November 20, 2007
Original LinkIn books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino.
In his latest book, “
Musicophilia," Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers -- “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.
Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.
He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information -- a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of.
And he writes about the power of rhythm to help coordinate and energize basic locomotive movement, a power that explains why music can help push athletes to new levels and why the right sort of music (generally, legato with a well-defined rhythm) can help liberate some parkinsonian patients from “their frozenness.”
Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy. In Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”
Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.”
As he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in affliction, and to adapt to loss and deprivation. Among the people who appear in this book are children with Williams syndrome, who have low I.Q.’s and extraordinary musical and narrative gifts (one young woman learns to sing operatic arias in more than 30 languages), and elderly dementia patients who develop unexpected musical talents.
Dr. Sacks notes that there are stories in medical literature about people who develop artistic gifts after left-hemisphere strokes, and he suggests that “there may be a variety of inhibitions -- psychological, neurological and social -- which may, for one reason or another, relax in one’s later years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.”
The composer Tobias Picker, who has Tourette’s, tells Dr. Sacks that the syndrome has shaped his imagination: “I live my life controlled by Tourette’s but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy -- I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way.”
Dr. Sacks notes that while the composer’s newest piano concerto “is full of turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls” in sections, Mr. Picker is able to write in every mode -- “the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and stormy” -- and can move “from one mood to another with consummate ease.”
Although this book could have benefited from some heavy-duty editing that would have removed repetitions and occasional patches of technical jargon, these lapses are easily overlooked by the reader, so powerful and compassionate are Dr. Sacks’ accounts of his patients’ dilemmas. He has written a book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.
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NHNE On Extraordinary Human Capabilities