The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
Interpretation
Music has a unique ability to connect people and promote healing without the use of drugs.
This quote by Oliver Sacks suggests that music possesses a significant ability to unify individuals and serve as a form of healing. He emphasizes that music is the most impactful form of therapy that operates on a deep emotional and psychological level, unlike any chemical treatments, highlighting its essential role in human experience and well-being.
In practice
In a speech about the role of arts in healthcare, one could use this quote to emphasize how music therapy aids recovery.
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.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Poverty is the discoverer of all the arts.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check. We adore chaos because we love to produce order. I don't use drugs; my dreams are frightening enough.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
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