Issues Affecting America: Responsible
Citizenship Fall 2008
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can
persuade us to buy something, remind us of our first date or lift
us out of depression when nothing else can. But the power of music
goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our
brain than language does — humans are a musical species.
Best-selling author Dr. Oliver Sacks’ helps us understand
music’s power. His compassionate, compelling tales of people
struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have
fundamentally changed the way we think about the human experience
and our own brains. In Musicophilia, he examines the power of music
through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and
everyday people — from a man who is struck by lightning and
suddenly becomes a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire
group of children with Williams Syndrome who are hyper-musical from
birth; or from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like
the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only
seven seconds — for everything but music.
In 1966, Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for
Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care facility where
he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had
spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate
movement. Dr. Sacks recognized these patients as survivors of the
great pandemic of sleeping sickness that swept the world from
1916 – 1927; he treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa,
which brought them back to life. They became the subjects of his
book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter A
Kind of Alaska and the Oscar-nominated feature film Awakenings with
Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Musicophilia, on The New York Times bestseller List, was named
one of the Best Books of 2007 by The Washington Post and the
editors of Amazon.com.
Registration
RSVP
for this event.
Sponsored by the Honors Program, St.
John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Division of
Student Affairs
Date
Monday, October 6, 2008
Time
4:30 p.m.
Location
Little Theatre, Queens Campus