 Brilliant's Audio presents The Mozart Effect by Don Campbell. Here is Don Campbell. What is this magical medium that moves and chance energizes and heals us? In an instant, music can uplift our soul. It awakens within us the spirit of prayer, compassion and love. Music can dance and sing our blues away. It conjures up memories of lost lovers or deceased friends. It lets the child in us to play, the monk in us to pray, and the hero in us to surmount all obstacles. Music can drum out evil spirits, sing the praises of the Virgin Mary, invoke the Buddha of universal salvation, enchant leaders and nations, captivate and soothe, resurrect and transform. From the first cry of life to the last sigh of death, from the beating of our hearts to the soaring of our imaginations, we are enveloped by sound and vibration every moment of our lives. It is the primal breath of creation itself, the speech of angels and atoms, the stuff of which life and dreams, souls and stars, are ultimately fashioned. Something was terribly out of kilter, the mountain air did nothing to soothe this pounding in my skull, and I could hardly distinguish the white light of the sky from the flashes of light in the right side of my head. A bump on the head had brought on these symptoms. But instead of abating over time they had grown worse. I could barely see with my right eye and the lid began to droop. My headaches became so severe that I had to take naps in the afternoon, yet at night I could barely sleep. During the classes I taught I found that because of the sensations in my head I could no longer reach the top registers of my voice. Since my life's work was as a composer and a musician and this authority on the healing aspects of sound, tone and music I was especially sensitive to all of this, and fearful. After three weeks I consulted a neuro-ophthalmologist who diagnosed my condition, Horner's syndrome, and inflammation in part of the fifth cranial nerve. The next step was determining the cause. So on April 1st, April Fool's Day, I was wheeled into the magnetic resonance imager at the Kaiser Permanente Center in Denver. The radiologist found a blood clot more than an inch and a half long in the right corroded artery, just beneath the right hemisphere of my brain. Thirty minutes later I was in the emergency room of St. Joseph's Hospital where the vascular surgeon told me that a blood clot had formed because there had been a hemorrhage in my skull. I was really lucky to be alive. After several hours and many tests, I was faced with three options. One was to undergo an o- Sample complete. Ready to continue?