St. John's News

Noted, award-winning author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, M.D., delivered an at-times humorous, sometimes poignant, always riveting lecture on St. John’s Queens campus on Monday, October 6. Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd at The Little Theatre, Dr. Sacks discussed his latest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and the profound effect music has on our brains.

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Students and faculty—some of whom brought entire classes with them—from the Queens and Staten Island campuses crowded into the Little Theatre to hear Dr. Sacks relate stories of the “therapeutic power of music.” He described how patients with dementia responded to music (his book Awakenings was written about such patients and was later made into a movie of the same name); talked about “deeply Parkinsonian” patients who had “total difficulty in initiating movement” until music stirred them to move with the tempo; and related the story of an Alzheimer’s patient who couldn’t remember what he did for a living or how to tie a necktie but could remember the baritone parts of every song he ever sang and performed each of them beautifully, with appropriate posturing and emotion. 

A Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and the first person to be named “Columbia University Artist,” Dr. Sacks has studied music’s effects on the brain for decades. He has used functional MRIs to study the brain’s reaction when music is played and reports that many areas throughout the brain light up in response to music, including the visual and motor areas. The reaction to hearing music, he said, can be physical. “Human beings can’t listen to music without keeping time with the rhythm,” he stated. “This isn’t true in any other mammals but appears quite early in human development.”

Because simply listening attentively to music can affect many parts of the brain, the Columbia professor heartily recommends that music be a primary part of education—a recommendation the audience endorsed with applause. He added that “amazing changes that are very visible to the naked eye occur throughout the brain of a musician. We have not found anything comparable in, for example, scientists or mathematicians.”

Dr. Sacks also touched on the subject of dreams, specifically music in dreams, about which he said “all people dream, all occasionally, some frequently dream of music.” And, he added, music dreamed tends to be remembered accurately. He also described musical hallucinations, music you think you hear externally but which is actually internal. He explained that the phenomenon is “not unusual in people with fairly advanced deafness” as the brain needs to be active and these music hallucinations seem to provide the missing stimulus. He added that he suspects “thousands of thousands” of people in the U.S. have such hallucinations.

As time ran out, the noted neurologist reminded his audience that work in this area really only began about 30 years ago.  “We still don’t know why music is so powerful or how it is so powerful in human nature. It shows itself in infancy and is manifest in every culture. Lies so deep in our nature, it must be innate.”