Oliver Sacks Quotes About Language
-
Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
→ -
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
→ -
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
→ -
My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance.
→ -
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.
→ -
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species.
→ -
I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.
→ -
Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
→
Related Authors
-
Julie Kavner Film actress -
Norman Doidge Psychiatrist -
Richard Lewontin Evolutionary Biologist -
Chuck Close Photographer -
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Neuroscientist -
Robin Williams Actor -
Antonio Damasio Professor -
Robert De Niro Actor -
Sigmund Freud Neurologist -
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist -
Malcolm Gladwell Journalist -
Temple Grandin Professor -
Irwin Winkler Film producer -
Steven Zaillian Screenwriter -
J.K. Simmons Actor -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Stanislav Grof Psychiatrist -
Daniel Levitin Neuroscientist -
Penny Marshall Actress -
Jill Bolte Taylor Author