“ 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 s… Oliver Sacks
“ Similar considerations arise with regard to recovery and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or cr… Oliver Sacks
“ She hoped I would send her some of my papers on neurology, of which I’ll understand not one word, but will glow with loving pride at my ridiculous, brilliant and altogether delightful nephew. Oliver Sacks
“ Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others. Oliver Sacks
“ Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but… Oliver Sacks
“ My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor… Oliver Sacks
“ Michael was all too conscious of his condition, and when he was in his grimmest moods, he would say, I am a doomed man, though there was a hint of the messianic in this too: he was doomed as all messi… Oliver Sacks
“ Many patients may confess that they feel strange or confused during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware o… Oliver Sacks
“ It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads. Oliver Sacks
“ It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the Petromyzon. Nevertheless it does seem to be the… Oliver Sacks
“ Is there any reason, we must wonder, why particular songs (or scenes) are ‘selected’ by particular patients for reproduction in their hallucinatory seizures? Oliver Sacks
“ In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes… Oliver Sacks
“ I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, Hello!… Oliver Sacks
“ I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in t… Oliver Sacks
“ I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) thi… Oliver Sacks
“ I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer—as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, bu… Oliver Sacks
“ I found the Guam visit very important at a human level, too. While the postencephalitic patients had been put away for decades, living in a hospital, often abandoned by their families, people with lyt… Oliver Sacks
“ I feel glad to be alive—I’m glad I’m not dead! sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. Oliver Sacks
“ Having Tourette's is wild, like being drunk all the while. Being on Haldol is dull, makes one square and sober, and neither state is really free...You 'normals', who have the right transmitters in the… Oliver Sacks
“ Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, world… Oliver Sacks
