The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species.

It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.