Seeing Voices Quotes

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“And language, (...) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, “inner speech,” and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

“had been so damaged emotionally by isolation (and in one case institutionalization as well) that they had become withdrawn and inaccessible, had turned against communication, and were no longer open to any attempts to establish formal language.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown’s Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.” A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church’s Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

“Culture is as crucial as Nature.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“I was struck by the graphic quality, the fullness of her descriptions. Her parents spoke too of this fullness: “All the characters or creatures or objects Charlotte talks about are placed,” her mother said; “spatial reference is essential to ASL. When Charlotte signs, the whole scene is set up; you can see where everyone or everything is; it is all visualized with a detail that would be rare for the hearing.” This placing of objects and people in specific locations, this use of elaborate, spatial reference had been striking in Charlotte, her parents said, since the age of four and a half—already at that age she had gone beyond them, shown a sort of “staging” power, an “architectural” power that they had seen in other deaf people—but rarely in the hearing.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“This innate structure, this latent structure, is not fully developed at birth, nor is it too obvious at the age of eighteen months. But then, suddenly, and in the most dramatic way, the developing child becomes open to language, becomes able to construct a grammar from the utterances of his parents. He shows a spectacular ability, a genius for language, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six months”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“signed language is not merely proselike and narrative in structure, but essentially “cinematic” too: In a signed language … narrative is no longer linear and prosaic. Instead, the essence of sign language is to cut from a normal view to a close-up to a distant shot to a close-up again, and so on, even including flashback and flash-forward scenes, exactly as a movie editor works.… Not only is signing itself arranged more like edited film than like written narration, but also each signer is placed very much as a camera: the field of vision and angle of view are directed but variable. Not only the signer signing but also the signer watching is aware at all times of the signer’s visual orientation to what is being signed about.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Speech has only one dimension—its extension in time; writing has two dimensions; models have three; but only signed languages have at their disposal four dimensions—the three spatial dimensions accessible to a signer’s body, as well as the dimension of time. And Sign fully exploits the syntactic possibilities in its four-dimensional channel of expression.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Profound childhood deafness is more than a medical diagnosis; it is a cultural phenomenon in which social, emotional, linguistic, and intellectual patterns and problems are inextricably bound together.”
― 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,”
― 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—”
― 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).”
― 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.”
― 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).”
― 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).”
― 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”
― 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.”
― 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”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

“Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

“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”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf