Alexandra

“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 example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.”
― Oliver W. Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“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 have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“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.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain