Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug. — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ears. — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a reaction,… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
Who cared if there was really any Being to pray to? What mattered was the sense of giving thanks and praise, the feeling of… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you.… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
