Quote

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.

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
Two
Unique
Human
Beings
Movement
Analog
Humans
Start
Chimpanzees
Children
Language
Correlation
Would
Sense
Rhythm
Three
Impression
Else
Dance

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

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It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices they create music.
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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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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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I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
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There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
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I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
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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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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.
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I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
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Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
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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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We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded ... unconscious, automatic.
Oliver Sacks
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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.
Oliver Sacks
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I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
Oliver Sacks
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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.
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.
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At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
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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.
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... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.
Oliver Sacks
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Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what other people have.
Oliver Sacks