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e0cb3aa
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I sometimes wonder why I have spent more than fifty years in New York, when it was the West, and especially the Southwest, which so enthralled me. I now have many ties in New York--to my patients, my students, my friends, and my analyst--but I have never felt it move me the way California did. I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, "The ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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b1674cc
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And at this point, self-stimulation of various sorts began: mental games, counting, fantasies, and, sooner or later, visual hallucinations--usually a "march" of hallucinations from simple"
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Oliver Sacks |
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30394c5
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in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.
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Oliver Sacks |
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77f4af6
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It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.
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science
creativity
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Oliver Sacks |
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e2142ea
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the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b2b4172
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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. If this is missing, we become computer-like, as Dr P. was. And, by the same token, if we delete feeling and judging, the pe..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c029799
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My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7943f6e
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Your brain is you in a way in which your heart isn't.
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Oliver Sacks |
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0b19b28
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there is no necessary dilution of reality in representation; quite the opposite, if the representation has power. Reality is conferred, re-conferred, by every original representation.
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Oliver Sacks |
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9d34e49
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After a while the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It
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Oliver Sacks |
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27a1f88
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Dangerous wellness, morbid brilliance, a deceptive euphoria with abysses beneath - THIS is the trap promised and threatened by nature - in the form of some intoxicating disorder, or by ourselves in the form of some excitant addiction.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f18bd38
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Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions. T
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Oliver Sacks |
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204df10
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My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one's own life, but others' too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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3f30cb5
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they do not 'convert' numbers into music, but actually feel them, in themselves, as 'forms', as 'tones', like the multitudinous forms that compose nature itself. They are not calculators, and their numeracy is 'iconic'. They summon up, they dwell among, strange scenes of numbers; they wander freely in great landscapes of numbers; they create, dramaturgically, a whole world made of numbers. They have, I believe, a most singular imagination -..
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Oliver Sacks |
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d47df6c
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There was a great gush of pus, and a loud bellow, followed by silence:
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Oliver Sacks |
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43b9aa4
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As he wrote, if we could "rerun" evolution, it would no doubt turn out completely differently every time."
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Oliver Sacks |
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f647ca3
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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.
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Oliver Sacks |
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b5aa885
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Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
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Oliver Sacks |
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120a0b2
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It is certain that we are not "given" reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that our language should embody our world view--the way in which we perceive and construct reality. But"
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Oliver Sacks |
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156c9c5
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In the mid-1950s, when I was in medical school, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between our neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders.
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Oliver Sacks |
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51d3384
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While Crick (and his co-workers) cracked the genetic code--a set of instructions, in general terms, for building a body--Edelman realized early that the genetic code could not specify or control the fate of every single cell in the body, that cellular development, especially in the nervous system, was subject to all sorts of contingencies--nerve cells could die, could migrate (Edelman spoke of such migrants as "gypsies"), could connect up w..
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Oliver Sacks |
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c19109c
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Experience and experiment are crucially important here--neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The
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Oliver Sacks |
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2a66995
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These were "fossil behaviors," Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now "awakened" by L-dopa.1 I"
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Oliver Sacks |
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c519472
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The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or "master" interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman's picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music. --"
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Oliver Sacks |
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ed7c57a
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Similar considerations arise with regard to recovery and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this. And
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Oliver Sacks |
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9ee2672
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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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b2b77b7
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Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.
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science
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Oliver Sacks |
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375bcf9
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Large numbers of highly qualified men and women left England in the 1950s (in the so-called brain drain), for professions and universities were crowded in England, and (as I saw when I did my neurology internship in London) brilliant and accomplished people could get stuck for years in subservient roles, never enjoying autonomy or responsibility.
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Oliver Sacks |
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fd0d429
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At sixteen, Michael was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and given twelve "treatments" of insulin shock therapy; this entailed bringing his blood sugar down so low that he lost consciousness and then restoring it with a glucose drip. This was the first line of treatment for schizophrenia in 1944, to be followed, if need be, by electroconvulsive treatment or lobotomy. The discovery of tranquilizers was still eight years in the future. Whet..
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Oliver Sacks |
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23009d9
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that nothing in biology made sense except in the light of evolution and chance, contingency. He put everything in the context of deep evolutionary time. Steve
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Oliver Sacks |
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2b34e5a
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The situation changed for Michael and for millions of other schizophrenics, for better and worse, around 1953, when the first tranquilizer--a drug called Largactil in England, Thorazine in the United States--became available. The tranquilizers could damp down and perhaps prevent the hallucinations and delusions, the "positive symptoms" of schizophrenia, but this could come at great cost to the individual."
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Oliver Sacks |
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11e722c
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A whole new way of thinking seemed to ray out from Zeki's work, and it set me thinking of the possible neural basis for consciousness in a way I had never considered before--and to realize that with our new powers of imaging the brain and our newly developed abilities to record the activity of individual neurons in living and conscious brains, we might be able to plot how and where all sorts of experiences are "constructed." This was an exh..
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Oliver Sacks |
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8755998
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Writing to him a few days later, I said that the experience was "a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor.... I never had a feeling of such incandescence."
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Oliver Sacks |
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b8dff4a
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It gave me a deeper sense of science as a communal enterprise, of scientists as a fraternal, international community, sharing and thinking on each other's work, and of Crick himself as a sort of hub, in touch with everyone in this neuroscientific world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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6e8a983
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In England, one was classified (working class, middle class, upper class, whatever) as soon as one opened one's mouth; one did not mix, one was not at ease, with people of a different class--a system which, if implicit, was nonetheless as rigid, as uncrossable, as the caste system in India.
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Oliver Sacks |
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aaafc3a
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It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the Petromyzon. Nevertheless it does seem to be the case." In"
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Oliver Sacks |
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8e44b64
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Natural selection almost always builds on what went before.... It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in simple mathematical form, and they are probably the same throughout the universe. The laws of biology, by contrast, are often only broad generalizations, since they describe rather elaborate (chemical) mechanisms that natural selection has e..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e81df96
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Ralph pointed out his car to me, its license plate bearing just four letters, A T G C--the four nucleotides of DNA--and
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Oliver Sacks |
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0b50724
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His closed-eye appearances had deceived many visitors, I was told, but they might then find, to their cost, that these closed eyes veiled the sharpest attention, the clearest and deepest mind, they were ever likely to encounter. On
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Oliver Sacks |
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e344998
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Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up.... Both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London.
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Oliver Sacks |
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1b6096c
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In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:
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Oliver Sacks |
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8351593
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In 1986, I read a remarkable article by Israel Rosenfield in The New York Review of Books in which he discussed the revolutionary work and views of Gerald M. Edelman. Edelman was nothing if not bold. "We are at the beginning of"
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Oliver Sacks |
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ae0fb3e
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In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.
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Oliver Sacks |
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ebda797
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I did not seem to have any special project to animate me.
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Oliver Sacks |