Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

The field of neuropsychology began in the mid-1800s, and the oldest studies Oliver Sacks refers to are those by John Hughlings Jackson, an English neurologist who studied patients experiencing epilepsy and hallucinations in the mid-to-late 19th century. Jackson’s descriptions of the neurology of epilepsy remain foundational today. His conclusions were based on bedside observation of patients and could not be experimentally confirmed during his lifetime. As a result, Jackson’s work received little notice until long after his death. More recently, advances in technology and methodology have made Jackson’s ideas influential for a new generation of neurologists, including Sacks (An Introduction to the Life and Work of John Hughlings Jackson).

Sacks was a neuropsychologist who worked with countless patients with various neurological conditions and differences. He valued scientific data but also emphasized a humanistic approach, and his manner of writing hints at a sort of partnership of discovery he undertook with his patients: “Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known. This was brought out in a letter” (384). Sacks’s empathy and deep interest in the human condition, combined with his scientific rigor, offer new ways of thinking about how humans relate to art and to each other. Sacks shows that a musician’s brain is clearly identifiable as such through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), where the brains of other types of artists are not. These brain imaging scans show an enlargement in the corpus callosum (which connects the two hemispheres), indicating that music connects areas of the brain that would not otherwise be connected. The musician’s brain also shows more gray matter (and thus a stronger area of function and connectivity) in the auditory and visual cortex. The basal ganglia, which is located in the center of the brain, plays a role in the repetitive actions that are necessary for playing and dancing to music, as does the motor cortex. A stroke in this part of the brain can render a person unable to move, speak, or feel emotion as they could before the stroke. When a person becomes fully involved in music, all of these brain areas are working together, along with the frontal lobe, which is the seat of the complex functions that define human existence (planning, organization, higher-level thinking).