10 Questions: For Oliver Sacks
Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com
Any excuse to talk with Oliver Sacks is welcome, and now he has a new book, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain."
Born in London in 1933, Dr. Sacks is a neurologist who trained at Oxford University and has lived and worked in New York since 1965. He’s taught at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and New York University. Just this past summer, he was appointed a professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University.
One of Dr. Sacks’s early books was "Awakenings," based on his experiences with a group of patients in the Bronx who contracted sleeping sickness after World War I and were frozen in sleep for decades. He treated them with L-DOPA, then a new drug, which, remarkably, “awakened” them. (The book was turned into an acclaimed film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.)
Other books include "Seeing Voices," about the world of the deaf, and the bestselling "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a collection of case histories of patients with bizarre neurological conditions, told with Dr. Sack’s characteristic warmth and humanity. Eager to talk with Dr. Sacks, we posed our 10 Questions to him, and he asked us, in his charming British accent, if that was “rather like the 10 Commandments.”
Bach’s “Solfegietto.” I remember my brother Marcus, who was ten years my senior, learning it with our music teacher. No! No! No! the teacher, who was Italian, would say, pounding his fist. That piece of music was banged into my memory.
It’s a piano piece with a very Bach fugal structure. It’s formally intricate, but it also arouses an intense emotion that I can’t really describe. I think it was a rather jolly piece. But my brother died a couple years ago, and now it comes to me as if it were his signature tune, with an elegiac quality.
2. You open Musicophila with an anecdote from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. “Curiosity brings them down to the Earth’s surface to attend a concert,” you write, “they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’—while still finding the entire business unintelligible.” How would you describe the concept of music to one of those aliens?
I think one would have to say music is a form of expression and communication with no external reference like language or drawing but which can express and communicate emotions, moods, what human beings call the heart, as nothing else can. Music communicates being alive. The kinetic, quick aspect of music is very important.
I saw a little boy of three or four, who was dancing to whatever was going through his head. He wasn’t wearing an I-Pod. My immediate thought when I saw him was, No chimpanzee does this. Music and language is all rather human...
(CBS)
Born in London in 1933, Dr. Sacks is a neurologist who trained at Oxford University and has lived and worked in New York since 1965. He’s taught at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and New York University. Just this past summer, he was appointed a professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University.
One of Dr. Sacks’s early books was "Awakenings," based on his experiences with a group of patients in the Bronx who contracted sleeping sickness after World War I and were frozen in sleep for decades. He treated them with L-DOPA, then a new drug, which, remarkably, “awakened” them. (The book was turned into an acclaimed film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.)
Other books include "Seeing Voices," about the world of the deaf, and the bestselling "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a collection of case histories of patients with bizarre neurological conditions, told with Dr. Sack’s characteristic warmth and humanity. Eager to talk with Dr. Sacks, we posed our 10 Questions to him, and he asked us, in his charming British accent, if that was “rather like the 10 Commandments.”
1. What’s your first memory of music?
Bach’s “Solfegietto.” I remember my brother Marcus, who was ten years my senior, learning it with our music teacher. No! No! No! the teacher, who was Italian, would say, pounding his fist. That piece of music was banged into my memory.
It’s a piano piece with a very Bach fugal structure. It’s formally intricate, but it also arouses an intense emotion that I can’t really describe. I think it was a rather jolly piece. But my brother died a couple years ago, and now it comes to me as if it were his signature tune, with an elegiac quality.
2. You open Musicophila with an anecdote from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. “Curiosity brings them down to the Earth’s surface to attend a concert,” you write, “they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’—while still finding the entire business unintelligible.” How would you describe the concept of music to one of those aliens?
I think one would have to say music is a form of expression and communication with no external reference like language or drawing but which can express and communicate emotions, moods, what human beings call the heart, as nothing else can. Music communicates being alive. The kinetic, quick aspect of music is very important.
I saw a little boy of three or four, who was dancing to whatever was going through his head. He wasn’t wearing an I-Pod. My immediate thought when I saw him was, No chimpanzee does this. Music and language is all rather human...
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