In this excerpt from his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks recalls a patient who developed a passion for music following a brain tumor operation.
I have occasionally had patients with a sudden onset of musical or artistic interests-including Salimah M., a research chemist. In her early forties, Salimah started to have brief periods, lasting a minute or less, in which she would get “a strange feeling”-sometimes a sense that she was on a beach that she had once known, while at the same time being perfectly conscious of her current surroundings and able to continue a conversation, or drive a car, or do whatever she had been doing. Occasionally these episodes were accompanied by a “sour taste” in the mouth. She noticed these strange occurrences, but did not think of them as having any neurological significance. It was only when she had a grand mal seizure in the summer of 2003 that she went to a neurologist and was given brain scans, which revealed a large tumor in her right temporal lobe. This had been the cause of her strange episodes, which were now realized to be temporal lobe seizures. The tumor, her doctors felt, was malignant (though it was probably an oligodendroglioma, of relatively low malignancy) and needed to be removed. Salimah wondered if she had been given a death sentence and was fearful of the operation and its possible consequences; she and her husband had been told that there might be some “personality changes” following it. But in the event, the surgery went well, most of the tumor was removed, and after a period of convalescence, Salimah was able to return to her work as a chemist.
She had been a fairly reserved woman before the surgery, who would occasionally be annoyed or preoccupied by small things like dust or untidiness; her husband said she was sometimes “obsessive” about jobs that needed to be done around the house. But now, after the surgery, Salimah seemed unperturbed by such domestic matters. She had become, in the idiosyncratic words of her husband (English was not their first language), “a happy cat.” She was, he declared, “a joyologist.”
Salimah’s new cheerfulness was apparent at work. She had worked in the same laboratory for fifteen years and had always been admired for her intelligence and dedication. But now, while losing none of this professional competence, she seemed a much warmer person, keenly sympathetic and interested in the lives and feelings of her co-workers. Where before, in a colleague’s words, she had been “much more into herself,” she now became the confidante and social center of the entire lab.
At home, too, she shed some of her Marie Curie-like, work-oriented personality. She permitted herself time off from her thinking, her equations, and became more interested in going to movies or parties, living it up a bit. And a new love, a new passion, entered her life. She had been “vaguely musical,” in her own words, as a girl, had played the piano a little, but music had never played any great part in her life. Now it was different. She longed to hear music, to go to concerts, to listen to classical music on the radio or on CDs. She could be moved to rapture or tears by music which had carried “no special feeling” for her before. She became “addicted” to her car radio, which she would listen to while driving to work. A colleague who happened to pass her on the road to the lab said that the music on her radio was “incredibly loud”-he could hear it a quarter of a mile away. Salimah, in her convertible, was “entertaining the whole freeway.”
Salimah showed a drastic transformation from being only vaguely interested in music to being passionately excited by music and in continual need of it. And there were other, more general changes, too-a surge of emotionality, as if emotions of every sort were being stimulated or released. In Salimah’s words, “What happened after the surgery-I felt reborn. That changed my outlook on life and made me appreciate every minute of it.”
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Excerpted from Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks Copyright (c) 2007 by Oliver Sacks. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
