Oliver Sacks
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.
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.
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.
I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.
I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes.
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.Collection: Life
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species.Collection: Moving
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.Collection: Life
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.Collection: Understanding
The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.Collection: Music
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Beautiful
If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.Collection: Real
My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.Collection: Gratitude
Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.Collection: Memories
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.Collection: Depression
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Our World
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.Collection: Communication
Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cementCollection: Social
The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.Collection: Creating
Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.Collection: Medicine
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.Collection: Ocean
Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.Collection: Creativity
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.Collection: Moving
I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.Collection: Unique
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Past
Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external realityCollection: Dream
The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.Collection: Thinking
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--Collection: Blessing
It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love; it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity.Collection: Kindness
Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.Collection: Book
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?Collection: Fighting
I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'Collection: Weed
If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Nice
Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.Collection: Blood
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.Collection: Mean
Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.Collection: Roots
The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's. But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients.Collection: People
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.Collection: People
The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.Collection: People
I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion.Collection: Passion
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too wellCollection: Feelings
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.Collection: Philosophy