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WATCH NOVA'S "MUSICAL MINDS" ONLINE
Only available online from July 1-7, 2009

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/program.html

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OUR BRAINS ON MUSIC: THE SCIENCE
By Mike Hale
New York Times
June 29, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/arts/television/30nova.html

³Musical Minds,² the season premiere of ³Nova² on PBS, is based on the
neurologist Oliver Sacksıs most recent book, ³Musicophilia²
<http://bit.ly/ISx9T>, a collection of case studies of people whose brains
have unusual relationships to music, cases in which, as Dr. Sacks puts it,
³music gets them going to an extraordinary degree.² A one-hour program canıt
approach the depth and texture of Dr. Sacksıs 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 theyıre cracked up to be?

Music isnıt my area, so Iım 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 ³astonishingly, almost bafflingly brilliant pianist,² 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.

³Musical Minds,² which with the season premiere of the newsmagazine ³Nova
ScienceNow² 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
Touretteıs 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. Sacksıs 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 ³Musicophilia² in that magazine in 2007.)

Dr. Sacksıs 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 ³Musical Minds² 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 ³Musical Minds² tend to involve the programıs 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. Sacksıs work documenting the strange
adaptations of our brains all the more valuable and mysterious. ³Musical
Minds² may barely scratch the surface, but itıs still full of fascinating
information. Like this: Mr. Paravicini and Mr. Giordano each first
demonstrated his unusual musical abilities at 2 -- one by playing ³Donıt Cry
for Me Argentina² on the piano, and one by playing ³Iım Just a Singer (in a
Rock and Roll Band)² on the drums. Thereıs a dissertation right there.

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WATCH JOHN STUART INTERVIEW OLIVER SACKS ON THE DAILY SHOW
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=231584

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POWER TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST AND ANIMATE THE HEMISPHERES
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
November 20, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/books/20kaku.html

In books like ³The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat² and ³An
Anthropologist on Mars,² 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, ³Musicophilia² <http://bit.ly/ISx9T>, Dr. Sacks focuses
on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers -- ³musical
misalignments² that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of
atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are ³tonal² and
³corny²: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his
head. A musical savant with a ³phonographic² 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 ³yellow²
but ³ocher²; D minor is ³like flint, graphite²; and F minor is ³earthy,
ashy.² 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 heıs 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 ³completely abstract and
profoundly emotional,² devoid of the power to ³represent anything particular
or external,² 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 ³rhythm deaf,² 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 ³narrative or mnemonic power of music,² 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 ³their frozenness.²

Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy.
In Dr. Sacksı view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism,
and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because
³musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory
can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.²

Music, he says, can act as a ³Proustian 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.²

As heıs 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.ıs 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 ³there may be a variety of inhibitions -- psychological, neurological
and social -- which may, for one reason or another, relax in oneıs later
years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.²

The composer Tobias Picker, who has Touretteıs, tells Dr. Sacks that the
syndrome has shaped his imagination: ³I live my life controlled by
Touretteıs 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.²

Dr. Sacks notes that while the composerıs newest piano concerto ³is full of
turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls² in sections, Mr. Picker is able to
write in every mode -- ³the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and
stormy² -- and can move ³from one mood to another with consummate ease.²

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. Sacksı accounts of his patientsı 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.

............

NHNE On Extraordinary Human Capabilities:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/1048/Default.aspx

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Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
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