Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

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 can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

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

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality