Page 1 of a 7 page article in Seed:

The Listener

As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a
science of empathy takes on new dimension.

by Jonah Lehrer • Posted October 29, 2007 01:29 PM

Photograph by Doron Gild

In 1974 Oliver Sacks was climbing a mountain in Norway by himself. It
was early afternoon, and he had just begun his descent when a slight
misstep sent him careening over a rocky cliff. His left leg was
"twisted grotesquely" beneath his body, his limp knee wracked with
pain. "My knee could not support any weight at all, but just buckled
beneath me," he wrote in A Leg to Stand On. Sacks began to "row"
himself down the mountain, sliding on his back and pushing with his
hands, so that his leg, which he'd splinted with his umbrella, was
"hanging nervelessly" in front of him. After a few hours, Sacks was
exhausted, but he knew that if he stopped he would not survive the
cold night.

What kept Sacks going was music. As he painstakingly descended the
mountain, he began to make a melody out of his movements. "I fell into
a rhythm," Sacks writes, "guided by a sort of marching or rowing song,
sometimes the Volga Boatman's Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my
own. I found myself perfectly coordinated by this rhythmâ€"or perhaps
subordinated would be a better term: The musical beat was generated
within me, and all my muscles responded obediently...I was musicked
along." Sacks reached the village at the bottom of the mountain just
before nightfall.

A long convalescence followed, as he tried to regain the use of his
injured leg, but the nerves in his limb had been severely damaged.
When Sacks tried to walk, he was forced to consciously calculate his
movements, to think before each step.

Once again, Sacks was saved by the sudden appearance of song. As he
was struggling with physical therapyâ€"and growing increasingly
frustratedâ€"his mind was inexplicably filled with the resonant strings
of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. "In the moment that this inner music
started," Sacks recounts, "the leg came back. With no warning, no
transition whatever, the leg felt alive, and real, and mine." Sacks
would later describe his vivid hallucinations of the Concerto as a
kind of miracle, in which the music "descended like grace," reminding
him of his own "kinetic melody." The song had restored him to himself.

I'm sitting in Oliver Sacks's office in New York City's Greenwich
Village. Bookshelves are cluttered with neurological texts and
periodic-table paraphernalia, so that a rod of tungsten (his favorite
element) sits next to the collected works of William James. The air
conditioner is perpetually set on high, its wheeze so loud that it
drowns out the noises of city and street. This is where Sacks writes,
at a desk facing the window by the air conditioner, on long yellow
sheets fed into a manual typewriter. "I like the clacking of the
keys," he says. "I can't write without that sound."

Sacks's latest book is Musicophilia, an exploration of the musical
mind. As in his previous works, such as An Anthropologist on Mars, or
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks describes a series of
ordinary people transformed by their extraordinary neurological
conditions. He writes, for instance, of Tony Cicoria, who, after being
struck by lightning, suddenly developed an insatiable obsession with
Chopin's piano music. Before the accident, Tony had been a respected
surgeon, with little interest in classical music. But now he insisted
on spending all of his spare time practicing the piano. He even began
composing his own pieces, "giving form to the music continually
running in his head." Sacks also describes the case of Martin, who
developed uncanny musical talents after contracting meningitis as a
child. While the affliction impaired many aspects of Martin's mind, it
left him with a limitless auditory memory. And then there's Mrs. C.,
who was besieged by musical hallucinations after becoming deaf. She
couldn't stop hearing Christmas carols.

Read more here ...

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/10/the_listener.php

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...[John] Carey wrote back in public, powerfully praising Hughes's
poetic legacy and touching gently too his somewhat eccentric views on
the links between poetry and the body.

"He could tell, just from reading the plays, that Shakespeare
“obviously” suffered from irregular heart rhythm. Poetry, like the
“magnetism” of a faith healer, could repair damaged cells, whereas
prose could do the opposite.

After being diagnosed with cancer, he came to think that writing his
prose treatise Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being had
destroyed his immune system.

Ever since the 17th century, English society had, he believed, mounted
a systematic campaign of censorship and prohibition to stamp out
truths like these, and to impose its puritanical restrictions on
sexuality, which alone “carries the seeds of humanity and joy”.

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2007/10/ted-hughes-and-.html