Oliver Sacks Quotes

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.

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

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

Sunlight and seeing something that was a thought become a thing and materialize - that makes me come alive.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

My work is about seeing - seeing things like they haven't been seen before.

If you dream you do something, it's as if you actually are doing it from your brain's point of view.

For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms) projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts.