With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.