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Book: Seeing Voices
Quotes of Book: Seeing Voices
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  1. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    With others, of whom there were no actual visual memories, there were, at one point, incontinent visual "projections" {perhaps analogous to Wright's auditory "phantasms" and the phantom limbs of amputees: such "sensory ghosts" are created by the brain when it is suddenly cut off from normal sensory input}.
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  2. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 "Observations" of Pierre Desloges-
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  3. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity," Wittgenstein says. Thus it may take an outside view to show the native users of a language that their own utterances, which appear so simple and transparent to themselves, are, in fact, enormously complex and contain and conceal the vast apparatus of a true language
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  4. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example, Islay by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of those who sign.
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  5. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    As our central nervous system-and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex-grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols.… We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture {Geertz, 1973, p. 49}.
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  6. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C {below the bottom of the piano scale} might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this {thirty-two vibrations a second}, we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of "tone" within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of the normal auditory system {see Helmholtz's The Sensations of Tone, first published in 1862}.
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  7. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    the enhancement of evoked potentials spread forward into the left temporal lobe, which is normally regarded as purely auditory in function. This is a very remarkable and, one suspects, fundamental finding, for it suggests that what are normally auditory areas are being reallocated,
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  8. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer-as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, but whether by sight or sound, how, he is unable to say.
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  9. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    it is not {usually} the ideas of philosophers that change reality; nor, conversely, is it the practice of ordinary people. What changes history, what kindles revolutions, is the meeting of the two. A
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  10. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    Rousseau habla de un lenguaje humano original o primordial, en el que todo tiene su nombre natural y auténtico; un lenguaje tan concreto, tan particular, que es capaz de captar la esencia, la mismidad de todo; tan espontáneo que expresa directamente todas las emociones; tan transparente que no caben en él evasivas ni engaños. En éste lenguaje no habría lógica ni gramática ni metáforas ni abstracciones {ni necesidad de ellas, en realidad}; no sería un lenguaje meditado, una expresión simbólica del pensamiento y el sentimiento, sino sería, casi mágicamente, inmediato. Quizás sea una fantasía universal la idea de un lenguaje así, de un lenguaje del corazón, de un lenguaje de transparencia y lucidez perfectas, un lenguaje capaz de decirlo todo, sin engañarnos ni embrollarnos nunca, un lenguaje tan puro como la música.
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  11. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    It is certain that we are not "given" reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that our language should embody our world view-the way in which we perceive and construct reality. But
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  12. Oliver Sacks _ Seeing Voices

    Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
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