“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La musique, le cerveau et nous
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks
“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.”
― Oliver Sacks
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Music is part of being human.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; 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. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality”
― Oliver Sacks
“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain...Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.”
― Oliver Sacks
“There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“إذا أردنا أن نعرف فلاناً فنحن نسأل : " ما قصته - قصته الحقيقية الأعمق ؟ - " لأن كل واحد منا هو سيرة وقصة . كل واحد منا هو حكاية فريدة يتم تركيبها باستمرار ودون وعي بواسطتنا ومن خلالنا وفينا من خلال إدراكاتنا ومشاعرنا وأفكارنا وأفعالنا وليس أقله بواسطة حديثنا وحكاياتنا المنطوقة . نحن لا نختلف عن بعضنا بعضاً كثيراً بيولوجياً وفسيولوجياً ، أما تاريخياً ، كقصص ، فكل من فريد !”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“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?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel.
"There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly …”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“تصاب الحيوانات بالمرض, و لكن الإنسان فقط يمرض جذرياً
animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“...when the brain is released from the constraints of reality, it can generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and "impossible" combinations".”
― Oliver Sacks
“Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape”
― Oliver Sacks
“At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze," as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master-I had the feeling that Fleisher has sized up the piano's character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty-and, after this, there was nothing more to be said.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing—suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia—an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“يمكننا أن نرى بسهولة في الآخرين ما لا نهتم أو نجرؤ على رؤيته في أنفسنا”
― Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On
“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
“The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“But who was more tragic, or who was more damned—the man who knew it, or the man who did not?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“الطبيبُ والمريضُ نظيران , يتّعلمُ كل منهما من الآخر و يساعده ويتوصلان معآ إلى معارف جديدة وعلاج *”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“And language, (...) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
“إذا كان لدينا الصبا ، والجمال ، والقوة ، والموهبة ، وإذا وجدنا الشهرة ، والثروة ، والحظوة ، والرضى ، فمن السهل أن نكون لطفاء ، وأن نلقى العالم بقلب ودود . لكن دعنا فقط نفقد الحظوة ، والجمال ، والقوة ، والصحة ؛ دعنا نجد أنفسنا مرضى ، وتعساء ، ومن دون أمل واضح بالشفاء ؛ حينها فقط ستُمتحَن قوة احتمالنا وشخصيتنا الأخلاقية ، إلى الحد الأقصى”
― Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On
“Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“This usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and … I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes, or shadows of shapes, or an item from an image, such as grass from a landscape or wood grain, wavelets or raindrops … transformed in the most extraordinary ways at a great speed. Shapes are replicated, multiplied, reversed in negative, etc. Color is added, tinted, subtracted. Textures are the most fascinating; grass becomes fur becomes hair follicles becomes waving, dancing lines of light, and a hundred other variations and all the subtle gradients between them that my words are too coarse to describe.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks
“WHILE MUSIC alone can unlock people with parkinsonism, and movement or exercise of any kind is also beneficial, an ideal combination of music and movement is provided by dance (and dancing with a partner, or in a social setting, brings to bear other therapeutic dimensions).”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette’s syndrome, chorea, or dystonia.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“إذا فقد رجلٌ رجلاً أو عيناً ، فهو يعرف أنه فقد رِجلاً أو عيناً. ولكن إذا فقد نفساً - نفسه- فليس بإمكانه أن يعرف ذلك، لأنه لم يعد موجوداً هناك ليعرف”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)”
― Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
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.”
― Oliver Sacks
“I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“عيادة الطبيب أو جناح المستشفى ليس دائماً المكان الأفضل لملاحظة المرض - أو على الأقل ليس المكان الأفضل لملاحظة اضطراب يظهر ، إذا كان منشأه عضوياً ، بصورة اندفاع ، و تقليد ، و تشخيص ، و ردّ فعل ، و تفاعل قد يصل إلى درجة لا يمكن تصديقها تقريباً ..”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“يدعي الطب دوما أن التجربة هي الأختبار لعملياته وبالتالي كان أفلاطون محقا عندما قال إنه من أجل أن يصبح المرء طبيبا حقيقيا لابد أن يكون قد اختبر جميع الأمراض التي يأمل أن يعالجها وجميع الحوادث والحالات التي سيشخصها ... سأثق برجل كهذا ، لأن البقية يرشدوننا مثل الشخص الذي يرسم البحار والصخور والموانئ بينما يجلس إلى طاولته ويدير سفينته بأمان تام . اقذف به
في المشهد الحقيقي وستجده لا يعرف أين يبدأ
مونتيني”
― Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On
“يحتاج الإنسان إلى قصة داخلية مستمرة للحفاظ على نفسه وهويته *”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“من السهل تذكر الأمور الجميلة في الحياة ، الأوقات التي يبتهج فيها قلب المرء وينفتح حين يكون كل شيء مطوقاً بالعطف والحب من السهل تذكر صفاء الحياة؛ كم كان المرء نبيلا وكريماً وشجاعاً في مواجهة المحن لكن من الأصعب أن نتذكر كم كم كنا مفعمين بالكره !”
― Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On
“We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses -- secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -- equally vital, but unrecognised, and unlauded. These senses, unconscious, automatic, had to be discovered.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
“As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.
-DONNE”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
“Substituirile risipisera oare senzatia absentei trupului, despre care vorbea la început? Câtusi de putin. Ea continua sa simta, din cauza persistentei pierderii proprioceptiunii, ca trupul ei e mort, nereal, ca nu este al ei - nu poate pune stapânire pe propriul ei trup. Nu stie cum sa descrie aceasta stare, gaseste doar analogii derivate din alte simturi: «Simt ca trupul meu e orb si
mut fata de el însusi... nu are simtul de sine» - acestea sunt vorbele ei.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past;(...).We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recalled and admixed with every new perception.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“إن العيادة و المختبر و جناح المستشفى مصمّمة جميعاً لكبح و تركيز السلوك ، إن لم يكن لإقصائه كلياً ..”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“يمكن لطفل أن يتابع الكتاب المقدس قبل أن يتابع إقيلدس, ليس لأن الكتاب المقدس أبسط (يمكن قول العكس) بل لأنه مطروح بأسلوب رمزي و قصصي”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“And I myself was wrung with emotion -- it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his life lost in limbo, dissolving.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Ucho w liczbach:" A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“I never took amphetamines again—despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“a quiet despair..!!”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“could not be hypnotized, not because of any ‘resistance,’ but because of his extreme amnesia, which caused him to lose track of what the hypnotist was saying.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“Învesmântate în acest sentiment al extazului, arzând de o adânca semnificatie divina si filozofica, viziunile lui Hildegard au contribuit la îndrumarea ei catre o viata închinata sfinteniei si misticismului. Sunt un exemplu unic pentru felul în care un eveniment fiziologic, banal, neplacut sau lipsit de sens pentru majoritatea oamenilor, poate deveni, Într-o constiinta privilegiata, substratul unei supreme inspiratii extatice. Pentru a gasi o paralela potrivita, trebuie sa ne întoarcem la Dostoievski, care traia uneori aure epileptice extatice carora le acorda o semnificatie importanta: Exista momente, care nu dureaza decât cinci sau sase secunde, când simti prezenta armoniei vesnice [...] un lucru formidabil e limpezimea teribila cu care se manifesta si încântarea de care te umplu. Daca aceasta stare ar tine mai mult de cinci secunde, sufletul n-ar putea-o îndura si ar trebui sa dispara. În decursul acestor cinci secunde traiesc o întreaga existenta omeneasca, iar pentru asta mi-as da viata fara sa-mi treaca prin minte ca platesc prea scump ...”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic
“Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor man was - whether, indeed, one could speak of an 'existence', given so absolute a privation of memory or continuity.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Where was I? What had been done? I replied that I was in the recovery room and that he had detached the lateral rectus muscle of the right eye and attached the plaque containing radioiodine (I-125, to be precise) to the sclera. I said that I was sorry it was not radioactive ruthenium instead of iodine (I have a thing for the platinum metals) but that 125, at least, was memorable for being the smallest number that was the sum of two squares in two different ways. I startled myself as I said this; I had not thought it out before—it just jumped into my mind. (I realized, a few minutes later, that I was wrong—65 is the smallest such number.)”
― Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye
“Specifically, he wonders – and one in turn may wonder whether these thoughts were perhaps incited by his working with patients, in a hospital, in the war – he wonders whether there might be situations or conditions which take away the certainty of the body, which do give one grounds to doubt one’s body, perhaps indeed to lose one’s entire body in total doubt. This thought seems to haunt his last book like a nightmare.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic
“Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“67.What Jacob discovered in himself has similarities to a phenomenon reported in experimental animals by Arnaud Noreña and Jos Eggermont in 2005. They found that cats exposed to “noise trauma” and then raised for a few weeks in a quiet environment developed not only hearing loss but distorted tonotopic maps in the primary auditory cortex. (They would have complained of pitch distortion, were they able to.) If, however, the cats were exposed to an enriched acoustic environment for several weeks following exposure to noise trauma, their hearing loss was less severe, and distortions in their auditory cortical mapping did not occur.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“As I demonstrated this on Bob, he fell backwards onto me, completely inert and passive, with no hint of any reflexive reaction. Startled, I pushed him gently forward to the upright position, but now he started to topple forward; I could not balance him. I had a sense of bewilderment mixed with panic. For a moment, I thought that there had suddenly been a neurological catastrophe, that he had actually lost all his postural reflexes. Could acting like this, I wondered, actually alter the nervous system? The next day I was talking with him in his dressing room before the day’s shooting began, and as we talked, I noticed that his right foot was turned in with precisely the dystonic curvature it was held in when he portrayed Leonard L. on the set. I commented on this, and Bob seemed rather startled. “I didn’t realize,” he said. “I guess it’s unconscious.” He sometimes stayed in character for hours or days; he would make comments at dinner which belonged to Leonard, not himself, as if residues of the Leonard mind and character were still adhering to him.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals—aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“the delirious visions when they came to him may have owed something to opium as well as to a high temperature, since opium was then a normal remedy for ague or malaria.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost ‘abstract’ and ‘propositional’ thought—and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia).”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of “thinking in pure meanings.” I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth—it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye
“Cualquier enfermedad introduce una duplicidad en la vida: un "ello", con sus propias necesidades, exigencias y limitaciones.”
― Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
“In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for those wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.
This is why they laughed at the President's speech.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, “You’re in the papers.” There was a very nice essay-review in the paper which called Migraine “balanced, authoritative, brilliant,” or something of the sort. But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal folly, by being in the papers. In those days, one might be struck off the Medical Register in England for any indulgence in “the four As”: alcoholism, addiction, adultery, or advertising; my father thought that a review of Migraine in the general press might be seen as advertising. I had gone public, made myself visible. He himself always had, or believed he had, a “low profile.” He was known to and beloved by his patients, family, and friends, but not to a wider world. I had crossed a boundary, transgressed, and he feared for me. This coincided with feelings I had had myself, and in those days I often misread the word “publish” as “punish.” I felt that I would be punished if I published anything, and yet I had to; this conflict almost tore me apart.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“Rousseau habla de un lenguaje humano original o primordial, en el que todo tiene su nombre natural y auténtico; un lenguaje tan concreto, tan particular, que es capaz de captar la esencia, la mismidad de todo; tan espontáneo que expresa directamente todas las emociones; tan transparente que no caben en él evasivas ni engaños. En éste lenguaje no habría lógica ni gramática ni metáforas ni abstracciones (ni necesidad de ellas, en realidad); no sería un lenguaje meditado, una expresión simbólica del pensamiento y el sentimiento, sino sería, casi mágicamente, inmediato. Quizás sea una fantasía universal la idea de un lenguaje así, de un lenguaje del corazón, de un lenguaje de transparencia y lucidez perfectas, un lenguaje capaz de decirlo todo, sin engañarnos ni embrollarnos nunca, un lenguaje tan puro como la música.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
“None of us had ever encountered, or even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”
― Oliver Sacks
“He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’—rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“Ci ricordano che siamo sovrasviluppati in fatto di competenza meccanica, ma manchiamo di intelligenza, intuizione, consapevolezza biologiche; ed è questo, soprattutto, che dobbiamo riguadagnare, non solamente in medicina, ma nella scienza in generale.”
― Oliver Sacks, Risvegli
“I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“To restore the human subject at the centre - the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject - we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what', a real person, a patient, in relation to disease - in relation to the physical.
The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.”
― Oliver Sacks
“Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal....”
― Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal
“I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“Increasingly now, week by week, the normal, unconscious feedback of proprioception was being replaced by an equally unconscious feedback by vision, by visual automatism and reflexes increasingly integrated and fluent.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“Удивительное дело – она и победила, и проиграла. Восстановив действие, она утратила бытие. Пустив в ход все ресурсы нервной системы, а также волю, мужество, выдержку и независимость, она приспособилась к новой жизни. Столкнувшись с беспрецедентной ситуацией, она вступила в схватку со страшным врагом и выжила – огромным напряжением физических и духовных сил. Ее можно причислить к когорте безвестных героев неврологии. Но при этом она по-прежнему остается инвалидом и жертвой. Никакие высоты духа, никакая изобретательность, никакие адаптивные механизмы не могут справиться с абсолютным молчанием проприоцепции – жизненно важного шестого чувства, без которого наше тело утрачивает реальность, уходит от нас навсегда.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“physician. Though I no longer had a position or salary at Beth”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.
Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.
And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is “hardwired” or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made; natural disasters, "acts of God," seem somehow easier to accept. (...). This is the case with acute stress reactions, too: I see it often with my patients in hospital, who can show extraordinary courage and calmness in facing the most dreadful diseases but fly into a rage if a nurse is late with a bedpan or a medication. The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
“Is there any reason, we must wonder, why particular songs (or scenes) are ‘selected’ by particular patients for reproduction in their hallucinatory seizures?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes.
And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took on these expressions in reaction to her; and those expressions, in turn, were re-reflected, re-directed, re-distorted, by the Touretter, causing a still greater degree of outrage and shock. This grotesque, involuntary resonance, or mutuality, by which everyone was drawn into an absurdly amplifying interaction, was the source of the disturbance I had seen from a distance. This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody. This woman with a thousand faces, masks, personae- how must it be for her in this whirlwind of identities? The answer came soon- and not a second too late; for the build-up of pressures, both hers and others’, was fast approaching the point of explosion. Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out. And if the taking-in had lasted two minutes, the throwing-out was a single exhalation- fifty people in ten seconds, a fifth of a second or less for the time-foreshortened repertoire of each person.
I was later to spend hundreds of hours, talking to, observing, taping, learning from, Tourette patients. Yet nothing, I think, taught me as much, as swiftly, as penetratingly, as overwhelmingly as that phantasmagoric two minutes in a New York street.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“a ‘musical epilepsy’ or a ‘personal epilepsy’ would seem a contradiction in terms. And yet such epilepsies do occur, though solely in the context of temporal lobe seizures, epilepsies of the reminiscent part of the brain.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
“I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater pound-ages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at—the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym—“Sacks and his fives.” I didn’t realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“There is no need,” he said, suddenly getting serious, “to get dead drunk, pass out, and lie in the gutter. This is a very sad—even dangerous—thing to do. I hope you will never do it again.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life
“Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” —Kierkegaard”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life