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6bb7e3f
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tSb lHywnt blmrD, w lkn lnsn fqT ymrD jdhryan animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.
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Oliver Sacks |
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a037ce5
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We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8b6046f
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8277351
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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.
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sixth-sense
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Oliver Sacks |
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60eb1ae
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I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.
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Oliver Sacks |
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db49456
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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
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solitude
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Oliver Sacks |
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3e30bfa
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b2885b6
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mn lshl tdhkr l'mwr ljmyl@ fy lHy@ , l'wqt lty ybthj fyh qlb lmr wynftH Hyn ykwn kl shy mTwqan bl`Tf wlHb mn lshl tdhkr Sf lHy@; km kn lmr nbyl wkryman wshj`an fy mwjh@ lmHn lkn mn l'S`b 'n ntdhkr km km kn mf`myn blkrh !
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Oliver Sacks |
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3a07d5b
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Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards." --Kierkegaard"
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Oliver Sacks |
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a1914ba
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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0fc4457
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We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest kn..
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Oliver Sacks |
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4894d9f
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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abc51e4
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Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world's character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together, and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b41b0e0
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The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or "master" interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman's picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music."
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Oliver Sacks |
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95c1986
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There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one's proprioception, one's movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one's own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.
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Oliver Sacks |
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fd119b4
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But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess-- that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians.
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science
medical
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Oliver Sacks |
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7d9ee40
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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 mi..
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Oliver Sacks |
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00fc684
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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 pro..
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music
essential
narrative
therapy
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Oliver Sacks |
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6e4a44f
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I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life--achieving a sense of peace within oneself.
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morality
endd-of-life
peace
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Oliver Sacks |
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259bab6
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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18a003f
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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eb96525
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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..
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Oliver Sacks |
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84d04fc
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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).
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Oliver Sacks |
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b27478e
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7fee33e
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yd`y lTb dwm 'n ltjrb@ hy l'khtbr l`mlyth wbltly kn 'flTwn mHq `ndm ql nh mn 'jl 'n ySbH lmr Tbyb Hqyqy lbd 'n ykwn qd khtbr jmy` l'mrD lty y'ml 'n y`ljh wjmy` lHwdth wlHlt lty syshkhSh ... s'thq brjl khdh , l'n lbqy@ yrshdwnn mthl lshkhS ldhy yrsm lbHr wlSkhwr wlmwny' bynm yjls l~ Twlth wydyr sfynth b'mn tm . qdhf bh fy lmshhd lHqyqy wstjdh l y`rf 'yn ybd' mwntyny
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Oliver Sacks |
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f679ad9
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Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).
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Oliver Sacks |
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6223dcc
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7f7e947
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He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c6de337
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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3cf644b
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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).
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Oliver Sacks |
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010ac68
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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ed80427
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lTbybu wlmryDu nZyrn , ytW`lmu kl mnhm mn lakhr w ys`dh wytwSln m`a l~ m`rf jdyd@ w`lj *
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Oliver Sacks |
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6160e3a
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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 am..
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Oliver Sacks |
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cde4f06
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I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
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life
last-words
dying
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Oliver Sacks |
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2aa87e0
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Travel now by all means--if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c5b7782
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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1c0bbeb
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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 lif..
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Oliver Sacks |
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46caf3e
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The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e16d914
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IT IS WITH OUR FACES that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our sex are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions which Darwin wrote about, as well as the hidden or repressed ones which Freud wrote about, are displayed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions. Though we may admire arms and legs, breasts and buttocks, it is the face, first and last, which i..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c599668
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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9e9ba36
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This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the "civilized" world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them."
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Oliver Sacks |
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028f5c8
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Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton's most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe's great color work, like Newton's, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all t..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c4ff37c
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Auden poem, "Let your last thinks all be thanks,"
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Oliver Sacks |
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2f8fb90
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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 an..
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humorous
political
politics
ronald-reagan
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Oliver Sacks |