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Oliver Sacks Quotes about Memories

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Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Imagination, Perception
Oliver Sacks (2011). “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain”, p.127, Pan Macmillan

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Emotion, Evoke

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.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, People, Giving
Source: www.spiegel.de

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Frozen, Jars
Oliver Sacks (2012). “Hallucinations”, p.93, Pan Macmillan

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.

Oliver Sacks
Dream, Memories, Confused
"Uncle Tungsten". Book by Oliver Sacks, 2001.

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Men, Profound
Oliver Sacks (1998). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Mind, Arise
"Memories Are Fallible (And That's a Good Thing)" by Orion Jones, bigthink.com.

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.

Oliver Sacks
Memories, Musical, Brain
Oliver Sacks (2011). “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain”, p.64, Pan Macmillan

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