Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.
The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.
Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
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.
I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders – Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s – because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.
If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger.
Eccentricity is like having an accent. It’s what “other” people have.
I think there’s probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.
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.
I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing – partly built in, partly individually constructed – and this goes on all through one’s life.
There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace –.
I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.