Brain Art Culture and Medicine

Oliver Sacks

Web stories of Oliver Sacks

  • Oliver Sacks on Music and Mind  Important stuff starts at about 13 minutes and
    • Parkinson’s and music at about 16 minutes
    • Stuttering
    • Alzheimer’s  – Musical memory is tenacious
    • Autistic children
    • Person with encephalitis forgot everything All musical memories intact Could conduct symphony
    • Hallucinations of music
      • Feel like there is a device in their head
      • Intracranial “juke box”
      • 75% are deaf
      • sensory deprivation eg alone in a boat and bored
        • results in musical hallucinations
    • Amusia
      • Unable to understand and perceive music
        • perception of speech and everything else  is normal
        • right frontal white matter component is abnormal
    • Deafness and music
      • Losing hearing in one ear
        • results in a less perfect appreciation of music
        • but over time plasticity enables return of appreciation
    • Williams Syndrome
      • precocious musically
      • social “cocktail” personality
      • parietal and occipital lobes small
        • spatial sense and vision
      • temporal
        • speech and music are normal or supernormal
      • hyper-musical species
    • Musical Savants
      • Autism
        • prodigious musical pitch
    • Blindness and Musicality
      • Brain denied one aspect can develop other aspects
      • Blind Piano Tuners
    • Synesthesia
      • See colors
      • Smell smells
    • Previously not Musical and Become Musical
      • Tony Cicoria
        • orthopedic surgeon
          • struck by lightening
          • I was dead
            • and I saw myself dead
            • beautiful experience
            • but recovered from CPR
            • and pain suddenly came to him
            • recovered
              • lingering memory problems
              • over 2-3 days
                • insatiable desire to listen to music
                • without previous interest
                • then had unusual desire to play music
                • taught himself
                • inspirations deep inside him
                • started to hear music in his head
                • endless music in his head
                  • waking him in the night
                  • morning day night
                  • “possessed” by “music from heaven”
                  • solitary pursuit
                  • became very spiritual
                  • could see auras around people
      • Frontal and Temporal Lobe degeneration
    • Franco Magnagni
      • Never had thought of being an artist until 31
        • developed a high fever
        • ? seizures
        • nightly vivid dreams of Pontito
        • his hometown village
        • consumed to paint
        • taught himself to paint
    • Temporal lobe Seizures
      • Onset of musical hallucinations
      • Develop spiritual and mystical feelings
      • “Selema”
        • Strange feeling
          • sense she was on a beach
          • accompanied by sour taste
          • grand mal seizure
          • temporal lobe tumor
            • low malignancies
            • surgery
        • Transformed into a new person
          • reborn
            • returned to work as a research
            • became unperturbed about silly things
            • happy as a lark
              • new cheerfulness
              • new social skills
              • music became a great part in her life
              • moved to tears
              • addicted to listening to music
              • ? release of dormant social skills after removal of part of the temporal lobe
      • Musical Susceptibility among human beings is universal
        • central to all cultures
        • Many centers in the brain
          • that is why it is so robust
          • motor responses to music is natural to human beings
          • ie dancing as well
          • neuroscience of music
      • Singing by Speechless Children 1871
      • Music
        • right hemisphere
      • Language
        • left hemisphere
    • Melodic Learning
    • Mozart and Beethoven
      • great musicians
      • poor mathematicians
  • Dyslexia
  • Music and Chills – Frisson

 

 

  • Acting  and Handicapped Children
    • Sesame Street
      • Ameera represents the joyful lives of children with disabilities
        • has a spinal cord injury and uses a wheel chair and crutches
      • Julia is a fictional character
        • autism
      • Abby Cadabby
        • ADHD
      • Jason Kingsley an actor on Sesame street with Downs
  • Poetry
    • Cædmon
      • shepherd – illiterate inspired by the heavens to write poetry
  • Savants
  • Autism and Musoc

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