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.
Interpretation
The brain can create its own experiences when it lacks sensory input, which can lead to auditory hallucinations.
In this quote, Oliver Sacks discusses how the brain's auditory region can generate sounds, specifically musical hallucinations, when it is deprived of external auditory stimuli, such as in the case of deafness. This phenomenon highlights the brain's proactive nature in seeking stimulation and the ways it compensates for the absence of input by retrieving musical memories and creating sound experiences, thereby emphasizing the complexity and adaptability of neural processes.
In practice
In a discussion about the remarkable adaptability of the human brain in medical conferences.
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.
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
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.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
Nuclear accidents anywhere can affect people everywhere.
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
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