II. Post 5B

I have now finished part one of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, and I have decided to do a brief recap of the main points of this section. He begins the section by giving a definition of Musicophilia, and expresses it as a chronic and sudden onset of musical hallucinations. The title of part one is "Haunted by Music," so logically one would think of musicophilia as something inescapable and malicious. Early on, he supports this belief, expressing how some of his patients find that Musicophilia affects them every day. Sacks also differentiates the difference between having a tune stuck in your head, and having Musicophilia. Catchy tunes, as he explains, usually leave the brain after two weeks at most. Dr. Sacks also explains how many people who have musicophilia also have epilepsy, and in some cases, their musical hallucinations are only sparked by seizures of the temporal lobe. Later in the section however, he writes about how many of his patients learned either to deal with their musical hallucinations, or they completely got rid of them with the help of pharmaceuticals. Therefore, the claim that musicophilia can only be bad, and that it cannot be stopped, is disclaimed and proven wrong by the end of this first section.