Oliver Sacks Quotes
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.
One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.
We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.
Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.
I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world.
I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.
Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well