好的耳朵

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1681384,00.html
"The fact that absolute pitch — the ability to name any isolated musical tone — shows up on the scanner as an exaggerated asymmetry between the size of certain structures in the right and left sides of the brain falls far short of explaining how it's acquired. What gets closer are the observations that 50% of people born blind or blind from a young age have absolute pitch, and that it's four times more common among first-year music students in Beijing than those in New York — a reflection of the fact that the Chinese are more attuned to pitch, having had to master the precise tones used in spoken Mandarin.
The son of a musical family who still plays his father's Bechstein, Sacks has a strong empathy for the loss suffered by the many neurally damaged musicians who have found their way to him. Most touching of all is his tale of Clive Wearing, an English musician stricken in 1985 with a post-brain-infection amnesia so devastating that from one minute to the next he does not know who, where or what he is. At 69, just two things are unscathed in his inner life: a profound love for his wife and the ability to sing or play on the piano any piece of music set in front of him. Sacks describes Wearing's music as a rope let down from heaven: "Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss."
Love for music is a simple joy of life, but even that can be overwhelming, as Sacks found with Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who survived being struck by lightning only to find himself possessed by an all-consuming, life-disrupting passion for listening to, playing and composing piano music. After grappling with Cicoria's musicophilia for 12 years, Sacks decided to let things be — to acknowledge that some of music's eternal riddles are better left unsolved. "His was a lucky strike," writes Sacks, "and the music, however it had come, was a blessing, a grace — not to be questioned."