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39d3114
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The leg incident taught me in a way which I could not, perhaps, have learned otherwise about how one's body and the space around one are mapped in the brain and how this central mapping can be profoundly deranged by damage to a limb, especially if this is combined with immobilization and encasement.
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Oliver Sacks |
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eac3e33
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My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
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Oliver Sacks |
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72f9a28
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Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life's misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature.
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Oliver Sacks |
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fdc0b6f
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At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.
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Oliver Sacks |
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508c997
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When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form.... Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.
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science
nonfiction
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Oliver Sacks |
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a63dce7
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I worked with Mr. I., this was giving way to a very different vision of the brain-mind, a vision of it as essentially constructive or creative. I added that I had now started to wonder whether all perceptual qualities, including the perception of motion, were similarly constructed by the brain.73
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Oliver Sacks |
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d9d5628
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Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of "tone" within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c030b58
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As our central nervous system--and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex--grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols.... We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture (Geertz, 1973, p. 49).
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Oliver Sacks |
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8f0bed5
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I had found myself thinking of time--time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion--whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless "moments" which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain."
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Oliver Sacks |
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c12c431
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There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example, Islay by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of those who sign.
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Oliver Sacks |
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10c79eb
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The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity," Wittgenstein says. Thus it may take an outside view to show the native users of a language that their own utterances, which appear so simple and transparent to themselves, are, in fact, enormously complex and contain and conceal the vast apparatus of a true language"
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Oliver Sacks |
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b8a7a0c
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in Edelman's view, very little else is programmed or built in. A baby turtle, on hatching, is ready to go. A human baby is not ready to go; it must create all sorts of perceptual and other categorizations and use them to make sense of the world--to make an individual, personal world of its own, and to find out how to make its way in that world. Experience and experiment are crucially important here--neural Darwinism is essentially experient..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e5fc403
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Where perception of objects is concerned, Edelman likes to say, the world is not "labeled"; it does not come "already parsed into objects." We must make our perceptions through our own categorizations. "Every perception is an act of creation," as Edelman says. As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those map..
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Oliver Sacks |
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4cc0fea
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Categorization is the central task of the brain, and reentrant signaling allows the brain to categorize its own categorizations, then recategorize these, and so on. Such a process is the beginning of an enormous upward path enabling ever higher levels of thought and consciousness. Reentrant signaling might be likened to a sort of neural United Nations, in which dozens of voices are talking together, while including in their conversations a ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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7d5c4a7
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Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 "Observations" of Pierre Desloges--"
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Oliver Sacks |
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4256f10
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Darwin himself was evidently puzzled, as he wrote in The Descent of Man: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man...they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
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Oliver Sacks |
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46b2576
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With others, of whom there were no actual visual memories, there were, at one point, incontinent visual "projections" (perhaps analogous to Wright's auditory "phantasms" and the phantom limbs of amputees: such "sensory ghosts" are created by the brain when it is suddenly cut off from normal sensory input)."
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Oliver Sacks |
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052c889
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Jimmie pode redimir-se ou reencontrar-se, mesmo que seja apenas por breves instantes, atraves de uma relacao emocional, porque ele sabe que esta perdido.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b727ca7
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I found the Guam visit very important at a human level, too. While the postencephalitic patients had been put away for decades, living in a hospital, often abandoned by their families, people with lytico-bodig remained part of their family, part of their community, to the end. This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the "civilized" world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them...
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Oliver Sacks |
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2fe9c4d
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When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate--the genetic and neural fate--of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
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gratitude
life
inspirational
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Oliver Sacks |
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c4b4bad
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If one loses half the visual field from a stroke or other injury, one may or may not be aware of the loss. Monroe Cole, a neurologist, became aware of his own field loss only by doing a neurological exam on himself after his coronary bypass surgery. He was so surprised by his lack of awareness of this deficit that he published a paper about it. "Even intelligent patients," he wrote, "often are surprised when a hemianopia is demonstrated, de..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c1b5858
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My father called swimming "the elixir of life," and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die."
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Oliver Sacks |
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f9949fd
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It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
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Oliver Sacks |
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fbcdad2
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There are similar irrefutable beliefs in patients who lose the perception of their left side and the left side of space but maintain that there is nothing missing, even though we can demonstrate convincingly that they live in a hemi-universe. Such syndromes--so-called anosognosias--occur only with damage to the right half of the brain, which seems to be especially concerned with the sense of bodily identity.
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Oliver Sacks |
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24b24e6
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But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.
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Oliver Sacks |
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2142857
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Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval of genocide and relocation. In Hmong culture, there is a strong belief that night-mares can be fatal; this evil expectation, or nocebo, apparently contributed to the sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths of almost two hundred Hmong immigrants (mos..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e5e58ea
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'n 'tjrW' w'w'kWd... b'nn l shy sw~ Hzm@ 'w mjmw`@ mn Hsst mkhtlf@ ttb` b`Dh b`Dan bsr`@ l ymkn tSwWurh, wbtdfWq wHrk@ dy'mayn.
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Oliver Sacks |
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5b1c6be
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wnhy@ kl stkshfn stkwn lwSwl l~ Hyth bd'n wm`rf@ lmkn llmr@ l'wl~. (lywt)
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Oliver Sacks |
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7aff2f4
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'nt lmwsyq~ Tlm tstmr lmwsyq~ (lywt)
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Oliver Sacks |
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c1943b0
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Es usted desgraciado? --continue. --No puedo decir que lo sea. --?Disfruta de la vida? --No puedo decir que disfrute... Vacile, con miedo a estar yendo demasiado lejos, a estar desnudando a un hombre hasta dejar al descubierto alguna desesperacion oculta, inadmisible, insoportable. --No disfruta usted de la vida --repeti, un poco titubeante-- . ?Como se siente usted, entonces, respecto a la vida? --No puedo decir que sienta nada. --?Pero se..
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Oliver Sacks |
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b8320a5
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Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.
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Oliver Sacks |
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4285c00
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m` kl khTw@, wkl tqdWum, ttWs` afq lmr, wykhTw khrj `lmin mnkmsh; `lm lm ydrk 'nh kn mnkmshan l~ hdh lHdW. lqd wjdt hdh fy kl Hql, fsywlwjyan wwjwdyan.
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Oliver Sacks |
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024e32b
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I am now face to face with dying, but I am not finished with living.
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Oliver Sacks |
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3fc5758
|
Thus the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,' the 'presence,' becomes the person of God.
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Oliver Sacks |
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a66b7f0
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The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e04c29d
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Biologica, fisiologicamente, no somos distintos unos de otros; historicamente, como narraciones... somos todos unicos.
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Oliver Sacks |
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2d37bbc
|
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . .
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Oliver Sacks |
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3dca095
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In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical 'therapy' to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
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Oliver Sacks |
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5f27352
|
Though I revere good writing and art and music, it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b6028c3
|
There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.
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Oliver Sacks |
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6b7e968
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She has no words, and we lack words too. And society lacks words, and sympathy, for such states.
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Oliver Sacks |
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87066fa
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At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming and most painful.
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Oliver Sacks |
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bdcd613
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She has succeeded in operating, but not in being.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e667e9b
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I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
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Oliver Sacks |