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3ebc933
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a 'musical epilepsy' or a 'personal epilepsy' would seem a contradiction in terms. And yet such epilepsies do occur, though solely in the context of temporal lobe seizures, epilepsies of the reminiscent part of the brain.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f63e44f
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What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here--that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely
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Oliver Sacks |
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5f383a4
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And I myself was wrung with emotion -- it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his life lost in limbo, dissolving.
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Oliver Sacks |
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2ad4413
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The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty - simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else.
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Oliver Sacks |
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349966a
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PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines--elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of the attack, and states of euphoric rebound. Any or all of these may be abstracted as isolated periodic symptoms of relatively short duration--some hours, or at most two or three days, and as such may present themselves as primary emotional diso..
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Oliver Sacks |
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dca7e16
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You care, you really care for me!" "Of course," Eric said. "How could you doubt it?" But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to America fifty years ago, that I see how deeply they did care. And perhaps how deeply many others have cared for me--was the imagined lack of caring by others a ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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0fb8114
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This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or
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Oliver Sacks |
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ed99327
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Far commoner, and perhaps the most intolerable of all aura symptoms, is intense sudden vertigo accompanied by staggering, overwhelming nausea, and frequently vomiting. The
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Oliver Sacks |
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8f2f70b
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To what extent are we the authors, the creators of our own experiences? How much are these predetermined by the brains or senses we are born with, and to what extent do we shape our brains through experience? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness may cast an unexpected light on these questions. Going blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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db0acfa
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Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. The..
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Oliver Sacks |
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7e6af0a
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being.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e8d7109
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This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self became nobody.
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Oliver Sacks |
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369f887
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I had no room now for this fear, or for any other fear, because I was filled to the brim with music. And even when it was not literally (audibly) music, there was the music of my muscle-orchestra playing -- "the silent music of the body," in Harvey's lovely phrase. With this playing, the musicality of my motion, I myself became the music -- "You are the music, while the music lasts." A creature of muscle, motion and music, all inseparable a..
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introspective
poetic
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Oliver Sacks |
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d8f78b0
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Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description."
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indescribable
migraines
migraineur
neurology
migraine
headaches
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Oliver Sacks |
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8cbfb71
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Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8aef46d
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The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone
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music
practice
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Oliver Sacks |
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366fa3a
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Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,"
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Oliver Sacks |
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659f0b4
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The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear--she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything--she tends to be treated as a phoney or a fool.
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Oliver Sacks |
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d19b5f1
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As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?'--and
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Oliver Sacks |
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25a9b78
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cannot pretend I am without fear. But 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; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privil..
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Oliver Sacks |
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2c2b47a
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The structure of chaos is not static but dynamic;
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Oliver Sacks |
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bc12549
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the complex integration of the three secret senses: the labyrinthine, the proprioceptive, and the visual. It is this synthesis that is impaired in Parkinsonism. The
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Oliver Sacks |
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35f5f92
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Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7271163
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The "mare" in "nightmare" originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called "Old Hag" in Newfoundland)."
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Oliver Sacks |
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3c34d29
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I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.
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Oliver Sacks |
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d8e4769
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If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoievski in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as 'portals' to the beyond or the unknown?
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Oliver Sacks |
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44c62f0
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Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity--manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly
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Oliver Sacks |
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9c8e3d2
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Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems--and sometimes choices--of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves--questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8a0463d
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At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.
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Oliver Sacks |
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5f9acb9
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At some second transcendent moment in evolution, Edelman proposed, the development of "higher-order consciousness" was made possible in humans (and perhaps a few other species including apes and dolphins) by a higher level of reentrant signaling. Higher-order consciousness brings an unprecedented power of generalization and reflection, of recognizing past and future, so that finally self-consciousness, the awareness of being a self in the w..
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Oliver Sacks |
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365470a
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Where was I? What had been done? I replied that I was in the recovery room and that he had detached the lateral rectus muscle of the right eye and attached the plaque containing radioiodine (I-125, to be precise) to the sclera. I said that I was sorry it was not radioactive ruthenium instead of iodine (I have a thing for the platinum metals) but that 125, at least, was memorable for being the smallest number that was the sum of two squares ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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084e646
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when the attack is "due" (or a little overdue), it will occur, explosively, whether or not there is any provocation."
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Oliver Sacks |
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ef54059
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I wondered if what one normally calls "normal" was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emergent from the dark night and abyss, there was an intoxication of light and love and health."
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Oliver Sacks |
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9b51115
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There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable - and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia - for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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a9d56c8
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When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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7ce6593
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An animal, or a man, may get on very well without 'abstract attitude' but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind--
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Oliver Sacks |
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98a4ee9
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While some of these near-death experiences are marked by a sense of helplessness and passivity, even dissociation, in others there is an intense sense of immediacy and reality, and a dramatic acceleration of thought and perception and reaction, which allow one to negotiate danger successfully. Noyes and Kletti describe a jet pilot who faced almost certain death when his plane was improperly launched from its carrier: "I vividly recalled, in..
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Oliver Sacks |
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ba2ac76
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I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, "Hello!" It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, "Hello, yourself," and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters..
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Oliver Sacks |
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1cd0f4b
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There are no files in my memory that are repressed,' she asserted. 'You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they're blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors--nothing is hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can't bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn't generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippoc..
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temple-grandin
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Oliver Sacks |
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ea03474
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Se abrian a sus pies continuamente abismos de amnesia, pero el los salvaba, con ingenio, mediante rapidas fabulaciones y ficciones de todo tipo. Para el no eran ficciones, era como veia de pronto o interpretaba el mundo. El flujo incesante y la incoherencia del mundo no podia tolerarlos, no podia admitirlos ni un instante... substituia aquella cuasicoherencia extrana y delirante, con la que el senor Thomson, con sus invenciones continuas, i..
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Oliver Sacks |
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4d4f952
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For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone's life.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b4bb00f
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Physiological confirmation of such "filling in" by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory cortex while their subjects listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replaced by gaps of silence. The silent gaps embedded in familiar songs were not consciously noticed by their subjects, but the researchers..
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Oliver Sacks |
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fa06e71
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Culture is as crucial as Nature.
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Oliver Sacks |
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63b7543
|
My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special 'cry'. 'It's due to deformation of the crystal structure,' she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
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science
childhood
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Oliver Sacks |