Both Ellison and Sacks illustrated in their essays how music directly and indirectly affect the characters of a person. Sacks presented extremes cases of people without any particular interest in music developed an intense desire to play or compose music after an accident. The question being made is how those people got that music and artistic affination? It looks like their brain was rewire and they developed new talents and most important the compulsive desire to perform music. There is not scientific explanation for their personality behaviors, we only must understand that maybe some people have “hiding” talents or desires that are release under physiological changes like being struck lighting. Like musicians that are “born’ with skills to perform any instrument, the persons in Sack’s essay were born again and acquired those skills.
In the other hand the experience of Ellison is the results of his external environment in contrast to Sacks’s essay where the people experience an internal stimulus from physiological changes. Ellison had negative experience with music because of the proximity of the music to his apartment. If his living space was a detached house in the suburbs, his musical experience would had been different. The over stimulation of music caused a minor change in his brain too, not at the same level of the people who had suffered brain injuries, but a similar affiliation to music was emerged.
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Very interesting how they both had very different, yet similar experiences where their brains were “rewired” in a sense. I think both of their psyche’s developed this new love for music which created them both to have positive experiences with the stimuli being created.
Wow you explained this very well and in so much detail. You really show how music impacted both of them yet in some way the music impacted them very differently. I loved the way you explained this!