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2bebc7f
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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 projection of something deficient or inhibited in myself? I once heard a radio progra..
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Oliver Sacks |
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44064e3
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Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact
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Oliver Sacks |
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c3a94ad
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Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a "narrative" and is defined by this narrative."
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Oliver Sacks |
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4c2f1d3
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Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we mi..
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Oliver Sacks |
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cdcd154
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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 This moving and frightening segment in Bunuel's recently tran..
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Oliver Sacks |
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f4b2e65
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A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being . . . It is here . . . you may touch him, and see a profound change.' Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.
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Oliver Sacks |
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ee5a253
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That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even "dissociations") that people have to music.146 There are many of us who lack some of the perceptual or cognitive abilities to appreciate music but nonetheless enjoy it hugely, and enthusiastically bawl out tunes, sometimes shockingly off-key, in a way that gives us great ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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7160aae
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We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?"
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Oliver Sacks |
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56f475a
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Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr P.'s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable--of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular,
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Oliver Sacks |
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1211f85
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Is there any reason, we must wonder, why particular songs (or scenes) are 'selected' by particular patients for reproduction in their hallucinatory seizures?
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Oliver Sacks |
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6ebfab1
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God thinks in numbers,' Auntie Len used to say. 'Numbers are the way the world is put together.
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Oliver Sacks |
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d62fd98
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I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight
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Oliver Sacks |
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b90b651
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One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes.
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Oliver Sacks |
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e49837e
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had been so damaged emotionally by isolation (and in one case institutionalization as well) that they had become withdrawn and inaccessible, had turned against communication, and were no longer open to any attempts to establish formal language.
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Oliver Sacks |
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c9df25b
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Some sense of ongoing, of "next," is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless moment. And whereas for the rest of us the present is given its meaning and depth by the past (hence it becomes the "remembered present," in Gerald Edelman's term), as well as being given potential and tension by the future, for Greg it was flat and (in its meager way) c..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e7e20ef
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Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.
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Oliver Sacks |
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4517085
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Even worse, this sort of pain had an affective component all its own, which I found difficult to describe, a quality of agony, of anguish, of horror--words which still do not catch its essence. Neuralgic pain cannot be "embraced," fought against, or accommodated. It crushes one into a quivering, almost mindless sort of pulp; all one's powers of will, one's very identity, disappear under the assault of such pain. I"
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Oliver Sacks |
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e14ab8f
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Thinking of my schizophrenic brother, Michael, I asked Shengold if I too was schizophrenic. "No," he answered. Was I then, I asked, "merely neurotic"? "No," he answered. I left it there, we left it there, and there it has been left for the last forty-nine years. --"
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Oliver Sacks |
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ef3ff69
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I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is "hardwired" or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain."
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Oliver Sacks |
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7a69774
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If the last few decades have seen a surge or resurgence of ambiguous memory and identity syndromes, they have also led to important research--forensic, theoretical, and experimental--on the malleability of memory. Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist and memory researcher, has documented a disquieting success in implanting false memories by simply suggesting to a subject that he has experienced a fictitious event. Such pseudo-events, invented..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e65984d
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In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes. And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took o..
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Oliver Sacks |
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8ef300a
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Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger's not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs.
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Oliver Sacks |
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359e203
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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. Steve
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Oliver Sacks |
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e4767c1
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Tranquilizers have little or no effect on the "negative" symptoms of schizophrenia--withdrawal, flattening of affect, etc.--which, in their insidious, chronic way, can be more debilitating, more undermining of life, than any positive symptoms. It is a question of not just medication but the whole business of living a meaningful and enjoyable life--with support systems, community, self-respect, and being respected by others--which has to be ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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de254be
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They were all, in a sense, amateurs--self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution--and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world
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Oliver Sacks |
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abdeeaa
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The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.
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Oliver Sacks |
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dfdeb45
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Though the tendency to tic is innate in Tourette's, the particular form of tics often has a personal or historical origin. Thus a name, a sound, a visual image, a gesture, perhaps seen years before and forgotten, may first be unconsciously echoed or imitated and then preserved in the stereotypic form of a tic. Such tics are like hieroglyphic, petrified residues of the past and may indeed, with the passage of time, become so hieroglyphic, so..
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Oliver Sacks |
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5f92550
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Gooddy refers here to "personal" time, as contrasted with "clock" time, and the extent to which personal time departs from clock time may become almost unbridgeable with the extreme bradykinesia common in postencephalitic parkinsonism. I would often see my patient Miron V. sitting in the hallway outside my office. He would appear motionless, with his right arm often lifted, sometimes an inch or two above his knee, sometimes near his face. W..
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Oliver Sacks |
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159ba76
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The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.
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Oliver Sacks |
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9e2df41
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Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per cent, according to Selby and Lance) of adult migraine sufferers experienced severe motion-sickness in
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Oliver Sacks |
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e2e97ca
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Chorea--a twinkling movement or motor scintillation--does not have its origin in the cerebral cortex, but in the deeper parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and upper brainstem, which are the parts that mediate normal awakening. Thus these observations of chorea during migraine support the notion that migraine is a form of arousal disorder, something located in the strange borderlands of sleep--a disorder which has its origin deep in the b..
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Oliver Sacks |
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156a115
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While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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3e00ba6
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in these few minutes one gets an overwhelming impression of the absolute identity of Body and Mind, and the fact that our highest functions--consciousness and self--are not entities, self-sufficient, "above" the body, but neuropsychological constructs--processes--dependent on the continuity of bodily experience and its integration."
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Oliver Sacks |
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f682313
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I]t 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.
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nostalgia
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Oliver Sacks |
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0f59359
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It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by "lysis," a gradual abatement of the suffering accompanied by one or more secretory activities. As"
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Oliver Sacks |
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0e72b5c
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there is a world of difference between complexity and anarchy. The weather is complex, it is not anarchic.
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Oliver Sacks |
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437f4bd
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By asking why, by seeking meaning (not in any final sense, but in the immediate sense of use or purpose), Darwin found in his botanical work the strongest evidence for evolution and natural selection. And in doing so, he transformed botany itself from a purely descriptive discipline into an evolutionary science. Botany, indeed, was the first evolutionary science, and Darwin's botanical work was to lead the way to all the other evolutionary ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e0cea5f
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What could we do? What should we do? 'There are no prescriptions,' Luria wrote, 'in a case like this. Do whatever your ingenuity and your heart suggest. There is little or no hope of any recovery in his memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being - matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to tou..
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neurology
medicine
psychology
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Oliver Sacks |
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17ca7a2
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a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, "Doesn't a day like this make you glad to be alive?" to which Beckett answered, "I wouldn't go as far as that.")"
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Oliver Sacks |
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5495bb2
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Thus Aretaeus describes it, under the name of Heterocrania: And in certain cases the whole head is pained, and the pain is sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left side, or the forehead, or the fontanelle; and such attacks shift their place during the same day ... This is called Heterocrania, an illness by no means mild ... It occasions unseemly and dreadful symptoms ... nausea; vomiting of bilious matters; collapse of the patient ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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247031b
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Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: 'I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.
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Oliver Sacks |
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a51da38
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The old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery -- half-appalled, half-amused -- seeing for the first time exactly what is wrong and, in the same moment, exactly what there is to be done. This is the therapeutic moment.
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Oliver Sacks |
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16f68eb
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To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.
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Oliver Sacks |
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bf315bc
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The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.
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Oliver Sacks |