Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCPwas a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for stage and film...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth9 July 1933
Oliver Sacks quotes about
dream memories confused
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.
numbers elements boyhood
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.
dying faces face-to-face
I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
musical being-human music-is
Music is part of being human.
social bonding cement
Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement
dream reality waking
Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality
perspective focus feels
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
roots giving dancing
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.
brain addresses hallucinations
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.
brain different harmony
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.
degrees odd
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
profound brain intriguing
A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.
feelings irony paradox
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
medicine physicians common
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.