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Music is an integral part of the human experience.

The executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like 20 or 30 different parts of the brain,

which are recruited.

It's Thursday, November 14th, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis.

Music was among the many topics that the late neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote extensively and thoughtfully about.

Earlier this month, his longtime collaborator Kate Edgar, who also leads the Oliver Sacks Foundation,

released a book of Dr. Sacks's letters.

And the New York Public Library recently acquired Sax's entire archive.

Here's a conversation between Ira Flato and Oliver Sacks from 2007 about his book, Musicophilia.

Let me start with the first, one of the major points that you make in your book is that our brains are wired for music the same way we're wired for language.

Well, and even more extensively, there's no particular music center, but there are many different parts of the brain, many networks, many systems, in the auditory parts of the brain, the visual parts, the executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like 20 or 30 different parts of the brain which are recruited for musical experience and performance.

And this is much wider than for speech, which is a reason why if people lose language

and aphasia, they still have music available.

And you quote Stephen Pinker in the forward of your book in a preface saying, you know,

there's really no biological reason for we as an animal to be so, have music such an integral part of ourselves.

Do you agree with that?

No, I think I'd disagree rather strongly, although really one can only speculate.

But music occurs and is central in every culture we know of.

We have known of.

They're musical instruments which go back 50,000 years,

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