Oliver Sacks Quotes

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or "maps". These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably complex, but always meaningful patterns, may change in minutes or seconds. One is reminded of C. S. Sherrington's poetic evocation of the brain as "an enchanted loom", where "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns".

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

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.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

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.

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.