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7629ee2
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yd@ lTbyb 'w jnH lmstshf~ lys dy'man lmkn l'fDl lmlHZ@ lmrD - 'w `l~ l'ql lys lmkn l'fDl lmlHZ@ DTrb yZhr , dh kn mnsh'h `Dwyan , bSwr@ ndf` , w tqlyd , w tshkhyS , w rdW f`l , w tf`l qd ySl l~ drj@ l ymkn tSdyqh tqryban ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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a30eb42
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She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
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Oliver Sacks |
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282472d
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yHtj lnsn l~ qS@ dkhly@ mstmr@ llHfZ `l~ nfsh whwyth *
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Oliver Sacks |
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1478cf6
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Professional musicians, in general, possess what most of us would regard as remarkable powers of musical imagery. Many composers, indeed, do not compose initially or entirely at an instrument but in their minds. There is no more extraordinary example of this than Beethoven, who continued to compose (and whose compositions rose to greater and greater heights) years after he had become totally deaf. It is possible that his musical imagery was..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c5c1eba
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Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c3d3b70
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I feel glad to be alive--"I'm glad I'm not dead!" sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect."
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Oliver Sacks |
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a94caeb
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I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz's phrase) "thick description."
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Oliver Sacks |
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899d6e2
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.... Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some mystical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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bed0513
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You keep pressing me," he said, "to say that the attacks start with this symptom or that symptom, this phenomenon or that phenomenon, but this is not the way I experience them. It doesn't start with one symptom, it starts as a whole. You feel the whole thing, quite tiny at first, right from the start.... It's like glimpsing a point, a familiar point, on the horizon, and gradually getting nearer, seeing it get larger and larger; or glimpsing..
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Oliver Sacks |
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08db6cc
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And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e77dcc6
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I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c558e74
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This is what I get very upset at...' Temple, who was driving suddenly faltered and wept. 'I've read that libraries are where immortality lies... I don't want my thoughts to die with me... I want to have done something... I'm not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution--know that my life has meaning, Right now, I'm talking about things at the very core of my experience...
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Oliver Sacks |
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8003cc2
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He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, "I no longer believe what I was about to say.")"
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Oliver Sacks |
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b7244f0
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What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e327a5d
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There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. 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. I
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Oliver Sacks |
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3230bf7
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Many patients may confess that they feel "strange" or "confused" during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware of something the matter in addition to the scintillating scotoma, paraesthesiae, etc., something so unprecedented in their experience, so difficult to describe, that it is often avoided or omitted when speaking of their complaints. Great"
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Oliver Sacks |
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e71b989
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He is man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c5f3b10
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Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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dbe7e85
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Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)
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neurology
science
tourette-s
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Oliver Sacks |
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a98ed20
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It is often felt that Darwin, more than anyone, banished "meaning" from the world--in the sense of any overall divine meaning or purpose. There is indeed no design, no plan, no blueprint in Darwin's world; natural selection has no direction or aim, nor any goal to which it strives. Darwinism, it is often said, spelled the end of teleological thinking."
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Oliver Sacks |
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cfa12bd
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And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.
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Oliver Sacks |
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30bf081
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All the trouble starts when people forget they're human.
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Oliver Sacks |
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331edb1
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We ourselves were made of the very same elements as composed the sun and stars, that some of my atoms might once have been in a distant star. But it frightened me too, made me feel that my atoms were only on loan and might fly apart at any time, fly away like the fine talcum powder I saw in the bathroom.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c7e62bc
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Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
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Oliver Sacks |
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4500f52
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I appreciated that all animals have some form of mental life that reflects the architecture of their nervous system.
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Oliver Sacks |
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0482af4
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Du Bois Reymond spoke of "a general feeling of disorder" at the very start of his attacks, and other patients speak, simply, of feeling "unsettled." In this unsettled state one may feel hot or cold, or both (see, for example, Case 9); bloated and tight, or loose and queasy; a peculiar tension, or languor, or both; there are head pains, or other pains, sundry strains and discomforts, which come and go. Everything comes and goes, nothing is s..
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Oliver Sacks |
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1273b9c
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I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined with tall, stepped houses; the old Hortus Botanicus and the beautiful seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue; the Rembrandtplein with its open-air cafes; the fresh herrings sold in the streets and eaten on the spot; and the general atmosphere o..
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Oliver Sacks |
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a9888e7
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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 . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother's . . .) --Luis Bunuel
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Oliver Sacks |
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39ff303
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Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential f..
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Oliver Sacks |
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beaae2d
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Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or "motivated" to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-creative activities, is deeply pleasurable in itself. Both the innovative and the imitative impulses come together in pretend play, often using toys or dolls or miniature replicas of real-world objects to act out new scenarios or rehearse and r..
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Oliver Sacks |
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d042c4a
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Substituirile risipisera oare senzatia absentei trupului, despre care vorbea la inceput? Catusi de putin. Ea continua sa simta, din cauza persistentei pierderii proprioceptiunii, ca trupul ei e mort, nereal, ca nu este al ei - nu poate pune stapanire pe propriul ei trup. Nu stie cum sa descrie aceasta stare, gaseste doar analogii derivate din alte simturi: <> - aces..
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Oliver Sacks |
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9a4e56f
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Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and that, even though they weren't speaking words, signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways [as you usually get them by the subtle nonverbal interactions between the players] that make the whole set of sounds a u..
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Oliver Sacks |
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b3ef9c9
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I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.
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Oliver Sacks |
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9542bb5
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Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f3b37a3
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I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech would have been absurd. It seemed the very summit of the world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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5cd42ce
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These then are tales of metamorphosis, brought about by neurological chance, but metamorphosis into alternative states of being, other forms of life, no less human for being so different.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c7e6dc2
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In 1966, after arriving in New York, I read two of Luria's books, Higher Cortical Functions in Man and Human Brain and Psychological Processes. The latter, which contained very full case histories of patients with frontal lobe damage, filled me with admiration [4]. [Footnote 4]. And fear, for as I read it, I thought, what place is there for me in the world? Luria has already seen, said, written, and thought anything I can ever say, or write..
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impostor-syndrome
neuropsychology
science
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Oliver Sacks |
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b28a22a
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n l`yd@ w lmkhtbr w jnH lmstshf~ mSmWm@ jmy`an lkbH w trkyz lslwk , n lm ykn lqSy'h klyan ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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0becd6b
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He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call 'The Great Health'--rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette's.
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Oliver Sacks |
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81a5732
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from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin ... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c5e2a64
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ymkn lTfl 'n ytb` lktb lmqds qbl 'n ytb` qylds, lys l'n lktb lmqds 'bsT (ymkn qwl l`ks) bl l'nh mTrwH b'slwb rmzy w qSSy
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Oliver Sacks |
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6d228ff
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For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of 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 well'..
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wellness
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Oliver Sacks |
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8e42c72
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Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
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philosophy
science
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Oliver Sacks |
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75d8307
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This sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perception of my patients and their lives. So much so, indeed, that I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of "health" and "disease," to see these in terms of the ability of t..
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Oliver Sacks |