Oliver Sacks on Music and Mind 

Such an amazing man he was, I could listen to this for hours.

Incredible...this man really lived a life.

If you wish to hear FROM Oliver rather than ABOUT him, skip ahead to 10:32. And the Q&A starts around the 1 hr 4 min. mark.

Thank you for posting this, it saddens me to hear that Oliver has passed.

Musical memory is understandable because musicians absorb and literally ‘feel’ the music in the tissues and structures of their bodies. Just watch great classical musicians, who play without having to think about what their fingers and arms are doing. They go beyond the physical into a different realm. It’s an amazing feeling.

An amazing man. He was so nice giving me responses to my case. I would listen to him for hours

I love Oliver a lot. And here, on 1:32:smth his answer about Synesthesia is a sign of a profound thinker and scientist indeed. Bravo Oliver!

I love how Michael so quickly quotes/performs Bill Hicks’ “Tell me when, Lord.”

What a privilege to hear such a brilliant man talk! What I really loved was his passion for his work and his tentative nature of explaining things. This is what a good scientist does, he has an inclination in his answers but these are not a definitive because the brain is so complex. I just bought his book Musicophilia and will read it with more interest having seen him talk.

Happy new year one and all ~ I personally have experience with music & mind. My mother for many many yrs had dementia..& 2 main hardest part for ME, because as far as I could tell from the outer self of my mother she didn't seem to be scared, angry, or have any reaction to her non-emotional resoponse to these 2 losses, huge losses of her world. So, it was that final questioning who I was in relation to her; I missed her even asking who I was (my mother?) because the humor would be in my saying "as long as you don't think I'm your grandmother", this to ease her frustration. The worse was her loss of loving & responding to music. In the nursing home we'd both sing along or at least move & she was happy, as well as the other residents. Then one day Frank Sinatra was on the radio, let me just say, he was her main man, & I pointed out to her, him singing and, nothing from her. I will point out I have Stiff Person Syndrome, "low level" & yes Celine has it also. I've had it for 30yrs so I can move & do so around the house. As a child I pretended to be a dancer, swimmer, gymnastic dancer, ~ I am a singer & need even with my vocals not the best is like breathing. Please sing, move, play music..even a tid bit: hum a note or two, tap your foot/clap your hands as you listen to music ~ smile & enjoy that one note etc. 🎶😊👧🏾🎶

Brilliant, humorous and beautiful man

I just found this man! I'm so sad he's gone.

Oliver Sacks was great & did lots of things.

skip to 10:00

Explained in a profound way!!

Loved the question at 1:38:00

Sugestion:change the speed of the video to 1.25 It flows, much better.

Polykinetics is a method that combines musical therapy with physical fitness in order to help the brain recover from trauma and overcome chronic symptoms associated with various mental illnesses and disorders.

Bones McCoy from Star Trek must have said the following: Jim, I'm not a interplanetary scientist - I just like listening to Oliver Sacks lecture. Bless those of us you have been touched by this man.

Musical brain science leads us to Grooving as One , resulting in miraculous outcomes!!!

What a man!

Very intriguing indeed.

i play the harmonica, and cannot read music, but can listen to a song, about three times and play the tune.

Many composers from the past as well as our modern day rock/pop composers talk of hearing the music in full in their heads before writing and recording their works Sacks demeans their genius by referring to it as an hallucination.

It's more than that, when one speaks or sings from the heart. It's the vibration and frequency that entertwine and the heart solidifies the moment in time, as if it were frozen but in reality it stretched out like an elastic band.....

What happened to the banana slug tie? I’d like to purchase it as a remembrance of Dr. Sacks. (I also have an affinity to lowly creatures.)

Bless

at 31:01 is why I love this man

🕊

Why do people insist on over-intellectualizing their relatively simple questions into 45 seconds? It makes me wonder whether Dr. Sacks had to feign deafness when the real issue was that he was forgetting what the hell these people were talking about all that time ago.

Did Sacks and Sheldrake ever meet? It would have been so spectacular!

i can also play the tune in my imagination, and hear it.

Music is powerful

Wait- why did he calll himself at 29:28 ¨no neuroscientist myself¨? Isn´t that what he is?!

when girls screamed for the beatles or years before sinatra-were they,in those moments temporarily insane?

Hippocrates would prescribe poems for certain maladies because of the effects it has in the subconscious mind.

This man is like the guy filling the 3rd corner of an almighty triangle.

Who is the author mentioned in 13:00? I cant for the life of me make out the name, have tried different aproximations in google to no answer :(

Learning disability is not "dyslexia". It can present in all kinds of ways, its life disabling at times and some of it has been described in the "literature", but only SOME. If I were hit by lightening and came back I would hope to be the next Marco Polo, traveling the world and only remarking on my new astonishing vistas...and not the agony of being lost most of the time ;=)

👏🏻

"Be One", no longer some esoteric Zen phrase. Technology has made possible the entrainment of Earth. Groovists believe, this is the miracle making process of evolution. A practice all can & need to participate, en masse!!

it's surprising to me that a man like Oliver Sacks say "um" and "ah" so much while he speaks

The response to the question on atonal avant-garde and industrial/noise music was very irritating and blinkered (less from Sachs)

The second-to-last question was about the usefulness of the research, but Kandel's answer didn't really address the question.

501 Jean Tribe

Larry David goes on a bit at the start...

"Conducting the symphony" is not the big thing, its preparing and rehearsing the orchestra before the performance. Any fool can wave a stick around.

It's called the soul. The spiritual heart. Materialistic mindset gets you nowhere. Music cannot be explained because it is from the higher consciousness.

Groovism is our inborn religion!! Religion means to unite!!!

Very interesting topic but he isn't a versed speaker. The flow of speech is often missing. But nevertheless a great mind!

This mediator guy is rude and brutal and falsely supererior. Quite the contrast to sacks.

,, ,, ,

is it just me or is it extremely hard to bear the ah's, um's, uh's, etc?

Because the elemental e-Pi-i AM-FM sync-duration universe is composed of "musical" timing of periodic temporal spacing time, the Absolute Zero-infinity reference-framing of QM tuning by pulse-evolution to bio-logical Chemistry floating in this Eternity-now Actuality Interval. By sight we're made of maths, by sound we're made of music composed of Electron-photon-phonon-Proton Neutronic zero-infinity sync-duration mass-energy-momentum Chemistry. Excellent Observations. Because the elemental e-Pi-i AM-FM sync-duration condensation modulation cause-effect Universe is an echoing i-reflection containment chamber confined by Absolute Zero Kelvin Singularity-point vanishing-into-no-thing Perspective Principle, "music" is inherently composed coherence-cohesion objectives of timing pulse-evolution logarithmic Time Duration Timing differentiates, here-now-forever. 'Twould be nice if Neuroscience did the usual Sciencing Re-search in Philosophy of Mind by identifying Social Objectives, like "Obedience to Conscience" in the circumstances of QM-TIME Completeness cause-effect of 0-1-2-ness GD&P Actuality, eg the "Lord" is about ability to make appropriate responses to the moral concepts of Humanity as Unity-connection Duality in parallel coexistence "musically" timing time, with less contrapuntal.

Um um um um um um eh um eh I um

Brilliant man but his UUMS and AAHS are insufferable.

Perfect pitch can be learned though better to not lose it from birth. The word see-saw has two notes in the pitch of C to tune the voice box. Such talk is nonsense to all but overtone singers and those with a with Asian language