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Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

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
Depression
Ears
Tears
Tonic
Move
Juice
Moving
Orange
Music
Lift
Remedy
Lifts

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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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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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The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's. But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients.
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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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Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.
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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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But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
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Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
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I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.
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I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.
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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.
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In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.
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We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
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It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
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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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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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Music is part of being human.
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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.
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It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity.
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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.
Oliver Sacks