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.
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/oliver-sa...

[@wanderingsoul1189]

He was a such a sweet and profoundly intelligent man. Wish he could know how much he is adored by a young man from far away distant and distinct land.

[@MsVertinskaya]

we will always miss you dearly, Oliver, thanks for every single bit you've done

[@Gallowglass7]

Indeed, very sad

[@ryecatcher1366]

Wow... A voice of pure reason and truth. I'm staggered. His beliefs about over medication vocalised in a way that it should be. Objectively.

[@alizadevries1876]

HE'S SO ADORABLE!

[@zachdaniels8484]

Yeah I don't think adorable is the appropriate word to call him just saying that to be honest.

[@caramason56]

I absolutely believe music can heal the brain ❤️. So inspiring

[@riteshshukla5605]

🙌

[@pt20829]

Totally 101% agree that too many children are wrongly diagnosed with ADHD. With enormous respect and admiration for the late Dr.

[@PDN11141]

RIP Dr. Sachs, I respect his view. His books are worth buying even if you don't have a medical background. I learned when I was a working as a Neuro nurse how older people after a stoke. as some became aphasic ( speech gone or impaired) but give them a poem from childhood and they'd sometimes recite poetry perfectly. It gave the patient a freedom, finding joy and hope, same with music. I'd give the patients some sounds they were familiar with and I'd find to my astonishment that they'd come to life, in unexpected ways. Even years later when my mother had a stroke, she couldn't talk in any structured way, except in poetry, where her words arrived in the correct order. She 'd recite by memory. While before she had gabbled on, so nothing came out sounding right. I remember her laughing as if I had unblocked her speech, by arriving with poetry, or should I say the rhyming words of poets like Lear and Shakespeare, and music had a profound effect on her. It bought her some happiness she'd sing and tap to the sounds. I hope someone reads this. Music and poetry make a huge difference to patients. I suggest all schools and parents feed children rhyming poets, and when they reach old age, maybe they find own parents have Alzheimer's, or some other unfortunate neurological condition, they'll have a path in brain to you and you to them. Watch as they come to life again... Just like Awakenings... I'm so grateful to the Doctor's and elderly patients who taught me back when I was young. I wouldn't have placed quite the same value as I do now. People like Oliver Sachs made a difference to my mother's life and mine

[@wanderingsoul1189]

Thank you for this. ♥️

[@clintwolf4495]

Thanks for the great video. Very interesting.

[@lanser87]

I love Oliver Sacks!

[@kariwattsup]

Mozart effect... I love it!!!

[@Pianofy]

In the first question written in the video 'medication' should be 'meditation'

[@kristine6996]

Nice tie ... 🎩

[@user-nc8dz5ty6u]

A man who mistook Oliver's tie for a hat!

[@aimeemacdn]

loVE YOU

[@jannakraye6280]

hyper state in stagnation or stagnant motion where the anticipation of the outcome cycles like a lucid dreaming nowhere gurus or authority defiance over ordering: if the duress or perception of fear of rebellion of norepinephrine ...how many breaths per minute?

[@DistortedFaiths]

RIP

[@RDnAC]

Cool tie

[@howardshorrock4535]

RDnAC i

[@ingenuity168]

November 19, 2020.

[@CaptainFatfuk]

I’m curious by the title itself. Manipulating the brain. That implies that we are not our brains correct? I struggle with ocd intrusive thoughts and I think the biggest problem is that I identify too much with my mind.

[@monleuklum9238]

2:35

[@windsofmarchjourneyperrytr2823]

"The brains of musicians are grossly different than that of other people." So, hes basically saying we're all nuts, then. lol.

[@bigt9688]

No only real artists

[@victors1689]

What we are is, we are 8 BILLION IDIOTS DANCING IN THE DARK* ON A PINHEAD IN THE UNIVERSE and mostly to noise that passes off as music. So yes, we are nuts/neurotic

[@makonina1648]

Miss you dearly, I wish I can meet you

[@uuilson]

An enhanced existence or augmented reality...

[@JAYDUBYAH29]

Oops you meant "meditation" and wrote "medication" in the video...

[@deltatoofow]

if you close your eyes its chris eubank

[@thehotyounggrandpas8207]

Hahaha!

[@1m2a3t4t5]

Agee with the ADHD part.

[@thehotyounggrandpas8207]

Not so for us shit musicians, we are still mostly thick.

[@majedahmed5410]

his brain is full of idea---which all the same...look at the center... not the form...!

[@JimmyJoeJr]

A computer chip in the brain would be awesome.

[@kariwattsup]

But what's up with his "cat ate the canary" grimace.? Hmmmm too much elephant tranquilizer? Lol... He did experiment. He's pure genius