Neurologist and choir explore healing power of music

"Even with advanced dementia, when powers of memory and language are lost, people will respond to music," Oliver Sacks says.

We've all experienced it before or we've heard about it. People who can't talk can sing. Music's healing power is the topic of a special festival between neurologist Oliver Sacks and the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church.


Oliver Sacks is the best-selling author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." He shared the church stage Saturday with the a gospel choir as part of the inaugural World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science taking place in New York this week.


From the Washington Post:

"It should be an exciting and unusual event," Sacks said in an interview this week. "I will talk about the therapeutic and beneficent power of music as a physician, and then their wonderful choir will perform . . . And the audience will make what they can of it."

"What we have been studying ... is that when you pray, there's actually a physiological change in the body," he said. "Music is very much a part of this. There are certain notes that generate in the human body a kind of peacefulness."

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