“ To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of… Oliver Sacks
“ To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states. Oliver Sacks
“ Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death. Oliver Sacks
“ This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience—and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of… Oliver Sacks
“ This sense of the brain’s remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to d… Oliver Sacks
“ This is what I get very upset at...' Temple, who was driving suddenly faltered and wept. 'I've read that libraries are where immortality lies... I don't want my thoughts to die with me... I want to ha… Oliver Sacks
“ These were fossil behaviors, Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in th… Oliver Sacks
“ There are no files in my memory that are repressed,' she asserted. 'You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors—nothing is hidde… Oliver Sacks
“ There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony . . . a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself an… Oliver Sacks
“ The ‘secret’ of Shostakovich, it was suggested—by a Chinese neurologist, Dr Dajue Wang—was the presence of a metallic splinter, a mobile shell-fragment, in his brain, in the temporal horn of the left… Oliver Sacks
“ The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances. —IVY MCKENZIE Oliver Sacks
“ The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting th… Oliver Sacks
“ Temple started to become excited. ‘I want to get this out before you get to the airport,’ she said, with a sort of urgency. She had been brought up an Episcopalian, she told me, but had rather early ‘… Oliver Sacks
“ Substituirile risipisera oare senzatia absentei trupului, despre care vorbea la început? Câtusi de putin. Ea continua sa simta, din cauza persistentei pierderii proprioceptiunii, ca trupul ei e mort,… Oliver Sacks
“ Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say dete… Oliver Sacks
“ PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines—elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of t… Oliver Sacks
“ Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr P.’s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable—of what happens to a science which eschews the judgme… Oliver Sacks
“ It remains, for me, the most powerful and elegant explanation of how we humans and our brains construct our very individual selves and worlds. Oliver Sacks
“ It gave me a deeper sense of science as a communal enterprise, of scientists as a fraternal, international community, sharing and thinking on each other’s work, and of Crick himself as a sort of hub,… Oliver Sacks
“ In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a seco… Oliver Sacks
