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Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
Oliver Sacks
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Music has a profound impact on our emotions and can heal us mentally.

This quote by Oliver Sacks highlights the powerful and transformative role music plays in our emotional well-being. Just as a remedy or a tonic can provide physical relief, music has the ability to elevate our spirits or evoke deep emotions, serving as an essential tool for mental and emotional healing.

Themes

MusicEmotionHealingTherapyArt

In practice

Example use cases

Quoting this during a discussion about the therapeutic effects of music in a mental health awareness event.

More from Oliver Sacks

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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
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I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
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