“We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses -- secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -- equally vital, but unrecognised, and unlauded. These senses, unconscious, automatic, had to be discovered.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“But
it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a
reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and
to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no
less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales


“WHILE MUSIC alone can unlock people with parkinsonism, and movement or exercise of any kind is also beneficial, an ideal combination of music and movement is provided by dance (and dancing with a partner, or in a social setting, brings to bear other therapeutic dimensions).”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic

“And language, (...) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“This usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and … I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes, or shadows of shapes, or an item from an image, such as grass from a landscape or wood grain, wavelets or raindrops … transformed in the most extraordinary ways at a great speed. Shapes are replicated, multiplied, reversed in negative, etc. Color is added, tinted, subtracted. Textures are the most fascinating; grass becomes fur becomes hair follicles becomes waving, dancing lines of light, and a hundred other variations and all the subtle gradients between them that my words are too coarse to describe.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

“Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette’s syndrome, chorea, or dystonia.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain