Some of you may or may not be familiar with Oliver Sacks. Responsible for Awakenings</em> ( remeber the film with Robin Williams ) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.</em> He is about to release a new book entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.</em> Wired magazine did a very interesting interview in which he begins to break down the subject behind the book and talk about how influential music is on the brain. Here’s an excerpt from the article.</p> Wired:</strong> How did you discover that music can aid in healing?</p> Sacks:</strong> The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer’s, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else.</p> You can find the Wired article in full here.</a></p>