Mitchell directed that one prisoner be subjected to bombardment by music-he specified the Red Hot Chili Peppers. For instance, this weekend the Washington Post reports that psychologist James E. More recently, we have learned that the use of music played a key role in the Bush Administration’s torture program. Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange tells the story of a young Beethoven fanatic who is “programmed” to be physically ill on hearing Beethoven played. Since first publishing Tony Cicoria’s story, I have received many letters from people who were not struck by lightning and seemed to have no special physical or psychological conditions, but, often to their great surprise-in their forties or fifties or even eighties-have found themselves with sudden or unexpected creative gifts or passions, either musical or artistic.Ģ. What had happened in his brain to create this sudden and overwhelming passion for music? He plays daily and recently debuted his own composition, the Lightning Sonata. But about three weeks later, he developed an insatiable passion for the piano, and for Chopin in particular. One day he was struck by lightning and survived, apparently without any long-lasting problems.
Here was a man, a surgeon who never had much interest in music but occasionally listened to rock and roll.
When I first wrote Musicophilia, I thought Tony Cicoria’s story was rather dramatic-and unique. Cicoria and why you decided to introduce your book with his case. Your book begins with a “bolt from the blue,” so to speak, with the story of Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon in upstate New York whose life was transformed when he was struck by lightning in 1994.
Sacks about his remarkable study of music and the human brain.ġ. His latest book, Musicophilia, has just appeared as a Vintage paperback. A regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Sacks is best known for Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. But his greatest talent may be his ability to make the complexities of neurological disorders understandable to laymen while portraying the afflictions of his patients in a compelling and compassionate way.
Columbia University Professor Oliver Sacks is probably the country’s best known neurologist.
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