Oliver Sacks on Music and Mind

7 March 2007: Oliver Sacks is a physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. He spoke on "Music and Mind," with Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate and University Professor at Columbia University, serving as chair.

[@zenmindstate110]

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

[@JoelRatman]

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

[@TheFleetfingers]

Incredible...this man really lived a life.

[@Iznessmaurer]

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

[@cyriaquegriffon]

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

[@denise2169]

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.

[@irenefenske7066]

Enlightenment

[@caramason56]

Brilliant, humorous and beautiful man

[@abradakadabra]

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!

[@kamilbednarek9781]

Nie podoba mi się to ja dalej będziecie oszukiwać kręcić kłamać to wszystko zlikwidouję jak tam przyjadę to każdy profesorek dostanie z liścia za naśmiewają się a sami to szkolone przygłupy. Nie znam Angielskiego inaczej go widzę litery to cyfry a cyfry to nic

[@christophermclaughlin8899]

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.

[@dennisspeed3799]

The other guy is a first class jerk. Reminds me of F. Murray Abraham’s character in Finding Forrester. The difference:Sachs had done the work with real people that he was trying to help and to understand. He was a true doctor of the soul, not a soul-destroying academician.

[@garryhoban4771]

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.

[@gibbogle]

That is a great book.

[@marysalvi242]

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. 🎶😊👧🏾🎶

[@jeffersonspace]

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.

[@georgecherian6520]

Oliver Sacks was great & did lots of things.

[@GroovismOrg]

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

[@karlabanks4908]

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

[@HawneyChile]

What a man!

[@ghatshilagogol]

Explained in a profound way!!

[@fernandajacobi2793]

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

[@lkcuupa]

Music is powerful

[@grahammacfarlane3307]

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

[@stevenvanhulle7242]

I had this with the recorder. Now it's too long ago that I played it (half a century), so I'm not sure I still could.

[@judyclark1906]

Very intriguing indeed.

[@Ajpforman]

Loved the question at 1:38:00

[@stlsweetheart84]

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.

[@stlsweetheart84]

Polykinetics is inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks :)

[@zaferalabbas]

Sounds interesting!

[@TonyBurke100]

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.

[@jumperontheline]

He didn't say hearing music 'in our heads' is hallucination. He said that people who have musical hallucinations perceive the music as coming from outside themselves.

[@mariekatherine5238]

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.)

[@lawrenceawassisfut653]

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.....

[@CCRmusicfan]

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

[@grahammacfarlane3307]

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

[@jibbarich]

at 31:01 is why I love this man

[@linrkirk]

Bless

[@markman63]

skip to 10:00

[@chewie1355]

markman63 thank you

[@cornelianicodemus4837]

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

[@antonioeltigre4465]

Yes on that Dutch TV show with Daniel Dennett, Stephen J Gould etc

[@VladyslavKL]

🕊

[@lamper2]

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

[@jackchorn]

+lee shafer no- because girls and women are in a constant state of insanity. They are high functioning- it is a development of evolution. When you meet them they seem perfectly normal and even lovely. Don't let this fool you- this is an evolutionary response to breed and nest. As soon as they have you locked in their true self erupts- some more dramatic then other. The technical term that describes a man dealing with this is pussy whipped, and can be very dangerous to the male ego if he does not understand this or lets the behavior continue. So when these young girls go nuts over an idol it is simply them unable to control themselves in a mixture of overwhelming need to mate with the idol and knowing at the same time it is impossible.

[@lamper2]

Hey thanks great post

[@VeN0m88]

+jackchorn That was awesome, lol thanks

[@davanasantosh4180]

N those bipolar females must be even more crazier when they give birth to sane males like you

[@simonettadesimoni4192]

Come ebbre baccanti, felicemente insane!!!

[@jibbarich]

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

[@JanoDo]

He was a psychiatrist, meaning, he was a doctor, and of course his medical practice lead him to very deep insights. But he wasn't a scientist, meaning, he wasn't devoted to methodological study about the brain

[@GroovismOrg]

"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!!

[@averayugen8462]

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 ;=)

[@Erickvazquezc]

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 :(

[@mirapeerance]

Ignacy Jan Paderewski Former Prime Minister of Poland

[@Erickvazquezc]

@@mirapeerance cheers!

[@ofrabjousday1]

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.

[@shiitakestick]

@ ofrabjous : what are you on about ? Be quiet.

[@ofrabjousday1]

@@shiitakestick Over-intellectualizing simple questions. Am I going too fast for you?

[@shiitakestick]

@@ofrabjousday1 - could be . Are you calling spending 45 seconds on a thought " over intellectualizing " ??

[@ofrabjousday1]

@@shiitakestick Time 45 seconds out. That's a very long time to ask a question that could have been reduced to 15 words. If you don't know what I mean, watch the Q&A.

[@shiitakestick]

@@ofrabjousday1 - smh .. Try reading a book of his ..

[@nodnoc]

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

[@TechTins_Projects]

That is because he is not reading a script and its nerve wracking talking to a room full of highly educated people

[@znome8500]

He stutters that’s why. Um and ah Are used as fill in.

[@gibbogle]

It is taking time to think.

[@znome8500]

@Janitor Queen you clearly don’t know a single thing about him , go read his biography.

[@douglasdickerson5184]

👏🏻

[@kosmow2013]

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

[@Erickvazquezc]

nice, any recommended source?

[@Hammeroftruthmysterycult]

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

[@ejws1575]

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

[@jumperontheline]

I remember hearing many years ago that western music is processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas Japanese music is processed by the right hemisphere, with the result that westerners have difficulty in listening to it. My hunch is that other non-rhythmic music, such as industrial, some modern jazz, etc, is also 'right brain music'. It was very strange that they didn't mention any physiological reasons (such as mother's heartbeat felt in the womb) for why we find music so powerful, let alone discuss what might be happening neurologically. Dismissing it as being purely a learnt cultural response is ridiculous. If that was so, humans would be the only animals affected by music. Humans may be the only ones who move in time to a rhythm, as Dr Sacks mentioned, but dogs definitely reflect the energy in dance music by becoming playful when they hear it; they also become deeply relaxed when they hear peaceful classical music!

[@kayeworsham6268]

501 Jean Tribe

[@gibbogle]

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

[@dennisspeed3799]

Kandel’s the kind of soul-destroying academician whose sterility of thought is only equaled by his blithe unawareness of his transparent uselessness to the conversation. He couldn’t repeat the questions accurately because he didn’t bother to listen. “Oliver and I have worked on the great questions. We leave the details for you to work out.” Somebody ought to bitch-slap him with a copy of Rabelais’ Gargantua.

[@blessings42]

But it did give him a second opportunity to push the religion of scientism, namely the reduction of mind to matter. Sigh ...

[@gibbogle]

@@blessings42 Nobody understands mind, or even memory.

[@BatteryExhausted]

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

[@supremeintrovert7404]

Lol 😂 😂 😂. I can't unsee it now!

[@gibbogle]

I skipped him.

[@GroovismOrg]

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

[@gibbogle]

So does fascism.

[@GroovismOrg]

@@gibbogle it does?

[@jochananberohart3578]

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

[@archtura7276]

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

[@marymc4044]

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

[@sacredcoldplasma6276]

Um um um um um um eh um eh I um

[@sunrise444]

,, ,, ,

[@davidwilkie9551]

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.

[@ExtremeObservations]

Ok

[@sednafloating7027]

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

[@lafleurproductions]

Oliver Sacks gave us so much this minor speech habit is comparatively trivial. What astonished me was the total lack of self control in those asking questions, especially since Dr Sacks couldn't hear most of them and they had to repeated. What is wrong with people that they can't be succinct in this situation?

[@liedersanger1]

Its just you.Gives me tine to think! As it did him, I would guess.

[@ericgrunin]

He had a stammer.

[@mirceamatthews528]

We all have our own “fillers.” - “Like...”, “you know.”

[@nodnoc]

It indeed makes him very difficult to listen to. I'm actually very surprised that man as intelligent as Sacks spoke in this way.

[@pollywanda]

Brilliant man but his UUMS and AAHS are insufferable.

[@petergleeson295]

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