3 Posts found for Author: Oliver Sacks

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 overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own…. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation