Oliver Sacks (quotes)

Music is part of being human.
I cannot pretend I am not without fear.
Music has a bonding power, it’s primal social cement
Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring its memory.
First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.
I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
Eccentricity is like having an accent. It’s what “other” people have.
At 11, I could say I am sodium (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
Waking consciousness is dreaming but dreaming constrained by external reality
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people… I feel the future is in good hands.
A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.
Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Music is…a fundamental way of expressing our humanity – and it is often our best medicine.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.
Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.
My religion is nature. That‚Äôs what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.
In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.
The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud’s words, ‘Work and Love’.
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace–
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives – we are each of us unique.
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.
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.
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.
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
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.
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.
Who cared if there was really any Being to pray to? What mattered was the sense of giving thanks and praise, the feeling of a humble and grateful heart.
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 suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing – partly built in, partly individually constructed – and this goes on all through one’s life.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the documentary of ‘Awakenings’ was made in ’73, the first thing the film director asked was, ‘Could we meet the music therapist? She seems to be the most important person around here,’
I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
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.
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.
A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.
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.
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.
Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger.
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.
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.
If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.
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.
My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they’re two or three? Chimpanzees don’t dance.
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.
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.
..involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one’s mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.
… 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.
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)
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.
Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.
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.
We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize 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 unrecognized, and unlauded … unconscious, automatic.
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.
The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. … 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.
It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.
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.
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.
Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
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.
I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.
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
There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.
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.
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.’
For ‘wellness’, naturally, is no cause for complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well … Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being ‘very well’, they may become suspicious if they feel ‘too well’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Certainly it’s not just a visual experience – it’s an emotional one. In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Muscular dystrophy … was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: ‘How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance – a disease which has doubtless always existed – how is it that it is recognised only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?’
Enhancement not only allows the possibilities of a healthy fullness and exuberance, but of a rather ominous extravagance, aberration, monstrosity … This danger is built into the very nature of growth and life. Growth can become over-growth, life ‘hyper-life’ … The paradox of an illness which can present as wellness – as a wonderful feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its malignant potentials – is one of the chimaeras, tricks and ironies of nature.
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.
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
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.
Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to do with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a substance, or the way it was transformed in chemical reactions, never forgot anything he read, or was told, about the phenomena of chemistry. He seemed indifferent, or inattentive, to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena-noticing everything, forgetting nothing-that constituted Scheele’s special strength.

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About Oliver Sacks

Quotes by Oliver Sacks

Sigmund Freud

Viktor Frankl