Oliver Sacks | Standard Way of Being

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Today we remember Oliver Sacks. A naturalist, a writer, a psychonaut, but first and foremost a physician and explorer of the human condition. July 9, 1933 - August 30, 2015

In this clip from a lecture he gave at Vanderbilt University in 1999, he talks about how many different "ways of being" there are.

Transcribed here: "There is no standard way of being, or knowing, or perceiving. Although one has to talk about normality or mean or average or deviation or standard deviations in a sort of statistical sense, in the biological sense, variation is of the essence. There are an infinite number of ways of being and doing and knowing and remembering. And there are an infinite number of ways of being healthy. And I think health needs to be defined in terms of identity and singularity not in terms of some normative judgement."