Quotes by Neurologists - Page 2

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing—suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia—an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.
Oliver Sacks
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
Oliver Sacks
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.
Sigmund Freud
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
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
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.
Oliver Sacks
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud
What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.
Alice W. Flaherty
We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.
Sigmund Freud
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
Sigmund Freud
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Sigmund Freud
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
Sigmund Freud
I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
Oliver Sacks
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.
Sigmund Freud
...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another.
Sigmund Freud
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
Sigmund Freud
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal.
Sigmund Freud
I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.
Oliver Sacks
[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.
Oliver Sacks
My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
Oliver Sacks
I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.
Oliver Sacks
At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side:­ tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.
Sigmund Freud
The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.
Roger Bannister
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.
Oliver Sacks
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
In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
Sigmund Freud
For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.
John Hughlings Jackson
It’s now generally accepted that Mesmer was actually treating psychosomatic illness, and he profited mightily from people’s gullibility. In retrospect, his theories and practices sound ridiculous, but in truth, the story of Mesmer parallels many stories of today. It’s not so ridiculous to imagine people falling prey to products, procedures, and health claims that are brilliantly marketed. Every day we hear of some news item related to health. We are bombarded by messages about our health — good, bad, and confusingly contradictory. And we are literally mesmerized by these messages. Even the smart, educated, cautious, and skeptical consumer is mesmerized. It’s hard to separate truth from fiction, and to know the difference between what’s healthful and harmful when the information and endorsements come from “experts.
David Perlmutter
If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion—the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought—for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education.
Sigmund Freud
Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken off; and that these people either do everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God's kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.
Sigmund Freud
I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.
Sigmund Freud
It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.
William J. Bernstein
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
Sigmund Freud
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
Sigmund Freud
Forgive your child and yourself nightly. You didn't ask to live with the effects of ADHD any more than did your child.
Martin L. Kutscher
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)
Oliver Sacks
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
Sigmund Freud
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?
Sigmund Freud
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.
Oliver Sacks
Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.
Oliver Sacks
In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for those wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.This is why they laughed at the President's speech.
Oliver Sacks
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
Sigmund Freud
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Sigmund Freud
I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.
Sigmund Freud
Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.
Sigmund Freud
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
Sigmund Freud
public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
Sigmund Freud
As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.-DONNE
Oliver Sacks
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss
Sigmund Freud
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
Sigmund Freud
...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past
Oliver Sacks
However ordinary each of us may seem, we are all in some way special, and can do things that are extraordinary, perhaps until then…even thought impossible.
Roger Bannister
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
Sigmund Freud
The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.
Sigmund Freud
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
Sigmund Freud
The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Sigmund Freud