Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Neurologist and author, best known for the book Awakenings and for writing about patients with extraordinary neurological conditions.
On the island
Eight records
The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)
I love the Grateful Dead myself. To my great surprise, I'd never been to a rock concert. I danced for three hours.
Et incarnatus est (from Mass in B minor)Favourite
Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner
I think my first love when I was a little boy was Bach. I grew up in a house which was full of Bach. And I adore the liturgical music, above all the the great B minor Mass.
Mazurka in B-flat major, Op. 7, No. 1
my own taste as a as a romantic adolescent went towards Chopin. And in particular, I loved the Rubenstein recordings of the Mazurkas I knew them all by heart myself, and this one was a particular favourite.
my parents used to go to a musical or whatever every week. And they had adored Chu Chin Chao. And we had the score of this, and it used to be a family sing song, and in particular my father, who was a huge man with a bowel chess with a great resonant bass, used to sing Here be Oysters, Stewed and Honey, and Fricasied Sturgeon's Row. I can still hear him.
Eberhard Wächter, Giuseppe Taddei, Philharmonia Chorus, Carlo Maria Giulini
I love Mozart Oppo often without knowing the plot or the characters too well. I think I love Don Giovanni above all, and especially that dramatic scene where he is claimed and goes down to hell.
Sir John Gielgud, Houston Symphony, Christoph Eschenbach
I used to love reading Darwin, I still love reading Darwin. Above all, I like to imagine how he must have felt when he visited the Galapagos, where he saw evolution and creation happen. … A few months ago I heard an amazing rendering of this, in which the text was recited by Gielgud and set to music by a very gifted young American musician Tobias Picker, in there seemed to me a miraculous juxtaposition of text and voice and music.
Trockne Blumen (variations from Die schöne Müllerin)
I found myself in quite a deep depression. … And this music was redemptive to me. I felt I if I could hold on to that music I could climb out of this this evil state, and Black Dog would leave me alone.
String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131
I think on an island like this. To survive, you'd need to have some sort of project. Now, there's a particular composer, whom I hate. I think he's awful, but I'm assured that he's very, very great. And um I don't know why I have this odd loathing of Beethoven. But perhaps given all the time on the world, I could enter what everyone else tells me is his sublime world, and particularly the world of the final quartets.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:46Do you listen to the descriptions of your patients' symptoms and think, 'My goodness, this is a good story,' rather like a journalist?
At first I don't. Um at first I'm faced by a human being in trouble, although also a human being who's trying to articulate something which he can't understand and which is strange beyond imagination. … Often at some point the idea may come to me that it'll be a good story or worth telling.
Presenter asks
3:39How important is music to you personally?
I think extremely important, and I think it always has been. I can't live without it.
Presenter asks
7:05Can you remember the moment when you first realized the drug L-Dopa was going to work?
I think probably with the patient I call, Leonard. … Um his eyes became brighter. He became more alert. He started to look around. Though I think perhaps the most um dramatic awakening was with another patient, one called Lola. … And with her there was no warming up period at all. She um she suddenly came to the city. … As she walked down the corridor and she burst into conversation. Now I had thought theoretically this might happen. But it was it was absolutely unimaginable.
The keepsakes
The book
A Dictionary of Musical Themes
Harold Barlow and Sam Morgenstern
I think I would like to take a book which was a very favourite book of my father's, and this is A Dictionary of Musical Themes ... My father would open the book and leaf over the pages, and then suddenly one of the themes would come to life in his imagination and play for him, and this way I feel my repertoire would be increased from eight to ten thousand.
The luxury
I think that the sea and marine life is closer to my heart than anything else, and I think therefore a snorkel or if possible a scuba apparatus so that I could swim in the sea, be with my fellow creatures. I think that would be the happiest thing for me.
Presenter asks
11:17The drug had side effects and the patients began to regress. What happened?
Everything indeed started to go wrong in some patients in a few days, and others in a few weeks. I think some of this was directly to do with the nervous system and the drug. I think this was one sort of problem. The other, I think, was a sheer identity problem, as with this pati these patients who came to in their sixties having not had a middle to their life.
Presenter asks
16:37You were evacuated as a boy of six for four years during the war. Is that why being told you didn't exist [by the High Master] made such an impression on you?
I think the psychological impact of evacuation has never been properly described. It was overwhelming for me, but I was one of three and a half million kids who were sent away. I was just six. I hardly saw my parents in four years or so. And that was a very, very evil, evil time of life and I see with many of my contemporaries at a glance I can see that they too have been marked by evacuation. And certainly when I came back to London when I was just ten, my passion was for physics and chemistry and for the hard sciences where everything was predictable and stayed in place.
Presenter asks
24:58One almost has the impression that you're an explorer of the mind. Do you get hooked on that line of exploration and perhaps leave behind the human dimension?
Well, I I think there's certainly a a danger of this. As a child my favorite reading was um Darwin and the Galapagos or Bates on the Amazon and sort of natural history explorations. And you can't quite have natural history explorations of a human being. He is an an other facing you.
“when he went to reach for his hat he got his wife's head, which was approximately the same shape.”
“This amnesiac man who couldn't re who hadn't registered anything after nineteen seventy was totally at home. It was wonderful to see him. He knew all the songs and uh and rejoiced in them. And uh in the second half of the concert, where they played songs from the seventies and the eighties, he was very bewildered and lost, and he said he thought this was music from the future.”
“When she came to, she burst out singing, and and she she was singing all sorts of songs from the mid twenties and talking about Gershwin as if he were still alive. … She said. I know it's nineteen sixty-nine, but I feel it's nineteen twenty-six. I know I'm sixty four, but I feel I'm twenty one.”
“Well, I think a merciful repression has probably crept in, but I think it was rather a traumatic experience.”
“I'm always very careful I was always very careful there to wear my white coat and my identification. I think perhaps at that time my beard was longer and I and I maybe looked a little bit more eccentric. But it might be difficult to to prove one was sane.”
“This man, while he was very disabled in a way by the sudden movements and violences of his trouettes, was also a very gifted amateur musician and a brilliant improviser at jazz, and some of his improvisations would start with a tick which would immediately be elaborated, and when he was put on medication to calm him down, he lost a lot of his playfulness and his creative ability. On the other hand, he was able to hold a steady job. And so after a while he suggested that that we should have him in two parts, that he should be steadied for Monday to Friday and kept sober, square with a drug, and he would be taken off it and let fly at weekends.”