Main description:

Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Historical Connections and Perspectives provides a broad and comprehensive discussion of history and new discoveries regarding music and the brain, presenting a multidisciplinary overview on music processing, its effects on brain plasticity, and the healing power of music in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

In this context, the disorders that plagued famous musicians and how they affected both performance and composition are critically discussed, as is music as medicine and its potential health hazard.

Additional topics, including the way music fits into early conceptions of localization of function in the brain, its cultural roots in evolution, and its important roles in societies and educational systems are also explored.

Contents:

Franz Joseph Gall and Music: The Faculty and the Bump

Music, Neurology and Psychology in the 19th Century

Singing by Speechless (Aphasic) Children: Victorian Medical Observations

Some Early Cases of Aphasia and the Capacity to Sing

Benjamin Franklin and his Glass Armonica: From Music as Therapeutic to Pathological

Historical Perspectives on Music as a Cause of Disease

Stroke, Music and Creative Output: Alfred Schnittke and other Composers

Hector Berlioz and His Vesuvius: An Analysis of Historical Evidence from an Epileptological Perspective

Alexander Scriabin: His Chronic Right Hand Pain and its Impact on his Piano Compositions

Frederick Delius: Controversies Regarding his Neurological Disorder and its Impact on his Compositional Output

Robert Schumann in the Psychiatric Hospital at Endenich

Mozart at Play: The Limitations of Attributing the Etiology of Genius to Tourette Syndrome and Mental Illness

Paul Wittgenstein's Right arm and his Phantom: The Saga of a Famous Concert Pianist and his Amputation

Georg Friedrich Handel - A Case of Large Vessel Disease with Complications in the 18th Century

Joseph Haydn's Encephalopathy: New Aspects

Organists and Organ Music Composers

Frederic Chopin and his Neuropsychiatric Problems

Somnambulism in Verdi's Macbeth and Bellini's La Sonnambula: Opera, Sleepwalking, and Medicine

Opera and Neuroscience