Can the power of music make the brain come alive? Dr. Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain, is involved with this study as NOVA follows four individuals: Matt Giordano (United States), Derek Paravicini (England), Anne Barker (Ireland), and Tony Cicoria (United States) to investigate music's strange, surprising, and still unexplained power over the human mind. While these extraordinary stories offer examples of music's unquestionable power over the mind, scientists have yet to fully understand what happens in the brain as we experience music. In an effort to unravel the mystery, NOVA puts Sacks himself into a functional MRI machine for two experiments.

Originally broadcast in 2009 as an episode in the television series Nova.