out of the blue

Oliver Sacks has a new book coming out on October 16th. I want to read it. It is titled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (amazon). It is a set of case studies in the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, focused around music. When Sacks is asked in an interview with Wired Magazine about whether music is hard-wired into the human brain, he responds:

It's not a question that we can resolve easily. One would have to look for aspects of music which have no equivalent in speech. This certainly seems to be true of the regular beat or pulse. Speech has its own rhythm, but it doesn't have the fixed metrical quality of music. There's spontaneous synchronization with rhythm in all human beings, even in childhood. You tap with it, nod with it, and even if you don't, the motor parts of your brain move with it. There's an auditory/motor correlation in human beings not found in any other animal.

Here's a link to the interview.

I, for one, plan to find this book soon after it comes out. I should renew my library card.