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Brain 2006 129(10):2528-2532; doi:10.1093/brain/awl234
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The power of music

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music.’ This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. Curiosity brings them down to the Earth's surface to attend a concert; they listen politely and patiently, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’—while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on within them. They, themselves, as a species, lack music.

Clarke likes to embody questions in fables, and the Overlords' bewilderment makes one wonder, indeed, what it is about music that gives it such peculiar power over . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Oliver Sacks

Clinical Professor of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine New York, USA

E-mail: mail@oliversacks.com


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