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904b89f
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Pride and a Daily Marathon,
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Oliver Sacks |
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ff1b0f6
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This gave me a feeling of what seemed wrong with American medicine, that it consisted more and more of specialists. There were fewer and fewer primary care physicians, the base of the pyramid. My father and my two older brothers were all general practitioners, and I found myself feeling not like a super-specialist in migraine but like the general practitioner these patients should have seen to begin with.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e08bc3e
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Specifically, he wonders - and one in turn may wonder whether these thoughts were perhaps incited by his working with patients, in a hospital, in the war - he wonders whether there might be situations or conditions which take away the certainty of the body, which do give one grounds to doubt one's body, perhaps indeed to lose one's entire body in total doubt. This thought seems to haunt his last book like a nightmare.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f1df557
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Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist.
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Oliver Sacks |
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437720f
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When I visited Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., (it is the only university in the world for deaf and hearing-impaired students) and talked about the "hearing impaired," one of the deaf students signed, "Why don't you look at yourself as sign impaired?"4 It was a very interesting turning of the tables, because there were hundreds of students all conversing in sign, and I was the mute one who could understand nothing and communicate ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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ce355f7
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dh fqd rjlun rjl w `yn, fhw y`rf nh fqd rjl w `yn. wlkn dh fqd nfs -nfsh- flys bmknh n y`rf dhlk lnh lm y`d mwjwd hnk ly`rf
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Oliver Sacks |
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60902e5
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Such epileptic hallucinations or dreams, Penfield showed, are never phantasies: they are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind, accompanied by the emotions which accompanied the original experience. Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by ordinary memory, suggested to Penfield that the brain retained an almost..
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Oliver Sacks |
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b4fe73c
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I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, "You're in the papers." There was a very nice essay-review in the paper which called Migraine "balanced, authoritative, brilliant," or something of the sort. But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal foll..
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Oliver Sacks |
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4456c88
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It also gave me a feeling of vulnerability and mortality which I had not really had before. In
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Oliver Sacks |
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efc2b3c
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I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any at..
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Oliver Sacks |
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5916713
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But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution
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Oliver Sacks |
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5b93d1b
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entered my life and have been with me, for better or worse, ever since. A carefree life became a careful one, to some extent. I felt this was the end of youth and that middle age was now upon me.
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Oliver Sacks |
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ba8175b
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Ci ricordano che siamo sovrasviluppati in fatto di competenza meccanica, ma manchiamo di intelligenza, intuizione, consapevolezza biologiche; ed e questo, soprattutto, che dobbiamo riguadagnare, non solamente in medicina, ma nella scienza in generale.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b15f6a1
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cognitive
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Oliver Sacks |
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16bcd46
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parked the bike in a side road--and fainted. The second accident occurred at night in heavy
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Oliver Sacks |
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422acce
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Cortical maps are dynamic, and can change as circumstances alter. Many of us have experienced this, getting a new pair of glasses or a new hearing aid. At first the new glasses or hearing aids seem intolerable, distorting - but within days or hours, our brain adapts to them, and we can make full use of our new new optically or acoustically improved senses. It is similar with the brain's mapping of the body image, which adapts quite rapidly ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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0b05865
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In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind.62 This sort of singing language of meanings, without individual words as we understand them, he calls Hmmm (for holistic-mimetic-musical-multimodal)--and it depen..
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Oliver Sacks |
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f0d0e2d
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too-muchness had no doubt been noticed at school, for it was around this time that I received a school report that said, 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.
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Oliver Sacks |
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a3c7d4d
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read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the 'memory hole' peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past
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Oliver Sacks |
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165ba99
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Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been forged in the fires of psychosis.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f612411
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The sense of personal space, of the self in relation to other objects and other people, tends to be markedly altered in Tourette's syndrome.
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Oliver Sacks |
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4b1c66d
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To be ourselves we must have ourselves--possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
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Oliver Sacks |
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eba407a
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The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessy to the will of of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge
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Oliver Sacks |
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e1c3184
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That which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is not part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where.
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Oliver Sacks |
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d5c5482
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I had long wanted to see "true" indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, "I want to see indigo now--now!" And then, as if thrown b..
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Oliver Sacks |
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4df9ee2
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Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful contrivances, examples of nature's imagination, natural selection, at work. Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of yea..
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Oliver Sacks |
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22fd581
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Thus higher-order memorization is a multistage process, involving the transfer of perceptions, or perceptual syntheses, from short-term to long-term memory. It is just such a transfer that fails to occur in people with temporal lobe damage.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f6bde46
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My favourite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals - my old and valued friends - Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
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Oliver Sacks |
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37bc7c6
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a 'Divine mathematics,' with which one could create the richest possible reality by the most economical means, and this, it now seemed to me, was everywhere apparent: in the beautiful economy by which millions of compounds could be made from a few dozen elements, and the hundred-odd elements from hydrogen itself; the economy by which the whole range of atoms was composed from two or three particles; and in the way that their stability and i..
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Oliver Sacks |
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45a2be6
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not so long ago, all humans heard voices--generated internally, from the right hemisphere of the brain, but perceived (by the left hemisphere) as if external, and taken as direct communications from the gods. Sometime around 1000 B.C., Jaynes proposed, with the rise of modern consciousness, the voices became internalized and recognized as our own.21
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Oliver Sacks |
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15646bc
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The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love.
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Oliver Sacks |
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92e1327
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We would sit down fifteen, sometimes twenty, to the table on seder nights: my parents; the maiden aunts - Birdie, Len, and before the war, Dora, sometimes Annie; cousins of varying degree, visiting from France or Switzerland; and always a stranger or two would come. There was a beautiful, embroidered tablecloth which Annie had brought us from Jerusalem, gleaming white and gold on the table. My mother, knowing that sooner or later there woul..
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kindness
hospitality
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Oliver Sacks |
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013136f
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Hume wrote, 'that we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.' In some sense, he had been reduced to a 'Humean' being - I could not help thinking how fascinated Hume would have been at seeing in Jimmie his own philosophical 'chimaera' incarnate, a gruesome reduction of a man to mere disconnected, incoherent flux and chan..
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Oliver Sacks |
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80e127f
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I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer--as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, but whether by sight or sound, how, he is unable to say.
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Oliver Sacks |
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d2426a3
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The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. WITTGENSTEIN
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Oliver Sacks |
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7510846
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William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Wheather the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was less of a concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious cha..
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Oliver Sacks |
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418c6a2
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For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness', or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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71b7917
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He followed this with a letter in which he spoke of the "central resonances of a peripheral injury." He went on, "You are discovering an entirely new field. . . . Please publish your observations. It may do something to alter the 'veterinary' approach to peripheral disorders, and to open the way to a deeper and more human medicine."
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Oliver Sacks |
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77c8c2b
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I monitored their medications, their often unstable neurological states, but I did my best, too, to see that they had full lives--as full as possible, given their physical limitations. I felt that trying to open up the lives of these patients, who had been immobilized and shut up in hospital for so many years, was an essential part of my role as their physician.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7d9bb3e
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That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning--a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy--was ignored or bypassed; "care" was purely mechanical and medical."
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Oliver Sacks |
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970521c
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the enhancement of evoked potentials spread forward into the left temporal lobe, which is normally regarded as purely auditory in function. This is a very remarkable and, one suspects, fundamental finding, for it suggests that what are normally auditory areas are being reallocated,
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Oliver Sacks |
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0cfd52f
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We soon discovered one strong interest that we shared; we were both fascinated by "the sixth sense," proprioception: unconscious, invisible, but arguably more vital than any or all of the other five senses put together. One could be blind and deaf, like Helen Keller, and still lead a fairly rich life, but proprioception was crucial for the perception of one's own body, the position and movement of one's limbs in space, crucial indeed for th..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e7bd48e
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I did much of my writing in a little alcove by the bar, where I could be alone, private, invisible, yet warmed and stimulated by the vivid life at the bar.
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Oliver Sacks |
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162e7b9
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My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, "I remember it exactly as you described it." But regarding the second bombing, he said, "You never saw it. You weren't there." I was staggered at Michael's words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real? "What do you mean?" I objected. "I can see it all in my mind's eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus..
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Oliver Sacks |