![]() Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. Cicoria's heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. ![]() His new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-year-old surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. In his earlier collections of clinical tales - most famously in "Awakenings" (1973) and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985) - Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. ![]() But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit more likely, it never happened. ![]() Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. ![]()
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