Name: Musicophilia
ISBN: 9781400033539

Musicophilia

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music. Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day.

What Hacker News says

ecalifornicaApr 2025

You might enjoy Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. You're not alone in your experience.

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terminal_dDec 2022

Books that I read (and re-read) in 2022 that I'd recommend to folks on HN. Ordered from most enjoyable / insightful to least.

- Edward O. Wilson - Biophilia

- Will Durant - The Lessons Of History

- Freeman J. Dyson - A Many-Colored Glass

- Venkatesh Rao - The Gervais Principle

- Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

- Colin Wilson - The Outsider

- Stanislaw Lem - Cyberiad

- Antonio Martinez - Chaos Monkeys

- Ben Horowitz - What You Do Is Who You Are

- Alice Flaherty - The Midnight Disease

- Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia

- Ken Binmore - Rational Decisions

- Josh Kaufman - The Personal MBA

Edit: All these books made the cut, there were others that I never completed / disliked / wouldn't recommend, or were just plain mediocre / bad.

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nonrandomstringJul 2022

In case it's not already mentioned in TFA [1] "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" by Oliver Sacks is a fantastic read that will change how you think of music [2].

[1] substack is hostile to me

[2] https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/musicophilia-...

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geolgauNov 2019

You should read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. He writes about some of his patients experiencing synesthesia. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1297985.Musicophilia

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leto_iiNov 2019

Given that I know close to nothing about musical theory (or playing music), this talk surprised me. It seems that our minds are simply wired to pick up patterns and to try to make order out of randomness. I was reminded of 'Musicophilia' by Oliver Sacks, that I think is worth checking out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia

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bewatsonJan 2018

A great book that touches on the subject is "Musicophilia" by the late Oliver Sacks. It goes deep into the neurology of conditions like acquired savant syndrome, though the core of the book is on music-related neurological anomlaies https://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tales-Music-Revised-Expa...

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