301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

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 hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can’t bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn’t generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippocampus.

Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.

Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past;(...).We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recalled and admixed with every new perception.

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation.

Ucho w liczbach:" A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.

Pero hemos de decir desde el principio que una enfermedad no es nunca una mera pérdida o un mero exceso, que hay siempre una reacción por parte del organismo o individuo afectado para restaurar, reponer, compensar, y para preservar su identidad, por muy extraños que puedan ser los medios.

Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description.