A tape of his violin concerto was what helped me to overcome a strange sort of paralysis to one leg which I experienced after an accident in 1974. Mendelssohn seems to me the most joyous of composers. Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, performed by Joshua Bell.

I still play these, and adore them - but the Fantasy in F Minor affects me more deeply.ĥ. I would put these on the gramophone and try to accompany them on the piano, and in this way learned all the mazurkas myself. As a teenager, I had all the LPs of Chopin's mazurkas, played by Rubinstein.

Chopin's Fantasy in F Minor, performed by Arthur Rubinstein.

I don't have an iPod - I'm too low-tech - but if I did, it would certainly have these pieces: The music I most love has been conditioned by early experience, growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in an atmosphere of classical music, with little exposure either to popular music or to the music of other cultures. But the classical repertoire remains my touchstone. Recently I have been enjoying music by contemporary composers like John Corigliano, Tobias Picker and Michael Torke, and listening to everything from Leos Janacek to Hildegard von Bingen and an a cappella jazz group, the Grunyons. But I have rarely played them since, though I continue to love them. They absorbed me totally, and I did not want to listen to anything else. Thus I spent an entire year, 1979, playing Mozart's Requiem and his Mass in C Minor, over and over. In addition, I often develop a passion for a particular piece or a particular composer, which may last a month or a year, and then be replaced by a passion for something else. It is almost impossible to list my ten or twenty favorite pieces of music, because I have an omnivorous love of all classical music. Wired asked Sacks for a list of the recordings that could be found on his iPod… if he owned an iPod. A piano resides in the living room of his New York apartment under a pile of classical scores, which the neurologist can on rare occasions be convinced to play for others. Sacks is also a passionate music lover himself. In his new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he declares music a 'necessity' in his patients' lives, 'with a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while.'

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks described going to a Grateful Dead concert with a patient whose sense of time had been frozen in the late '60s by a brain tumor. Observing his patients' relationship with music yields crucial information about how their brains process sensory data, clues to their neurological impairments, and equally importantly, how their delight in music assists them in the process of recovery. Music has always played a central role in neurologist Oliver Sacks' practice of medicine.

Sacks music