Oliver Sacks to speak in Triangle

Scientist wrote 'Awakenings'

Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and best-selling author, has chronicled all manner of extreme human ailments and tics since his work "Awakenings," about catatonic patients afflicted with sleeping sickness, was made into a popular film. Most recently, Sacks focused on the mysteries of music and the brain in his book "Musicophilia." Sacks, 75, is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University.

He will be speaking at Duke University on Wednesday and at a National Humanities Center conference in Chapel Hill on Thursday. He talked last week with reporter Wade Rawlins.

You've said that we're a profoundly musical species and every culture has music. For music to have endured so long, music must feed a deeper need for humans or serve a role beyond pure entertainment.

SACKS: One sees in all sorts of cultures that it does have roles besides entertainment. It has ritual roles. It has religious roles. It's used in warfare. I think that music-making was originally and remains a communal activity -- singing together, dancing together. It very much has to do with human bonding and synchronizing people in work and mood and spiritual aspiration. All this is very much beyond entertainment.

Music is one of the cements that hold us together.

Many people find listening to music pleasurable or relaxing. Neurologically speaking, why does music make us cry or summon other emotions?

SACKS: The parts of the brain most concerned with the perception of music tend to be quite close to parts of the brain associated with memory and emotion -- much more so than with the visual parts of the brain. Speech and song and music virtually always arouse emotion and very deep emotion. The primary role of music in cultures is to express emotion and feelings of a sort that language can't do.

Can you talk about the therapeutic or healing powers of music?

SACKS: What fascinates me as a physician is seeing the power of music with various patients. This really started in the mid-1960s. This started with the Parkinsonian patients that I later wrote about in "Awakenings." They were very frozen. Music seemed to give them flow and movement and let them talk. It helped them bypass the frozen mechanisms. I've seen it with many other sorts of patients with dementia, Tourette's syndrome, depression.

This will be my second visit to North Carolina in a month. Earlier, I was at the CooperRiis therapeutic farm community near Asheville. There were very deeply disturbed schizophrenic and mentally disturbed people. On our last evening, there was a campfire, and people were singing and drumming and playing flutes. It was a wonderful evening. If someone had come upon the scene without knowing the people, it wouldn't have occurred to them that these were deeply ill, schizophrenic people. They were normal as long as they were making music.

Why do tunes get stuck in our heads sometimes, sort of like musical hiccups?

SACKS: Most of us have had jingles going round and round. The human brain is tremendously sensitive to musical rhythms and some melodies and is sort of vulnerable. There is a mischievous industry at work that tries to make music catchy. We don't really know why music should be so catchy. One can absolutely be tormented by music. You may enjoy it at first, but grow to hate it and try to find ways to get rid of it.

You are an amateur classical pianist. You said that Mozart makes you a better neurologist.

SACKS: Nietzsche used to go to concerts of Bizet and said Bizet makes me a better philosopher. I do often like background music. I'm very much in a Bach mood. I've taken up piano lessons after a gap of 63 years. I find that music stimulates thought. I would find it very difficult to be deprived of music and find that both physical and mental life would be impaired.

Why is the musical memory preserved in some patients with dementia?

SACKS: Musical memory, once music is learned and well-known, depends on procedural memory which involves the lower parts of brain like cerebellum and basal ganglia. These lower parts aren't damaged in dementia.

Are you working on a book about the brain and vision?

SACKS: Vision very much fascinates me. The subject has been hugely advanced by various forms of functional brain imaging. You may know exactly what is going on in the brain when one is having visual hallucinations.