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A fascinating compendium of a variety of case studies and stories relating music and the brain--

• perfect pitch and why we don't all have it (and how some people associate tones with colors)
• musical hallucinations (losing hearing & hallucinating songs from years before)
• "amusia" - an inability to perceive one of the many components of music, the absence of which makes it impossible to appreciate music (there are so many things going on when we listen to music that we tend to just take for granted! rhythm, timbre, pitch, harmony)
• musical savantism
• people with severe amnesia or aphasia where music can be a tool to recover some of that lost function
• even brain damage that frees up musical creativity

The stories are fascinating and interesting for what they say about the complexity of music, as well as the brain and what it means to be human. I was a little disappointed that Sacks didn't make a stronger argument or concluding summary at the end about what all of these stories and details means, what it all adds up to; he basically concludes that all human cultures have some form of music and that some relation to music is intrinsically part of being human. Perhaps this was cut from the audiobook, but it seems unlikely they would cut something as crucial as that, which would tie things together a bit more, and try to make sense of the whole picture.

In any case, there are any number of fascinating stories here, and listening to them reminded me how we all have those "touches of madness," little bits or traits of these much stranger and more extreme cases that we start to notice in ourselves after reading or hearing about them. For instance, it never occurred to me that we have "auditory imagery," and that some people have much better musical imaginations than others-- to the point that some people can look at a musical score and hear the whole orchestra in their head. Another familiar experience is the auditory "afterimage", or the "earworm," the song that gets stuck in your head. Or the notion that there is latent musical ability in many of us, but it is inhibited because so much of our brain is taken up with sight and visual processing.

The fact that our culture is so saturated with music and noise all the time, and that so many of us pipe it directly into our ears makes me wonder what we are doing to ourselves, what long-term effects there will be, on our brains and our hearing and our sensitivity to music.

Listened to the audiobook.

Title:	Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Author:	Oliver Sacks
Date published:	2007
Genre:	Nonfiction / Science
Number of pages:	400
Notes:	listened to audiobook

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This book picks up pretty much where The Eyre Affair left off. It's still funny and entertaining, but I found it less engaging than the first book-- I think because it is a bit more fragmented and has too much going on. Thursday is being forced into doing PR for Spec-Ops because of her popularity after the events of the last book, but she isn't allowed to say anything that will make the Goliath corporation, the government, or Spec-Ops look bad, or that will offend the Bronte foundation-- which pretty much covers all the interesting parts of the story. In the meantime, someone is trying to kill her with coincidence, her husband Landen has been eradicated by the chronoguard and Goliath to force her to retrieve Jack Schitt (one of the villains from the last book) from the copy of Poe's The Raven that he was trapped in, and Thursday had been recruited to work for Jurisfiction (the enforcement group within books) and apprenticed to Miss Havisham (of Dicken's Great Expectations) to learn how to travel between books. Oh, and her father has warned her that in a few days everything is going to turn to pink goo and the world is going to end.

Lots (too many) of fascinating bits. There's a whole sub-subplot about neanderthal liberation-- they were resequenced from DNA, a bit like Thursday's pet dodo, but there is no place where they really fit into human society. This only comes into the story in a few places, and we learn a bit about how expressive their faces are, and their art perception-- but it doesn't go any further.

Another delightful detail is the "footnoterphone" which the Jurisfiction people use to communicate with each other-- Thursday keeps hearing voices that no one else hears, and they are presented to the reader as footnotes, which is humorous and a bit mind-bending. Thursday is also on trial within the world of Jurisfiction for changing the ending of Jane Eyre-- her lawyer contacts her via footnoterphone, and eventually the trial is held in the world of Kafka's The Trial, and Thursday makes use of her familiarity with Kafka to come through the bizarre, nonsensical trial just fine.

The repeated bouts of strange and deadly coincidences that keep happening to Thursday give Fforde the chance for some entertaining wordplay (e.g., a sequence of ordinary names that all sound like different ways to say goodbye). Thursday's uncle Mycroft theorizes that when a greater number of coincidences are happening, there is a local area of decreased entropy. As protection, he gives her an "entroposcope"-- a jar with rice and lentils mixed together, and when she shakes it and they start swirling or separating out, she's in danger. Sounds fun and plausible, and simple enough that I could build my own (not that I expect to be any danger of overpowering coincidences).

Entertaining and delightful characters, humor, wordplay-- but a little disappointing as a novel.

Title:	Lost in a Good Book
Author:	Jasper Fforde
Date published:	2002
Genre:	Fantasy
Series:	Thursday Next
Number of pages:	399

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Read this in a few months. All in Romanian! 40 days .. most less than 10 pages .. ending with a one sentence truth and question. Warren contends that we are here with 5 purposes in life .. worship, fellowship, discipleship, service and evangelism. Written by an American, challenging particular ways of thinking in America, it does a good job. Americans (as well as others) are trained culturally to seek pleasure, to seek the simple way out, to care for self first. But God did not create us to do such things! He created us for Himself, and has plans for our lives that can have long-term effects, not just make us happy today.

Warren writes in a style that is a bit inflammatory, making bold statements in order to provoke questions and thinking. Not everything that he writes is perfectly true (although, honestly, there are few authors or people who speak only truth), but overall many good points are made. Warren encourages the reader to be well-balanced, not simply to choose one thing and do it well. We are made to do each of the 5 things mentioned above, and while one or two will be much more natural, the Church is called to participate in all of them.

Title:	Viata Condusa de Scopuri (The Purpose Driven Life)
Author:	Rick Warren
Date published:	2002
Genre:	Spiritual
Number of pages:	332
Notes:	repeat reading

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