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Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

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
Profoundly
Abstract
Arts
Completely
Among
Emotional
Art
Music
Uniquely

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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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I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
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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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Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.
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Music is part of being human.
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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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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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My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance.
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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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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 has a bonding power, it's primal social cement
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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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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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The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.
Oliver Sacks
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I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
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I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Oliver Sacks
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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.
Oliver Sacks
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There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.
Oliver Sacks