“ That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning—a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy—was ignored or bypassed; Oliver Sacks
“ Se abrían a sus pies continuamente abismos de amnesia, pero él los salvaba, con ingenio, mediante rápidas fabulaciones y ficciones de todo tipo. Para él no eran ficciones, era como veía de pronto o in… Oliver Sacks
“ Physiological confirmation of such filling in by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory… Oliver Sacks
“ Only in the realm of mishearing—at least my mishearings—can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into… Oliver Sacks
“ Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of ‘judgment’— Oliver Sacks
“ Natural selection almost always builds on what went before…. It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in… Oliver Sacks
“ Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful… Oliver Sacks
“ Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence? Oliver Sacks
“ McKenzie once called Parkinsonism an organized chaos, and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness… Oliver Sacks
“ It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by lysis, a gradual abate… Oliver Sacks
“ It is certain that we are not given reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that o… Oliver Sacks
“ Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal). No Oliver Sacks
“ Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been forged in the fires of psychosis. Oliver Sacks
“ Increasingly now, week by week, the normal, unconscious feedback of proprioception was being replaced by an equally unconscious feedback by vision, by visual automatism and reflexes increasingly integ… Oliver Sacks
“ In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens. Oliver Sacks
“ IT IS WITH OUR FACES that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our sex are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions which Darwin… Oliver Sacks
“ I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well. Oliver Sacks
“ I had returned to piano-playing and music lessons when I had turned seventy-five (having written about how even older people can learn new skills, I thought it was time to take my own advice). Oliver Sacks
“ Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An oct… Oliver Sacks
“ Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates. Oliver Sacks
