Prof. Oliver Sacks Discusses Healing Power of Music

Best known for his work with people suffering from unusual brain disorders, Oliver Sacks admitted that when he started his medical career back in the 1960s, he wanted to work as a research scientist in a laboratory. Reawakening the Brain Through Music focused on the ability of music to heal patients afflicted with severe neurological and physical problems and the larger biological question of where music resides in the brain. "But I was exceptionally clumsy. I was always breaking apparatus and having accidents," Sacks told an audience at this year's World Science Festival. "So finally in '66 they said to me, 'Get out! Go. Go see patients. You'll do less harm.'" His work since then has been the stuff of medical history, featured in a stream of best-selling case histories as well as the 1990 film Awakenings , starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.