If you have not noticed already, there has been a growing trend of physician-writers hitting the limelight in the last few decades – and I am all for it. Even though this type of author is not anything new to us, with the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud, more physicians within our lifetimes with newer perspectives are creeping up on our shelves, such as Khaled Hosseini, Atul Gawande, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. Their perception of our current landscape allows for more accessible reading and understanding of the blurry world of science and medicine we so dearly want to grasp. In addition, I am sure it is an “escape” for physicians, allowing these people to write about their unique “bottled-up” perspectives regarding their work. Maybe even write stories influenced by their impactful medical profession.

The book I will recommend today, which I recently re-read, is from none other than the “OG” of modern physician-writers, Oliver Sacks. His book “Musicophilia” is such a fascinating read. I felt like I was continuously learning about something new on almost every page I turned. Music is ultimately so abstract, with no meaning at all, and yet humans find it so emotionally compelling that it can pierce the heart. It truly does have power over people that exceeds our understanding. We interact with it constantly and instinctively, whether that’s in the form of listening to the latest Spotify playlist or navigating through the streets of Dubai with the horn of our cars.

All accounts of the psychology and neuroscience of how music affects us are discussed in the book. It’s so interesting to learn about numerous things such as amusia (the lack of musicality), musical hallucinations, musical savants and their absolute pitch ability, musical dreams and imagery, frontotemporal dementia and seizures, earworms, cochlear implants, the anatomy of the inner ear, Williams Syndrome, Alzheimer's Disease, Tourette’s Syndrome, Synaesthesia, Dystonia, Dyskinesia and the truth behind the bewitching ‘Mozart Myth’.

Sacks goes through several absorbing and jaw-dropping case studies and stories of people who may seem normal on the outside, but on the inside have a wonderfully complex and intricate relationship with music. These relationships can sometimes be therapeutic, in some cases harmful, charming even, but above all they are unforgettable.

One particular case describes a 42-year-old man who got struck by lightning and then suddenly became obsessed with Chopin, gradually becoming a master of the piano. Another explains how a 3-year-old boy succumbed to meningitis and grew up to have an IQ of less than 60, and yet remembers over 2000 operas and knows all of Bach’s cantatas, recalling each voice and instrument being played.

Yes, Sacks’s writing is sometimes anecdotal-heavy, dry, and repetitive, but overall, it was thoroughly engaging, enchanting, and thought-provoking. He is both a great storyteller and a great neurologist, both of which are rarely put together.

A lovely quote I recall from the book reminds me of how utterly distinctive we are as people. Even when our quotidian days may be filled with dread, boredom, and routine, music permits us to become matchless and dynamic beyond compare: “We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one… we perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony (perhaps most elementally) rhythm. We integrate all of these and ‘construct’ music in our minds,” said Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia.

As a PhD student researching the intricacies of the brain and how sleep works in space, this certainly pushed all the right buttons for me. If you are looking for a comparatively different read, a non-fiction book, and a new perspective on music, I recommend this one.