That's a wonderful insight and explains why no matter how many times we hear the screen door slam, we still see Mary's dress wave as she dances across the porch as the radio plays. 'Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.' 'It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all,' writes Sacks. In an amplified mental state, music erases the past and future. He lifts Wearing's story to a universal plane by explaining how music ignites our brains to express and reveal themselves: 'A piece of music will draw one in, teach one about its structure and secrets, whether one is listening consciously or not.' But Sacks doesn't leave the story hanging on a medical riddle. It's not entirely clear how Wearing can summon the delicate skills to play a Bach fugue, or that his conscious mind is involved at all. Playing the piano or conducting reanimates Wearing, Sacks writes, and 'engages him as a creative person.' His performing self is 'seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self' is virtually lost. With his characteristic empathy and keen eye for details, Sacks, a neurologist whose literary tales of his patients began appearing in the '80s in the New York Review of Books, and later in the New Yorker, wonders how Wearing managed to 'retain his remarkable knowledge of music, his ability to sight-read, to play the piano and organ, sing, conduct a choir, in the masterly way he did before he became ill?' His answers delve into the brain anatomy where our trivial and emotional memories reside, and reveal the transformative power of music. But living in an eternal here-and-now is not Zen bliss for Wearing, it is 'a never-ending agony.' 'It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment,' wrote Wearing's wife, Deborah, of her husband. 'In the Moment: Music and Amnesia' follows an English musician and musicologist, Clive Wearing, who in his mid-40s suffered a brain infection that wiped out his memory and entire past.

One essay in his new collection, 'Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,' presents Oliver Sacks at his best, weaving neuroscience through a fascinating personal story, allowing us to think about brain functions and music in a bracing new light.

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks