Oliver Sacks Brain Quotations

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.

Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.

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.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre 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.

Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger.

It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.