This month's Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks, whose new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is a series of case studies that explore the role music plays in our mental lives. One of the things Sacks finds most striking is the "therapeutic power of music", its transformative abilities on even the most profoundly brain-damaged people:
The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else.One thing I hope we can do more of in Head First is harness our brain's natural predilection for music in teaching new concepts. We do this a bit in Head First Design Patterns with the "Model, View, Controller" song, but Ear Power has sadly been absent from our more recent books.
Anyone want to give us a hand with some Head First songs? Perhaps a hip-hop track on PMP terminology, or a reggae number on SQL joins?
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We had a lengthy song in HF Software Development about use cases, written to the tune of Piano Man, but it got cut :-( Maybe we can get it online somewhere.
Did you ever see the Alan Kay talk "Doing With Images Makes Symbols"? It's on archive.org. He shows a woman being shown how to play tennis by pretending it is a rhythmic dance. Within 5 minutes her game is visibly better. She was transferred from someone who couldn't to someone who eventually went on to teach others.
So come on O'Reilly! When are the HF authors going to start teaching the salsa?