Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Oliver Sacks was wearing sweats and gathering Woody Allen DVDs when I walked into his book-crammed apartment in Manhattan's West Village. He was going to have his first dinner with the filmmaker that evening and needed to brush up on his comic output.

Humor and the brain might be a future topic for the 74- year-old literary neurologist, but I was there to interview him about music and the brain, the subject of his new book, ``Musicophilia.''

We sat near his grand piano.

Hilferty: What is musicophilia?

Sacks: The word means ``love of music,'' and I think that 99.999 percent of human beings have it. We're a musical species. Music is central in every culture and we're very attached to music.

Hilferty: Are you?

Sacks: When I was about 5, someone asked, ``What are your favorite things in the world?'' and I said, ``Bach and smoked salmon.'' Seventy years later, it's still the case.

Hilferty: You write about an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten everything and yet can memorize an entire Schumann piano concerto.

Sacks: We have, all of us, very tenacious musical memories, and if we can't remember anything else, we remember music.

Hilferty: What about the curious case of Clive Wearing?

Frightened Man

Sacks: He was an eminent musician and musicologist. Then in 1985, he got herpes encephalitis, which attacks the temporal lobes of the brain and parts of the brain necessary for the memory of experiences. The devastation of memory was so great that Clive cannot give any account of his life. But, incredibly, he is able to perform, to sing, to conduct a choir and a whole orchestra perfectly, with all the virtuosity, sensitivity and musical intelligence he had. When you see him as a performing musician, you think he's absolutely normal.

Hilferty: And after the performance?

Sacks: He's a confused, frightened man who has no idea if he's just conducted an orchestra.

Hilferty: Music also enables amnesiac and speechless patients to suddenly retrieve words and lost speech. How so?

Sacks: If someone has a stroke and loses the area of the left frontal lobe necessary for language, they may still be able to sing, and often to sing with the lyrics. This is immensely reassuring to them because it shows them that language is still somewhere.

Hilferty: What about musical hallucinations?

False Perceptions

Sacks: When someone has a musical hallucination, there is an immediate feeling of an external source and of hearing something indistinguishable from perception. Some part of the brain is just sort of out of control and autonomously creating these false perceptions. This turns out to be rather common. I would think there are hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who have musical hallucinations.

Hilferty: Are any deaf?

Sacks: About three-quarters of them are fairly deaf. As one becomes deafer, it's almost as if the auditory cortex is hungry for sound and hungry for music. And if there's nothing to provide it from the outside, it will delve into memory and regurgitate it from inside.

Hilferty: Have you had any musical hallucinations yourself?

Sacks: Yes. I sort of hit my head. I had a shower and a cup of tea. I finally phoned a friend and said, ``I've been having a horrible musical hallucination.'' They were German songs and I don't know German. He said, ``Can you hum or sing some of them?'' They turned out to be Mahler's ``Songs on the Death of Children.'' I hate Mahler.

Hilferty: Would you say great composers have hallucinations they then transcribe?

Shostakovich's Head

Sacks: In general, no, although there may be one or two exceptions. Schumann was probably manic-depressive and, when excited or deeply melancholic, would have musical hallucinations. There's also a story about Shostakovich, who it was said got his head full of fragments during World Word II. If he tipped his head in a particular way, he would have a cornucopia of hallucinatory tunes, which he could then use. This is probably too good to be true.

Hilferty: You write about people who have a brain injury that triggers musical talent.

Sacks: Yes. There was a surgeon in his early 40s with really not much interest in music. But he got struck by lightning and had a cardiac arrest. He was dead probably half a minute, but then came to. About a month later, he became obsessed by music. He had to hear it, play it. He started to have dreams that he was composing and would wake with music still in his head. He continues as a surgeon, but music has become the central thing of his life. As a matter of fact, I have one of his pieces, ``Lightning Sonata,'' which he just composed.

Mysterious Feelings

Hilferty: Would you say that music gets to the core of the mystery of human existence?

Sacks: Music can affect one more profoundly than language and almost anything. Music can fill one with mysterious feelings, agonized or ecstatic or what is it? It seems to introduce forms of consciousness and sensations one never experiences otherwise.

``Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain'' is published by Knopf (381 pages, $26).

Bloomberg TV presents a conversation with Oliver Sacks as part of this weekend's Muse program. (Friday night at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday at 12:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 4:30 a.m., 6 a.m. (on E!), 8 a.m., 10 a.m., 12 p.m., 7 p.m., 10 p.m.; Sunday at 1:00 a.m., 4 a.m., 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m.). Check your local cable listings or see http://www.bloomberg.com/tvradio/tv/schedule_us.html.

(Robert Hilferty is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Robert Hilferty in New York at rhilferty@verizon.net.

Last Updated: October 19, 2007 00:07 EDT