Oliver Sacks: The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greate...

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.

Oliver Sacks

fate life 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.

Oliver Sacks

musical dancing moving

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

anatomy-and-physiology disease life

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.

Oliver Sacks

understanding mind needs

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

animal beautiful adventure

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

unique real men

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

Oliver Sacks

integrating music fundamentals

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

Oliver Sacks

eye imagination brain

My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

Oliver Sacks

gratitude wonder feelings

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

perception imagination memories

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.

Oliver Sacks

our-world people interesting

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

orange-juice depression moving

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.

Oliver Sacks

ocean sitting brain

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

orchestra creating brain

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

eye self men

Creativity...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.

Oliver Sacks

creativity eye moving

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.

Oliver Sacks

gratitude special feelings

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.

Oliver Sacks

frozen jars memories

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

communication people thinking

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

Oliver Sacks

medicine humanity fundamentals

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.