From time to time Dr. Oliver Sacks is haunted by musical symbols: notes, clefs, staffs and bar lines all fly by his eyes uninvited and in rapid succession. The celebrated neuroscientist can “see” the imaginary scores despite, or perhaps because of, his partial blindness.
As it turns out, Sacks is not alone. People from around the world have been writing him letters describing the music-oriented hallucinations that come unexpectedly and unbidden. He’s described their experiences in a new report published in the journal Brain.
“When they happen you’re startled,” says Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University and author of the 2012 bestseller, “Hallucinations.”
“It’s different from imagination. When you imagine something, it’s yours because you have imagined it. But when this happens to you, you’re startled. You wonder, ‘Who ordered this up? Where did it come from?’”
More often than not, people who are visited by these hallucinations of musical notation have problems with their eyesight like Sacks, but the visions can come to people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even just a fever, he says. While they often come to people who are musically oriented, they can also appear to those who can’t read a note.
Sacks describes the case of 75-year-old Ted R., who developed Parkinson’s in his early 60s. Despite the disease, Ted is still an active scholar and writer – and a gifted pianist who’s been having musical hallucinations for the last two years.
The first time the musical notations appeared, he’d been reading a book. He turned away from it for a few seconds, and when he glanced back at the pages in front of him, the text had been replaced by a musical score.
