Oliver Sacks on Manipulating the Brain | Big Think

Oliver Sacks on Manipulating the Brain

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Oliver Sacks discusses changing the brain through meditation, and listening your way to Harvard.

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Oliver Sacks:

Oliver Sacks is a psychiatrist and neurologist best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

In 1966, Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film called Awakenings.

In July of 2007, Sacks was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university's first Columbia University Artist. Sacks Latest book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), was has been Revised and Expanded in a new edition that was released in September of 2008.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Is it possible to change the brain with medication?

Oliver Sacks: From what I read, I think that’s all sorts of changes, at least temporary changes may be possible. One can certainly get states of calm and alter the brain rhythms and have states of trance.

Whether they’re permanent changes, I don’t know. But any learning experience changes the brain and nothing more, incidentally, than musical learning, so that the brains of musicians are visibly different and even grossly different from the brains of other people.

Question: Are you a proponent of art therapy?

Oliver Sacks: Yeah. Very, very strongly.

Most of my own work is with elderly people with neurological problems of one sort or another. And I can see how their lives could be transformed by music and sometimes by poetry and art.

But, say, people with Parkinson’s may be unable to move or speak unless there’s music. People who have Alzheimer’s are confused and lost and agitated or disoriented, can be focused wonderfully sometimes by familiar music, which will give them a link to the past and to their own memories which they can’t access in any other way.

And sometimes people who are aphasic and have lost the power of language can get it back through music.

I don’t have direct experience with young people, but from everything I read, I think that music and other forms of art need to be in a central part of education. This is an essential part of being human.

And although I wouldn’t locate everything in the right hemisphere, we are not calculating machines. We need the arts as much as we need everything else.

Question: Is it possible to enhance your mental abilities by listening to Mozart?Oliver Sacks: Well, this so called "Mozart effect" was described, actually, in a very modest way about 15 years ago and then got taken up by the media and hyped and exaggerated in a way which was rather embarrassing to the original describers.

I think there’s very little to suggest that, although Mozart as background will make any difference, on the other hand, real engagement with music, and especially performing music, or listening attentively, can make a great deal of difference.

And especially early in life. You’d see this in people, say, who do Suzuki training. And one a year of Suzuki training can not only enhance one's musicality and alter the brain quite visibly, but the effect seems to leak over to some extent into forms of visual thinking and logical thinking, pattern recognition, and so forth.

So, a little musical background is not enough, but real musical engagement, I think, can be very important.

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