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Oliver Sacks is at it again, with a typically fascinating essay (taken from his upcoming book) in this week's New Yorker about the relationships of music and language. You can't read the essay online, but you can listen to a ten minute podcast interview with him about it here. He is responding to Steven Pinker's well-known description of music as "auditory cheesecake," something which we could easily do without. To Sacks, "music and mimesis are as essential to humans as language."
Sacks uses his standard approach of presenting bizarre examples from his neurology practice to provide insight into how the brain works. In the New Yorker article, he described patients who, following unusual injuries (one guy was hit by lightening), develop compulsions to hear music constantly--they adapt music to become their language. Sacks describes Pinker's view of "music being merely piggy-backed on language" as backwards; rather, "language is piggy-backed on music."
The podcast is well worth a listen.
Sacks uses his standard approach of presenting bizarre examples from his neurology practice to provide insight into how the brain works. In the New Yorker article, he described patients who, following unusual injuries (one guy was hit by lightening), develop compulsions to hear music constantly--they adapt music to become their language. Sacks describes Pinker's view of "music being merely piggy-backed on language" as backwards; rather, "language is piggy-backed on music."
The podcast is well worth a listen.