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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

With Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks turns his neurological eye on how music interacts with our brain. Music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, and for most people, music stirs memories and emotions and inhabits our daily lives. For some people, music can spark other senses including taste, can calm or animate people with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or in the case of a musician who lost the ability to remember, it allows him to still perform professionally. Yet for others, music can be a cacophony that attacks their minds or be the source of hallucinations. Musicophilia has received mostly positive reviews with the New York Times saying, "In the end, Sacks's catalog of oddities sheds little systematic light on the mystery of music. He cannot be blamed for this - the science of music is still in its early days. Readers will probably be grateful that Sacks, unlike Freud, is happy to revel in phenomena that he cannot yet explain."