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714f421
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I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, "Speed" and "In the River of Consciousness."
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Oliver Sacks |
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67a970b
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Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness," one of the first synoptic articles to come out of his collaboration with Christof Koch at Caltech. I felt very privileged to see this manuscript, in particular their carefully laid-out argument that an ideal way of entering this seemingly inaccessible subject would be through exploring disorders of visual perception. Crick and Koch's paper was aimed at neuroscientists and covered a vast ra..
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Oliver Sacks |
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6035ceb
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The power of music, narrative, and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing - suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or p..
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Oliver Sacks |
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2c41f5c
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Ucho w liczbach:" A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones."
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Oliver Sacks |
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9a025a2
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This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience--and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his..
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Oliver Sacks |
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8ad07c4
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Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth--it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking."
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Oliver Sacks |
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6c41737
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When traditional figures--devils, witches, or hags--are no longer believed in, new ones--aliens, visitations from "a previous life"--take their place. Hallucinations,"
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Oliver Sacks |
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b546f9a
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Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has "implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music...[but] of the evolutionary origin" of both. In particular, they see absolute pitch, whatever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Ste..
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Oliver Sacks |
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2bce0ba
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Invesmantate in acest sentiment al extazului, arzand de o adanca semnificatie divina si filozofica, viziunile lui Hildegard au contribuit la indrumarea ei catre o viata inchinata sfinteniei si misticismului. Sunt un exemplu unic pentru felul in care un eveniment fiziologic, banal, neplacut sau lipsit de sens pentru majoritatea oamenilor, poate deveni, Intr-o constiinta privilegiata, substratul unei supreme inspiratii extatice. Pentru a gasi..
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Oliver Sacks |
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8b66a5d
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Dr. Sacks treats each of his subjects--the amnesic fifty-year-old man who believes himself to be a young sailor in the Navy, the "disembodied" woman whose limbs have become alien to her, and of course the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat--with a deep respect for the unique individual living beneath the disorder. These tales inspire awe and empathy, allowing the reader to enter the uncanny worlds of those with autism, Alzheimer's, T..
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Oliver Sacks |
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3aaf631
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Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple's mind to a parallel: "I find a very high correlation," she said, "between the way animals are treated and the handicapped.... Georgia is a snake pit--they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals.... Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped."
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Oliver Sacks |
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aed64f3
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But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.
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Oliver Sacks |
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da0831a
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GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown's Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky's Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vah..
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Oliver Sacks |
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5520262
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I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday--a special bottle that could neither leak nor break--he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, "I take a little every morning for my health."
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Oliver Sacks |
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10de18c
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Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer--everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well--and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e31d1e2
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My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor man was - whether, indeed, one could speak of an 'existence', given so absolute a privation of memory or continuity.
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Oliver Sacks |
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59c7977
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I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science - focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos...create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction,
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Oliver Sacks |
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8d55e5e
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When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, 'smoked salmon and Bach.' (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same).
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Oliver Sacks |
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f17c54f
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I had returned to piano-playing and music lessons when I had turned seventy-five (having written about how even older people can learn new skills, I thought it was time to take my own advice).
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Oliver Sacks |
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2d83880
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For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c3a67c2
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All of us, at first, had high hopes of helping Jammie - he was so personable, so likable, so quick and intelligent, it was difficult to believe that he might be beyond help. But none of us had ever encountered, even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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ab5f1be
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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. I 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 ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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599afe5
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The last scene of Michael's life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he suddenly raised himself up on an elbow, said, "I'm going outside to have a smoke," and fell back dead."
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Oliver Sacks |
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d442ce4
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I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7292a9c
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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;
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Oliver Sacks |
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9751c7c
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We may see very clearly how the wrong sound, or "anti-music," is pathogenic and migrainogenic; while the right sound--proper music--is truly tranquillising, and immediately restores cerebral health. These effects are striking, and quite fundamental, and put one in mind of Novalis's aphorism: "Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution."
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Oliver Sacks |
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ddab9f8
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Visual illusions, too, fascinated me; they showed how intellectual understanding, insight, and even common sense were powerless against the force of perceptual distortions. Gibson's inverting glasses showed the power of the mind to rectify optical distortions, where visual illusions showed its inability to correct perceptual ones.
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Oliver Sacks |
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5747c3f
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Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal....
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Oliver Sacks |
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b0f460a
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You have done useful, honorable work. Come home. All is forgiven
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Oliver Sacks |
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bfbe147
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I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place--irrespective of my subject--where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoc..
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Oliver Sacks |
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dd2a1f2
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Deaf, signing parents will "babble" to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant's brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf chi..
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Oliver Sacks |
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04a6c31
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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. Another
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Oliver Sacks |
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0faefbc
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My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.
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Oliver Sacks |
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9acd908
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Did being in love itself flood the body with opioids, or cannabinoids, or whatever?
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Oliver Sacks |
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ddc69fe
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I often dream... of my parents and of my former patients - all long gone but loved and important in my life.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8518b08
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Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.
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Oliver Sacks |
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8d6939c
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If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self--himself--he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.)
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Oliver Sacks |
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d421324
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I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.
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science
mathematics
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Oliver Sacks |
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a2a9f9c
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The left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialized, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.
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Oliver Sacks |
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505d58b
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Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of 'judgment'--
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Oliver Sacks |
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3cf6655
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Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician--but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation.
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Oliver Sacks |
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56e67c7
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I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b87615f
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Vygotsky has been described--not unjustly--as "the Mozart of psychology."
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Oliver Sacks |
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143d91f
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Wystan loved medical talk, and he had a soft spot for physicians. (In his book Epistle to a Godson, there are four poems dedicated to doctors, including one to me.)
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Oliver Sacks |