Musicophilia

With his trademark compassion and erudition, Dr Oliver Sacks examines the power of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people.

Among them: a surgeon who is struck by lightning and suddenly becomes obsessed with Chopin; people with ‘amusia’, to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans only seven seconds – for everything but music.

Dr Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people who are deeply disoriented by Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia.

Musicophilia alters our conception of who we are and how we function, and shows us an essential part of what it is to be human.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Author Biography

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at the Queen’s College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.

Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as ‘the poet laureate of medicine’, and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.