Oliver Sacks
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.Collection: Creativity
My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.Collection: Monday
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.Collection: Perspective
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.Collection: Hands
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.Collection: Musical
I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.Collection: Thinking
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.Collection: Degrees
... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.Collection: Body
Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Brain
The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.Collection: Unique
Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.Collection: Nature
there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.Collection: Secret
A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.Collection: Profound
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.Collection: Memories
Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.Collection: Book