We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

Certainly it’s not just a visual experience – it’s an emotional one. In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a...

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

As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude…Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.-DONNE

When the documentary of ‘Awakenings’ was made in ’73, the first thing the film director asked was, ‘Could we meet the music therapist? She seems to be the most important person around here,’

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children...

For ‘wellness’, naturally is no cause of complaint–people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill–not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some...

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals… We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for...

I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them… and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator...

If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed,...

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and...

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

Thus the feeling I sometimes have – which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have – that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by...

Some people with Tourette’s have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects….. (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage...

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope,...

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music...

Cualquier enfermedad introduce una duplicidad en la vida: un “ello”, con sus propias necesidades, exigencias y limitaciones.

In this, then, lies their power of understanding–understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the...

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species — billions of people — playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call...

The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. – Alvaro Pascual-Leone

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

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) is as powerful as any medicine,

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...

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration...

Who cared if there was really any Being to pray to? What mattered was the sense of giving thanks and praise, the feeling of a humble and grateful heart.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace–