Sacks: One can become a creative and good human being without music lessons. Wired: From the perspective of neurological development, is it important to give music lessons to your kids? It's very easy to become preoccupied with theorizing and the activities of daily living and stop noticing the beauties of the world.

All of us are apt to get a little desiccated if we don't make a point of holding on to the delights of art and music and landscape. Darwin may have been as absorbed in thinking about evolution as Freud was absorbed in thinking about psychoanalysis when he went to operas. But there are lots of highest-power intellectuals who stay interested in music, like Einstein. As one's mind becomes preoccupied with theoretical or scientific issues, one may have less attention, time or emotion available for other things. Wired: You describe Darwin losing his youthful passion for music as his mind became a 'machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact,' as he put it. One patient of mine has epileptic seizures induced by music and has to wear earplugs in New York City. I think we may be exposed to too much loud and repetitive music. The brain is very sensitive to music you don't have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it. They feel it's part of their creativity - they're doing it for you. You can't go to a restaurant without music, and they get offended if you ask them to turn it off. But I can't help wondering if the incidence of earworms and musical hallucinations is higher now, with background music in every public place. Darwin might have had to go to London to see a concert. Sacks: At first it would seem to be a wonderful gain. But iPods make music ubiquitous, like mental air-conditioning. Wired: When you were growing up, hearing music often required going to see it performed. You can be blind without being musical, but there is a correlation.

A third of all musical savants are blind.

But in those born blind, musicians or not, it's nearly 1 in 2. Absolute pitch is pretty rare in the general population - maybe 1 in 10,000 have it. People who are born blind seem to develop extraordinary auditory, tactile, and olfactory sensitivities. Sacks: When one is born without a sense or loses it early, one turns to the other senses to construct the richest possible world and identity. Art Tatum, Joaquín Rodrigo, Blind Willie McTell, Stevie Wonder - why are there so many great blind musicians? Ten seconds afterwards, he had no memory of it. After I'd written about him, he sang professionally again, and it was beautiful, though people were afraid he'd be lost before the performance. He's had Alzheimer's for 40 years, and is profoundly disabled in almost every way, but is a member of an a cappella group called the Grunyons. This is Woody Geist, who I describe in my new book.

Oliver sacks book musicophilia