Watch a video of Oliver Sacks talking about one of the cases appearing in his book Musicophilia

A surgeon described in 1994 how in he was by lightening. The lightening bolt came out from the and hit him on the face and he was flung backwards. He had a arrest but he was resucitated.
He seemed to recover completely but then something very happened about 4 or 5 weeks later. He'd never had much interest in music. He didn't have a piano in the house but now suddenly he developed what he called an to hear piano music and then to play piano music. He got very excited by hearing a recording of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Chopin's Scherzo. He wanted to play that Chopin Squezzo.
And then he had a that he was performing in Carnegie Hall and performing his own music and when he woke up he heard music his mind and it wouldn't stop. So quite suddenly in the course of 48 hours, a month after the lightening bolt something started happening in this man's brain and mind turning it towards music and he became obsessed by music and very excited. He got a music teacher; he learned to practice; he learned to try to his compositions.
He did continue to work as a surgeon but the rest of his life seemed to be devoted to music.
He also got an excited feeling, a sort of mystical feeling that perhaps his life had been for him to bring music to the world. And so the musical feeling and a sort of mystical religious, slightly grandeous feeling came on him about a month after the lightening bolt and basically this has continued ever since.
And so recently last summer he gave a concert in which he played the Chopin Scherzo very nicely, he played some of his own compositions very movingly and he gave a talk to the audience telling them about the lightening bolt and how he had been transformed and become a different person and they were rather and wondered if they could have a lightening bolt too.
And of course as a neurologist, I was very fascinated by this and wondered what the hell has happened, what went on on this brain. There are parts of the brain especially in the which if they are excited can give rise to musical feeling and religious and mystical feeling and I wondered if the lightening stroke or the cardiac arrest had somehow with his temple lobes . He himself says as a medical man he can make nothing of it. He says he simply thinks it came from heaven, he's inspired. However since he also has himself a in neuroscience, he's prepared to admit perhaps something there's a to all of this inspiration going on on the brain so we are looking for the neural basis of all this musical and mystical inspiration precipitated by a lightening bolt.