

But I have rarely played them since, though I continue to love them.

They absorbed me totally, and I did not want to listen to anything else.

Thus I spent an entire year, 1979, playing Mozart's Requiem and his Mass in C Minor, over and over. In addition, I often develop a passion for a particular piece or a particular composer, which may last a month or a year, and then be replaced by a passion for something else. It is almost impossible to list my ten or twenty favorite pieces of music, because I have an omnivorous love of all classical music. Wired asked Sacks for a list of the recordings that could be found on his iPod… if he owned an iPod. A piano resides in the living room of his New York apartment under a pile of classical scores, which the neurologist can on rare occasions be convinced to play for others. Sacks is also a passionate music lover himself. In his new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he declares music a "necessity" in his patients' lives, "with a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while."

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks described going to a Grateful Dead concert with a patient whose sense of time had been frozen in the late '60s by a brain tumor. Observing his patients' relationship with music yields crucial information about how their brains process sensory data, clues to their neurological impairments, and equally importantly, how their delight in music assists them in the process of recovery. “Many of us know from personal experience how profound a music intervention can be at times that include surgery, ill-health or mental health episodes,” said Kim Cunio, an associate professor and convener of musicology at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the research.Music has always played a central role in neurologist Oliver Sacks' practice of medicine. “Future research is needed to clarify optimal music interventions and doses for use in specific clinical and public health scenarios,” the authors said, emphasising that there was “substantial individual variation in responses to music interventions” across the studies analysed. The authors of the meta-analysis suggest that the benefit of music to mental quality of life was close in effect to improvements in mental health due to exercise and weight loss. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed “music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing”, as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data.
