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Music is part of being human.

Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks
Age: 82 †
Born: 1933
Born: July 9
Died: 2015
Died: August 30
Chemist
Neurologist
Physician Writer
Science Communicator
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Oliver Wolf Sacks
Human
Humans
Musical
Part
Music

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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.
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There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
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We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
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It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
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With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre 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.
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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.
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Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.
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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.
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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.
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Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
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I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
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Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
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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.
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When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
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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'.
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I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Oliver Sacks