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A video Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia - Bolt from the Blue
A video 9/11/08: Dr. Tony Cicoria on Expressions
Tony Cicoria, who after being struck by lightning became obsessed by piano music. In 1994, when Tony Cicoria was forty-two, and a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon, he was struck by lightning. He had an out-of-body experience. “I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ …Then—slam! I was back.” Soon after, he consulted a neurologist—he was feeling sluggish and having some difficulties with his memory. He had a thorough neurological exam, and nothing seemed amiss. A couple of weeks later, Cicoria went back to work, and in another two weeks, his memory problems disappeared. Life had returned to normal, seemingly, when “suddenly over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music.” This was completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He started to teach himself to play piano. And then, he started to hear music in his head. In the third month after being struck, Cicoria was inspired, even possessed, by music, and scarcely had time for anything else. Some years passed and Cicoria continued to work full time as a surgeon, but his heart and mind now centered on music. He got divorced in 2004, and that same year had a fearful motorcycle accident. He made a complete recovery and was back at work in two months

Washington Post Oct. 2007

Tony Cicoria was forty-two, very fit and robust, a former college football player who had become a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York. He was at a lakeside pavilion for a family gathering one fall afternoon. It was pleasant and breezy, but he noticed a few storm clouds in the distance; it looked like rain.

He went to a pay phone outside the pavilion to make a quick call to his mother (this was in 1994, before the age of cell phones). He still remembers every single second of what happened next: "I was talking to my mother on the phone. There was a little bit of rain, thunder in the distance. My mother hung up. The phone was a foot away from where I was standing when I got struck. I remember a flash of light coming out of the phone. It hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards."

Then-he seemed to hesitate before telling me this-"I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.' I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman-she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me-position herself over my body, give it CPR.... I floated up the stairs-my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light ... an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these ... pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up ... there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, 'This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had'-SLAM! I was back."

Dr. Cicoria knew he was back in his own body because he had pain-pain from the burns on his face and his left foot, where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body-and, he realized, "only bodies have pain." He wanted to go back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him CPR, to let him go; but it was too late-he was firmly back among the living. After a minute or two, when he could speak, he said, "It's okay-I'm a doctor!" The woman (she turned out to be an intensive-care-unit nurse) replied, "A few minutes ago, you weren't."

The police came and wanted to call an ambulance, but Cicoria refused, delirious. They took him home instead ("it seemed to take hours"), where he called his own doctor, a cardiologist. The cardiologist, when he saw him, thought Cicoria must have had a brief cardiac arrest, but could find nothing amiss with examination or EKG. "With these things, you're alive or dead," the cardiologist remarked. He did not feel that Dr. Cicoria would suffer any further consequences of this bizarre accident.

Cicoria also consulted a neurologist-he was feeling sluggish (most unusual for him) and having some difficulties with his memory. He found himself forgetting the names of people he knew well. He was examined neurologically, had an EEG and an MRI. Again, nothing seemed amiss.

A couple of weeks later, when his energy returned, Dr. Cicoria went back to work. There were still some lingering memory problems-he occasionally forgot the names of rare diseases or surgical procedures-but all his surgical skills were unimpaired. In another two weeks, his memory problems disappeared, and that, he thought, was the end of the matter.

What then happened still fills Cicoria with amazement, even now, a dozen years later. Life had returned to normal, seemingly, when "suddenly, over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music." This was completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He had had a few piano lessons as a boy, he said, "but no real interest." He did not have a piano in his house. What music he did listen to tended to be rock music.

With this sudden onset of craving for piano music, he began to buy recordings and became especially enamored of a Vladimir Ashkenazy recording of Chopin favorites-the Military Polonaise, the Winter Wind ?tude, the Black Key ?tude, the A-flat Polonaise, the B-flat Minor Scherzo. "I loved them all," Tony said. "I had the desire to play them. I ordered all the sheet music. At this point, one of our babysitters asked if she could store her piano in our house-so now, just when I craved one, a piano arrived, a nice little upright. It suited me fine. I could hardly read the music, could barely play, but I started to teach myself." It had been more than thirty years since the few piano lessons of his boyhood, and his fingers seemed stiff and awkward.

And then, on the heels of this sudden desire for piano music, Cicoria started to hear music in his head. "The first time," he said, "it was in a dream. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written. I woke up, startled, and the music was still in my head. I jumped out of bed, started trying to write down as much of it as I could remember. But I hardly knew how to notate what I heard." This was not too successful-he had never tried to write or notate music before. But whenever he sat down at the piano to work on the Chopin, his own music "would come and take me over. It had a very powerful presence."

I was not quite sure what to make of this peremptory music, which would intrude almost irresistibly and overwhelm him. Was he having musical hallucinations? No, Dr. Cicoria said, they were not hallucinations-"inspiration" was a more apt word. The music was there, deep inside him-or somewhere-and all he had to do was let it come to him. "It's like a frequency, a radio band. If I open myself up, it comes. I want to say, 'It comes from heaven,' as Mozart said."

His music is ceaseless. "It never runs dry," he continued. "If anything, I have to turn it off."

Now he had to wrestle not just with learning to play the Chopin, but to give form to the music continually running in his head, to try it out on the piano, to get it on manuscript paper. "It was a terrible struggle," he said. "I would get up at four in the morning and play till I went to work, and when I got home from work I was at the piano all evening. My wife was not really pleased. I was possessed."

In the third month after being struck by lightning, then, Cicoria-once an easygoing, genial family man, almost indifferent to music-was inspired, even possessed, by music, and scarcely had time for anything else. It began to dawn on him that perhaps he had been "saved" for a special reason. "I came to think," he said, "that the only reason I had been allowed to survive was the music." I asked him whether he had been a religious man before the lightning. He had been raised Catholic, he said, but had never been particularly observant; he had some "unorthodox" beliefs, too, such as in reincarnation.

He himself, he grew to think, had had a sort of reincarnation, had been transformed and given a special gift, a mission, to "tune in" to the music that he called, half metaphorically, "the music from heaven." This came, often, in "an absolute torrent" of notes with no breaks, no rests, between them, and he would have to give it shape and form. (As he said this, I thought of Caedmon, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poet, an illiterate goatherd who, it was said, had received the "art of song" in a dream one night, and spent the rest of his life praising God and creation in hymns and poems.)

Cicoria continued to work on his piano playing and his compositions. He got books on notation, and soon realized that he needed a music teacher. He would travel to concerts by his favorite performers but had nothing to do with musical friends in his own town or musical activities there. This was a solitary pursuit, between himself and his muse.

I asked whether he had experienced other changes since the lightning strike-a new appreciation of art, perhaps, different taste in reading, new beliefs? Cicoria said he had become "very spiritual" since his near-death experience. He had started to read every book he could find about near-death experiences and about lightning strikes. And he had got "a whole library on Tesla," as well as anything on the terrible and beautiful power of high-voltage electricity. He felt he could sometimes see "auras" of light or energy around people's bodies-he had never seen this before the lightning bolt.

Some years passed, and Cicoria's new life, his inspiration, never deserted him for a moment. He continued to work full-time as a surgeon, but his heart and mind now centered on music. He got divorced in 2004, and the same year had a fearful motorcycle accident. He had no memory of this, but his Harley was struck by another vehicle, and he was found in a ditch, unconscious and badly injured, with broken bones, a ruptured spleen, a perforated lung, cardiac contusions, and, despite his helmet, head injuries. In spite of all this, he made a complete recovery and was back at work in two months. Neither the accident nor his head injury nor his divorce seemed to have made any difference to his passion for playing and composing music.

Return to Life
Cicoria could sense speed and direction while 'dead' and he saw highs and lows of his life pass by. His scientific mind was analyzing what was happening, and he was happy to go where where he seemed to be headed. Suddenly he was being jolted back to life by a woman who was administering CPR. He felt anger and pain, and cried out "Please don't make me come back." But he was back in his body and experiencing excrutiating pain. After some time thay were able to get him to sit up and they insisted that he go to the hospital. He refused. "When you are hit by lightning you are either dead or alive, and I was alive," he says. So he made his way back to the place where his family had gathered in a pavilion for a picnic. He was in great pain, his mind was in a fog, and he allowed them to take him home.

Classical Piano Music
Tony Cicoria was a child of the 60s and was raised on rock and roll, especially Led Zeppelin. He had no interest in classical music at all. However, after being checked out by a cardiologist and neurologist and being pronounced well after his experience, he began to have an insatiable desire to hear classical piano music. He purchased records and cassettes and spent most of his spare time listening to these artists. He says that he was possesssed.

At this time his baby sitter needed a home for her piano for a year and Cicoria gladly offered to keep it. He began piano lessons and tried to play a composition he had first heard in his mind a few weeks after his near death experience. Every time he would sit at the piano this music would keep playing in his mind. On January 29, 2008, his 56th birthday, Tony Cicoria played this composition, along with two others he had composed, in a concert performance

Education
Lest anyone think that Tony Cicoria's experience was some kind of fantasy, his educational background in science would tend to negate that idea. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology from The Citadel, South Carolina; a term's scholarship at the Woods Hole Laboratory in Massachusetts, where he studied developmental biology; a doctor of philosophy degree in physiology and cellular biophysics from the Medical University of South Carolina; a degree in medicine from the Medical University of South Carolina and spent his residency at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Asked if he is afraid to die, Cicoria replies,
"No. Not in the least.
Not when I've experienced
the most wonderful feeling imaginable."

Source: Personal conversations with Dr.Tony Cicoria, April, 2008.

Plot of the movie "Juno":

Sixteen-year-old Minnesotan high-schooler Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) discovers she is pregnant with a child fathered by her friend and longtime admirer, Paulie Bleeker . While at first she intends to have an abortion, she changes her mind and decides to make a plan for the child's adoption. With the help of her friend Leah , Juno searches the ads in the Pennysaver and finds a couple she feels will provide a suitable home. Along with her father Mac, Juno meets the couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring, in their expensive home and expresses a desire for a closed adoption.

Vanessa is extremely anxious around Juno and their initial interactions are uneasy. However, Juno and Leah happen to see Vanessa in a shopping mall being completely at ease with a child, and Juno encourages Vanessa to talk to Juno's baby in the womb, where it obligingly kicks for her. On the other hand, Juno more easily forms a friendship with Mark, with whom she shares tastes in punk rock and horror films. Mark, who has set aside his rock band youth (now confined to memorabilia displayed in the one room of the house allowed him by Vanessa), works at home composing commercial jingles. Juno hangs out with Mark a few times, ignoring a warning from her stepmother Bren (that she should not spend time alone with a married man.

As the pregnancy progresses, Juno struggles with the emotions she feels for her baby's father, Paulie, who is clearly—although passively—in love with Juno. Juno maintains an outwardly indifferent attitude toward Paulie, but when she learns he has asked another girl to the prom, she is hurt and angrily confronts him. Paulie reminds Juno that it is at her request they remain distant and tells her that she broke his heart. He also suggests that she has feelings for him she is unable to admit.

Not long before her baby is due, Juno is again visiting with Mark when their interaction becomes strongly emotional. Mark then tells her that he will be leaving Vanessa. Vanessa arrives home, and, to her shock, Mark tells her he does not feel ready to be a father and that there are still things he wants to do first—dreams Vanessa does not share. Juno watches the Loring marriage fall apart, then drives away and cries by the side of the road before coming to a decision. Returning to the Lorings' home, she leaves a note.

After a heartfelt discussion with Mac, Juno accepts that she loves Paulie. Juno then tells Paulie that she loves him, and Paulie's actions make it clear that her feelings are reciprocated. At his track meet, when Paulie notices Juno is not in the stands and realizes she must be in labor, he rushes to the hospital to be with her (she had not told him because she did not want him to miss the meet). He arrives to find Juno has given birth, and comforts Juno as she cries. Vanessa comes to the hospital where she joyfully claims the newborn boy as a single adoptive mother. On the wall in the baby's new nursery, Vanessa has framed Juno's note—addressed only to her—which reads "Vanessa: If you're still in, I'm still in. —Juno." The film ends with Juno and Paulie playing guitar and singing together sometime later, followed by a kiss.

Ellen Page -"Juno"
Themes:
Ellen Page commented, "What I get most frustrated at is when people call it a pro-life movie, which is just absurd... The most important thing is the choice is there, and the film completely demonstrates that." Reitman [director of the movie] thought that it was "fantastic" that both pro-life and pro-choice groups were embracing the film."Juno seems to be a mirror, and people [on both sides] see themselves in it."

Other critics labeled Juno as feminist because of its atypical portrayal of Juno as a confident and intelligent teenage girl. ...Boston Globe noted that "Juno serves cool, intelligent girls something they rarely see in a movie: themselves." Page praised the film for its positive depiction of teenage girls, describing Juno's character as "really refreshing and allow[ing] for new possibilities in what young women can be...honest but original, completely devoid of stereotype,"

see the video and hear the song:
"Juno's opening title sequence depicting a cartoonized Juno walking through her town while drinking a bottle of ... orange drink, a sequence that "had texture and a little bit of edge, but also imparted the warmth and heart of the screenplay".

Critical reaction
The movie benefited from an extremely positive critical reception; as of March 15, 2008 , 93% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 183 reviews] and was the best reviewed comedy film of 2007.the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars and called it "just about the best movie of the year. "Has there been a better performance this year than Ellen Page's creation of Juno? I don't think so."

However, not all critics share the positive view towards Juno. David Edelstein of New York magazine felt that the film was desperate to be "a movie that confers hipness on teens, that makes kids want to use the same slang and snap up the soundtrack". Music reviewer Jim DeRogatis criticized the film's stylized dialogue and what he saw as a casual take on abortion and Juno's naïveté in becoming pregnant, claiming: "As an unapologetically old-school feminist, the father of a soon-to-be-teenage daughter, a reporter who regularly talks to actual teens as part of his beat and a plain old moviegoer, I hated, hated, hated this movie."

In 2008, after 17 students under sixteen years of age at a Gloucester, Massachusetts high school became pregnant, Time magazine called it the "Juno Effect."