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10/17/2007: "Genetic breakdown causes more social behavior"

Wired: In Musicophilia, you describe a camp for children with a genetic disorder called Williams syndrome. Many of the kids there have impaired intellectual skills, but they're also extremely chatty and social, and have heightened musical abilities. Is this correspondence of social and musical abilities just a coincidence?

Sacks: People with Williams are helplessly empathic . they starve if they don't get both human and musical contact. The emotional parts of their brains, like the amygdala, may be unusually large, as well as areas in the temporal lobes concerned with hearing, speech, and music. For people with Williams, the human, musical, and conversational abilities all seem to go together.

[ We see the same thing in communities that have declined. The smart people go away, replaced by the socially savvy people. They don't compose great symphonies. They make "unique" rock music and chat a lot, and do nothing of consequence. ]

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-10/ff_musicophilia