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Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British-American neurologist, writer, and amateur chemist who was Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine.

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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

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At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

– Oliver Sacks

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Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

– Oliver Sacks

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I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

– Oliver Sacks

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In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

– Oliver Sacks

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Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.

– Oliver Sacks

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Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.

– Oliver Sacks

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Music is part of being human.

– Oliver Sacks

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My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

– Oliver Sacks

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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.

– Oliver Sacks

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There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

– Oliver Sacks

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To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

– Oliver Sacks

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We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

– Oliver Sacks

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Quotes from the news wire:

The brain is the most intricate mechanism in the universe, i couldn't imagine spending my life with kidneys.

– Oliver Sacks

Found on Reuters 9 years ago

Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us -- through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations, biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives -- we are each of us unique.

– Oliver Sacks

Found on CNN 9 years ago

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