Oliver Sacks Quotes

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.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down.

It may sound lovey-dovey, but there's research showing the positive effect of meditation on parts of the brain that control emotion.

When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

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.

Human beings do not relate to written words in the same way that they will relate to spoken words. They do not relate to music in the same way that they do to pictures. It's all different parts of our head, different parts of our minds processing this.

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Phrenology is the study of the brain or how it operates, you know, the particular components that effect the nerves and the thought process, and the study of the size of the head. We just wanted to tie it into subject matters.

The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain.

Our brain is the factory of the emotions

Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.