Oliver Sacks ( 1933-2015) Tribute List

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of popular books on the workings of the mind, died on August 30, 2015 at the age of 82.

In books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, the latter of which was made into a film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, Sacks made highly unusual neurological cases relevant to a general audience by showing us what, neurologically speaking, makes human beings human. In recent months he had written eloquently in newspapers about facing death from the liver cancer that killed him. Here are eleven quotes from Sacks' life and work.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. quintessence
    the most typical example or representative of a type
    The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain...Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.
    -Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain
  2. inalienable
    incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another
    ...the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.
    ― The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
  3. propensity
    a natural inclination
    One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.
    ― Awakenings
  4. numinous
    of or relating to or characteristic of a spirit
    And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth.
    ― Hallucinations
  5. cathartic
    emotionally purging
    “The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--”
    ― Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
  6. veridical
    truthful or coinciding with reality
    There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections...what we feel or assert to be true... depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way...
    — NY Review of Books, February 21, 2013
  7. rapture
    a state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion
    There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear.
    –The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
  8. incessantly
    without interruption
    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.
    ― Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
  9. communion
    sharing thoughts and feelings
    Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage... there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.
    ― The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
  10. sentient
    endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness
    Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
    – New York Times, February 19, 2015
  11. audacity
    aggressive or outright boldness
    I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
    This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun...
    – New York Times, February 19, 2015
Created on Thu Feb 19 22:32:40 EST 2015 (updated Mon Aug 31 15:32:05 EDT 2015)

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