There’s something special about music. It invades and involves us. It infects and affects us like no other art. It’s not even clear we can think about music: it seems to think about us.

Hum a familiar tune to yourself. Now think about what you did. You didn’t remember the tune, you played it in your mind. You didn’t construct the whole melody prior to humming it, you embarked on the piece, and one note just followed another. “We recall one tone at a time,” writes Oliver Sacks, “and each tone entirely fills our consciousness, yet simultaneously it relates to the whole.”

Anatomists, Sacks tell us, could not readily identify the brain of a painter, writer or mathematician, but they could instantly identify the brain of a musician. It would be larger in motor, auditory and visuospatial areas of the cerebellum, and the corpus callosum – the great rope that joins the two halves of the brain – would be enlarged.

Music can survive the most devastating brain damage. A herpes infection left Clive Wearing, a musicologist and musician, with a memory span of no more than a few seconds. His entire being was overturned. But, confronted with a piece of music, he would first insist he had never played it before and then play it flawlessly. The process of making the music overcame his handicap. His wife wrote to Sacks of “Clive’s at-homeness in music. . . where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum”.

Or there is the case of Tony Cicoria, a man struck by lightning in a telephone box. A few weeks later, he was overcome by an “insatiable desire to listen to piano music”. He bought CDs and sheet music and began to resurrect his childhood piano lessons. Then, involuntarily, he began to compose music in his head. A torrent of notes came, he said, “from heaven”. Cicoria now lives in music.

We all know people who “live in” music. These are not necessarily music lovers or professional musicians. Most people can be deeply moved by music. But there are some people for whom anything that is not music is a distraction from the real business of their lives. They may not say it, they may not even know it, but you can recognise them by their expressions when music starts to play or the subject of music comes up. That’s what matters, they’re thinking, that’s all that matters.

Knowing such people, I’ve always wondered what is so special about music. Whole lives are transported elsewhere by its power. Sacks has been wondering the same thing and this book is the beginnings of an answer. The way we hum tunes, the way brains develop in response to music and the way some people live their entire lives in music all suggest that it may be more than just something we do. It may be something we are.

Sacks is better placed than anybody to explore this idea. A neurologist and amateur musician, he has, in books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, created his own literary genre. He writes, basically, adventure stories, accounts of voyages into the unexplored territory of the brain. In doing so, he reveals a landscape far more complex and strange than anything we could infer from our daily interactions. After finishing a Sacks book, every face in the street inspires agonies of wild surmise.

He is drawn to stories rather than theory and, in this book, he comes to no firm conclusion about music. But he does reinforce my intuition that this is a special art that springs from deeper wells than any other. We can invent painting or poetry, but music seems to have preceded us. It is a condition rather than an outcome of our existence. WH Auden, deeply impressed when shown the effect of music therapy on patients suffering from Parkinsonism, quoted Novalis: “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.” As Auden well knew, this cuts very deeply indeed.

Musicophilia is an anecdotal survey. Sacks swings from story to story, touching on the science along the way. Take, for example, the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas, who may have discovered why tunes spring into our minds out of nowhere. What he calls “motor tapes” in the basal ganglia of the brain are ticking over all the time, “acting as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator”. Occasionally, a pattern escapes into “the context of the thalamocortical system” and you hear a song in your head. Or there is an account of the truly strange condition known as Williams Syndrome, which affects one in 10,000 children. It causes mental retardation, but in a most peculiar way. Sufferers have low IQs, but large vocabularies, and tend to be obsessed with music. Children unable to tie their shoelaces will sing and play with precison for hours. Again the message is: music springs from the deepest wells of our being.

Of course, the problem with this is that aberrant conditions and rare experiences such as being struck by lightning may offer little in the way of general wisdom about the human condition. We may find ourselves being misled by our own amazement at the stories Sacks tells. Furthermore, one always knows roughly where his books are going to end — in a state of romantic, inconclusive wonder. As a writer, Sacks is a storyteller; as a scientist, he is a reporter, a provider rather than an assessor of evidence. The books may carry you along, but, afterwards, you might wonder what it was, exactly, that you learnt other than the fact that Sacks is a “feeling” man.

Although often frustrated by this approach, I am sympathetic. The world is underdetermined by theory and nowhere more so than in the human mind. We know little about what goes on in our heads and anecdote is as good a way as any of engaging with our ignorance. If Sacks is Herman Melville rather than Charles Darwin, then that is not such a bad thing to be. In addition, a “feeling” man is a necessary guide to music. Music, he points out, “has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world”. Much can be said and written about music, but the substrate of it all is feeling.

Because of music’s universality, there is nothing indistinct about this feeling. We know as surely as we know anything that, in Sacks’s words, “music can pierce the heart directly” and that a piece of music such as Dido’s Lament by Purcell can be understood as an expression of ultimate loss by anybody in any culture. A feeling felt by all is an objective fact, albeit one that may lie beyond the reach of science. And it is while on Dido’s Lament that Sacks makes his greatest point (it underpins all he says), which is that music saves us. “And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.”

Music springs from and returns to the deepest interstices of the human mind. It makes us grieve again, but by turning grief into beauty, by showing us that the feeling of grief itself exists outside the confines of the narrow box in which we find ourselves, music tells us the one thing we really want to hear. We are not alone.

MUSICOPHILIA: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
Picador £17.99 pp381

www.bryanappleyard.com

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