I’m glad that you are reading the book. I loved it too.

For a somewhat critical review of that book, see Musical Maladies by neuroscientist Norman Weinberger, available on the American Scientist website. The writer rather echoes my own sentiments about Sacks, despite my admiration of him as a fine writer and a compassionate person. A lot of special cases and very little theory—as another writer says you are charmed and entranced but come away from a read wondering what you have really learned.

One recent bit of related nature-of-music news (I have fairly plagiarized below from a recent bit in the Science of 13 March) that is comforting: a study reported in the European Journal of Neuroscience by Nina Kraus and colleagues, where three categories of young adults with varying degrees of musical training—those with none, those who started learning to play an instrument before age 7, and those who started later but had at least 10 years of it—were monitored with electrodes that recorded the response of the auditory brainstem to a quarter-second of an emotion-laden sound: an infant’s wail.

The subjects with the most musical experience responded the fastest, and those who had practiced the earliest had the strongest response to parts of the cry where timing, pitch and timbre were the most complex. Commenting on the paper, a composer says the study helps show that music is not just “auditory cheesecake” as suggested by Steven Pinker, but that “its enjoyment is deeply rooted in our cognition.”