Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
There are a range of human reactions to music: from indifference to rapture, from “amusia” (the inability to recognize certain aspects of music) to a synesthetic response that imbues every musical note with its own color and taste. Our sensitivities to music can become dangerous-whether is from songs we simply can’t get out of our heads or the non stop musical hallucinations a surprising number of us experience night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: it can help people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and organize people’s memories who suffer from Alzheimer’s or amnesia. It is clear that music has a unique power to alter the brain in remarkable and complex ways, and in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Speaker Details
Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and the author of nine bestselling books on brain anomalies, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which has been translated into 21 languages. Sacks earned his medical degrees from Oxford University, while a member of Queen’s College, then moved to the United States and a became a resident in neurology at UCLA. For 42 years Sacks was a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and he has recently been appointed the first “Columbia Artist’ at Columbia University, a new residency that exemplifies the University’s effort to promote interdisciplinary scholarship. In this position Dr. Sacks will continue to see patients and will also be teaching classes in the creative writing department as well as the medical school.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Oliver Sacks
- Affiliation:
- Columbia University, Professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry, and first appointed "Columbia Artist" in residence
-
-
Jeff Running
-
