You may very well know of neurologist Oliver Sacks and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, in which he tells us stories about the way that the brain and various machinery thereof allow us to perceive, process, and experience music. But, as he says in the preface of Musicophilia: “But this wonderful machinery—perhaps because it is so complex and highly developed—is vulnerable to various distortions, excesses, and breakdowns.” In other words, the very mechanisms that bring us euphoric or therapeutic experiences of music can, for numerous reasons, cause the same brain that once enjoyed music to be repulsed by it.  

Yes, you may know of Sacks, but The Kennedy Center now wants you to know the name Dr. Charles Limb, Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, the Chief of the Division of Otology, and The Kennedy Center’s Next 50 honoree.

Dr. Limb chose to be a hearing specialist “out of a deep love for musical experiences and a desire to help people suffering from hearing disorders,” as told to the University of California San Francisco, where he is the Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center with a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery.

In his 2011 TEDMED Talk about music perception in cochlear implant users—a topic he has explored on various other platforms including National Public Radio, 60 Minutes, National Geographic, the New York Times, PBS, CNN, Scientific American, the British Broadcasting Company—he tells us about the strangeness of music. That music is what we experience when “little waves of energy in the air” ultimately get converted into an energy signal inside of our brains. It is a phenomenon that either brings delight or pain depending upon our particular capacities to process such an abstract process. 

While his various appointments and titles–including current President of the American Auditory Society and Co-Director for the Sound Health Network sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in collaboration with the NIH–are seemingly function-focused, it is beauty that drives Dr. Limb to understand what happens from keyboard to the brain such that, as in a case outlined by Sacks, the cacophony of a “screeching car” transforms back into the melody of a piano. As he says in his TEDMED talk:

Really when we think of our senses or when we think of the loss of a sense, we really think about something like this: the ability to touch something luxurious, to taste something delicious, to smell something fragrant. To see something beautiful. This is what we want out of our senses, we want beauty. We don’t just want function.

For Dr. Charles Limb, medicine is his instrument to bring the music into our worlds.