Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCPwas a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for stage and film...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth9 July 1933
brain different harmony
There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.
unique narrative different
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.
cared feeling giving grateful humble mattered pray thanks
Who cared if there was really any Being to pray to? What mattered was the sense of giving thanks and praise, the feeling of a humble and grateful heart.
art certainly delight demented emotional experience informal painting paintings patients quite recognize respond responsive scarcely seen time visual words
Certainly it's not just a visual experience - it's an emotional one. In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep.
asked director meet music seems
When the documentary of 'Awakenings' was made in '73, the first thing the film director asked was, 'Could we meet the music therapist? She seems to be the most important person around here,'
active autonomous functional hearing imagery involved parts seeing super
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're 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.
rivers smell lakes
Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.
firsts patient sickness
First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.
health delight patient
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.
reflection museums drs
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
fall night thinking
I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes.
doctors stupidity patient
There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.
men indifferent effects
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
mean community culture
I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.