Moayad’s Reviews > Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain > Status Update

This book is getting back on track with interesting stories and reflections from entertaining the possibility of evolution (or perhaps diminishment) of our hearing capabilities from tones (pitch) of voices to understanding meaning of words. Cases of Synesthesia and seeing/feeling what you're hearing juxtaposed with blindness and how it affects hearing. Mostly beautiful content and page turning stories so far.

It’s been some time since my first read of this book and I think I have a better understanding of Sacks’s writing today than I did 4 years ago. With this newly, perhaps biased, goggles equipped I find myself enjoying the world he builds around the patients he’s describing. Like an investigator lifting each object and scrutinizing it, he explores the lives before the illness honing in on a conclusion.

Finally finished the first part of the book. I think the problem with this book for me is Sacks listing all these cases with minor variations of symptoms before going on and describing the origin of those symptoms. It's like having a "connect the dots" drawing with the dots too close to each other, sure it's easy to make out the whole picture but it's freakin boring.

This is going to be a long read. Dr.Sacks explores the relationship between our brains and the music we hear. So far, Sacks explores how music can cause seizures or haunt people for days, months, or years. He also talks about earworms, those songs that get stuck in our heads from the first listen and bounce in there whether we wanted or not and what can trigger music in our heads. It's more of an exploration so far.