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A review by ashrafulla
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
1.0
I know this book is cute to its readers because it makes them feel intelligent. "Hey look at me now I understand music from a brain perspective." This book is far far too narrow to pull that off. It's actually a terrible message to send to readers that music is inherently related to brain damage. The obvious question to ask is whether every good musician is mentally damaged, a question to which Sacks would answer yes apparently. He continually insinuates that great musicians probably had small mental issues which were a side effect of their genius.
That is just bad bad storytelling. I am not knocking anecdotal evidence; anecdotal evidence is very strong because unlike controlled experiments anecdotal evidence is data found in real-life with the conditions of real-life rather than contrived conditions. I am knocking the construction that Sacks makes between music and deformed brain conditions. This doesn't account for the numerous musicians who do not have a defect yet still show the same musical abilities. The lack of a counterfactual is because Sacks is a neuroclinician; he's not going to see people who have non-pathological brains.
This is a very frustrating point to make because it is fairly obvious to me. If a mental condition is associated with music it implies that a) music requires the sacrifice of mental faculties, and b) those who have non-pathological brains are insinuated to be "lesser" musical beings. Neither of these things are true and neither of these things make any sense whatsoever. Yet somehow Sacks and his readers (the book I read was a new edition with notes from multiple readers) find it fascinating that there is this association which doesn't exist. I disliked the entire message of this book, which is why I downgraded it so much.
That is just bad bad storytelling. I am not knocking anecdotal evidence; anecdotal evidence is very strong because unlike controlled experiments anecdotal evidence is data found in real-life with the conditions of real-life rather than contrived conditions. I am knocking the construction that Sacks makes between music and deformed brain conditions. This doesn't account for the numerous musicians who do not have a defect yet still show the same musical abilities. The lack of a counterfactual is because Sacks is a neuroclinician; he's not going to see people who have non-pathological brains.
This is a very frustrating point to make because it is fairly obvious to me. If a mental condition is associated with music it implies that a) music requires the sacrifice of mental faculties, and b) those who have non-pathological brains are insinuated to be "lesser" musical beings. Neither of these things are true and neither of these things make any sense whatsoever. Yet somehow Sacks and his readers (the book I read was a new edition with notes from multiple readers) find it fascinating that there is this association which doesn't exist. I disliked the entire message of this book, which is why I downgraded it so much.