Music on the brain

>> Oliver Sacks on the science of lullabies,
love lyrics, martial music and more

by Juliet Waters

In the introduction to Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks writes about Arthur C. Clarke’s Overlords, a race of alien superbeings that arrive on Earth and are mystified by our obsession with music. Though we love our music, contemporary earthlings are no less mystified, it seems. Two Montrealers, coincidentally, represent the two extremes in contemporary neuroscience. There’s Stephen Pinker, who Sacks quotes and gently chides for “echoing the Overlords.” Pinker has written, “as far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless…it could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” And there’s Daniel J. Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, something of a catalogue of the ways music works for us neurologically. Sacks is clearly a fan and friend of Levitin’s. But Sacks’s approach to music doesn’t fall easily into one camp or the other. While he was in Montreal, last week, we talked about why.

Mirror: You quote Stephen Pinker in your introduction as a scientist who has a very different attitude towards music than your own….

Oliver Sacks: I think I’ve probably been very unfair to Stephen Pinker. And it’s probably unfair to pull a sentence or two out of context...But I think there are at least two things there. I think this business of saying it would make no difference to life if music vanished, one has to take the opposite approach and ask why is music everywhere, why is there no culture without music, why does music have so many roles, from religious music, to martial music, to lullabies, to love lyrics to whatever? Maybe he could do without music for a day—although I think he himself is quite musical—but another question is, how music became such a part of our lives or whether it could be explained in simple terms of natural selection or not. And this is a complicated sort of issue.

M: I get the feeling it’s one you prefer to avoid.

OS: I tend to stay relatively close to what patients tell me. I’m reluctant to take off on evolutionary speculation. People are always saying to me. “Sacks, where’s your general theory?” And I say I’m just a storyteller. But I will provide material for a general theory. Long ago when I first met [neurologist] Francis Crick—it was at a dinner—he seized me by the shoulders sat me down next to him and said, “tell me stories.” He, as a theorist, was starving for data. And I had the feeling of telling him stories and it was like throwing fuel into a nuclear reactor [impression of an explosion]. And they would come out as hypothesis. I just provide the fuel.

M: I read a recent review, which basically argued that what might make your book bad science to some, is exactly what makes it good writing to others. What do you think of that kind of statement?

OS: Certainly, I would say that my book isn’t systematic and doesn’t attempt to be. Dan’s [Levitin] book is systematic. We read each other’s books in manuscript and we each said, “I couldn’t write a book like yours.” I think our books are complementary. Mine is a collection of very detailed, carefully observed, meticulously described examples of human predicaments—when people have musical hallucinations, or amusia or whatever. When possible, I will find out what my newer scientific colleagues think and I will send my patients to see them. But I have to stick to my physicianly view. And that view is not to do with being either a writer or a scientist, although I like to think I’m somewhat of both. But science is not entirely about statistics and generalities. I’m concerned with the situation of the individual; you could say the science of the individual. And this is a different sort of science.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain
by Oliver Sacks, Knopf, HC, 381PP, $34.95