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76de3d7
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But the feeling of a limb as a sensory and motor part of oneself seems to be innate, built-in, hardwired--and this supposition is supported by the fact that people born without limbs may nonetheless have vivid phantoms in their place.4
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Oliver Sacks |
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d7ec371
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An alcoholic has a personality change after a drink or two, but a drunk can drink as much as he wants. I'm a drunk.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f9e5786
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A magic realm of timelessness had been inserted into time, an intensity of newness and presentness, of the sort usually devoured by past and future. Suddenly, wonderfully, I fount myself exempted from the nagging pressures of past and future and savoring the infinite gift of a complete and perfect now.
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Oliver Sacks |
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819216b
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67.What Jacob discovered in himself has similarities to a phenomenon reported in experimental animals by Arnaud Norena and Jos Eggermont in 2005. They found that cats exposed to "noise trauma" and then raised for a few weeks in a quiet environment developed not only hearing loss but distorted tonotopic maps in the primary auditory cortex. (They would have complained of pitch distortion, were they able to.) If, however, the cats were exposed..
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Oliver Sacks |
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cea66a1
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He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin.
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Oliver Sacks |
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782114f
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As I demonstrated this on Bob, he fell backwards onto me, completely inert and passive, with no hint of any reflexive reaction. Startled, I pushed him gently forward to the upright position, but now he started to topple forward; I could not balance him. I had a sense of bewilderment mixed with panic. For a moment, I thought that there had suddenly been a neurological catastrophe, that he had actually lost all his postural reflexes. Could ac..
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Oliver Sacks |
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d2d0907
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the delirious visions when they came to him may have owed something to opium as well as to a high temperature, since opium was then a normal remedy for ague or malaria.
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Oliver Sacks |
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0dc2e0f
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who could have dreamed that in this blind, palsied woman, hidden away, inactivated, over-protected all her life, there lay the germ of an astonishing artistic sensibility (unsuspected by her, as by others) that would germinate and blossom into a rare and beautiful reality, after remaining dormant, blighted, for sixty years? Postscript
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Oliver Sacks |
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c4e5374
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Rousseau habla de un lenguaje humano original o primordial, en el que todo tiene su nombre natural y autentico; un lenguaje tan concreto, tan particular, que es capaz de captar la esencia, la mismidad de todo; tan espontaneo que expresa directamente todas las emociones; tan transparente que no caben en el evasivas ni enganos. En este lenguaje no habria logica ni gramatica ni metaforas ni abstracciones (ni necesidad de ellas, en realidad); n..
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Oliver Sacks |
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e442f65
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It was backbreaking, round-the-clock work, and it made us realize how hard the nurses and aides and orderlies worked in their normal routines, but we managed to prevent skin breakdown or any other problems among the more than five hundred patients. Work
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Oliver Sacks |
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73a2ad7
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Experientia docet,
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Oliver Sacks |
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75379f1
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The Allegory of the Wolf Boy" ("At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity")."
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Oliver Sacks |
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5370ed3
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There is no need," he said, suddenly getting serious, "to get dead drunk, pass out, and lie in the gutter. This is a very sad--even dangerous--thing to do. I hope you will never do it again."
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Oliver Sacks |
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19d3eb7
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Requiem. A young neurophysiologist, Ralph Siegel, chanced to be sitting a few rows behind me; we had seen each other briefly the previous year when I had visited the Salk Institute, where he was one of Francis Crick's proteges. When Ralph saw that I had a notebook on my lap and was writing nonstop throughout the concert, he knew the bulky figure ahead of him had to be me.
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Oliver Sacks |
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44cabee
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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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c4a77a9
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All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.
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Oliver Sacks |
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72af254
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Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence?
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Oliver Sacks |
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25fe5d3
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The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture is so different: so completely sun-oriented, sky-oriented, wind- and weather-oriented, as a start. The buildings face outward, life faces outward, whereas in Greece and Rome the focus is inward:
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Oliver Sacks |
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670d90b
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This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.
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Oliver Sacks |
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a43aea1
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Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems;
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Oliver Sacks |
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ef6acc0
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I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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075e8dc
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Nie dostrzegamy pewnych aspektow najwazniejszych dla nas spraw z powodu ich prostoty i tego, ze bardzo dobrze je znamy. (Nie mozna pewnych rzeczy spostrzec, poniewaz wciaz ma sie je przed oczami.) Czlowiek nie zdaje sobie sprawy z prawdziwych fundamentow swoich dociekan.
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Oliver Sacks |
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605f494
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Nao havera ninguem como nos quando partirmos, mas pensando bem nunca uma pessoa e como outra. Quem morre nao pode ser substituido. Deixa lacunas que nao podem ser preenchidas, pois e o destino - destino genetico e neural - de todo ser humano ser um individuo unico, encontrar seu proprio caminho, viver sua propria vida, morrer sua propria morte.
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inspiração
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Oliver Sacks |
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fc83e5b
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Jednym z ulubionych slow neurologii jest ,,deficyt". Oznacza ono zaburzenie lub brak funkcji neurologicznej: utrate mowy, zdolnosci porozumiewania sie, pamieci, wzroku, sprawnosci fizycznej, poczucia tozsamosci i tysiac innych strat i niedostatkow okreslonych zdolnosci. Dla wszystkich tych dysfunkcji (inny ulubiony termin) mamy caly zestaw oznaczajacych braki slowek: afonia, afemia, afazja, alek-sja, apraksja, agnozja, amnezja, ataksja -- o..
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Oliver Sacks |
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758a5a1
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Hallucination of particularly vile smells is called cacosmia.)
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Oliver Sacks |
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8fcfc1f
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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 of writing. My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.
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Oliver Sacks |
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83035a1
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Para ser nosotros mismos hemos de tenernos a nosotros mismos, hemos de poseer, de reposeer si es preciso, nuestras historias biograficas. Hemos de <> nosotros mismos el drama interior, la narracion, la nuestra, de de nostros mismos. El individuo necesita esa narracion, una narracion interior continua, para mantener su identidad, su yo.
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yo
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Oliver Sacks |
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3463cf5
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This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a 'motor individual' (Sherrington's term for the person who emerges through acts).
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Oliver Sacks |
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3092052
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She hoped I would send her some of my papers on neurology, "of which I'll understand not one word, but will glow with loving pride at my ridiculous, brilliant and altogether delightful nephew."
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Oliver Sacks |
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048890e
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what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? It
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Oliver Sacks |
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1116c63
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I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater pound-ages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at--the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym--"Sacks and his fives." I didn't realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encoura..
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Oliver Sacks |
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714fee3
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The drowsiness which often accompanies or precedes a severe common migraine is occasionally abstracted as a symptom in its own right, and may then constitute the sole expression of the migrainous tendency. The
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Oliver Sacks |
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c139406
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A union of literary and scientific cultures - there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.
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literature
science
science-and-arts
childhood
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Oliver Sacks |
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e17c362
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photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.
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photography
science
childhood
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Oliver Sacks |
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be58650
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I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me 'diffident') and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.
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science
shyness
curiosity
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Oliver Sacks |
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9da2a2b
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The tritone - an augmented fourth (or, in hazz parlance, a flatted fifth) - is a difficult interval to sing and has often been regarded as having an ugly, uncanny, or even diabolical quality. Its use was forbidden in early ecclesiastical music, and early theorists called it diabolus in musica ("the devil in music"). But Tartini used it, for this very reason, in his Devil's Trill Sonata for violin. Though the raw tritone sounds so harsh, it ..
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Oliver Sacks |
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3455258
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One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as "cognitively infectious musical agents.")"
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Oliver Sacks |
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ae32c88
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They saw it as a food of the gods, and believed that the cacao tree originally grew only in Paradise, but was stolen and brought to mankind by their god Quetzalcoatl, who descended from heaven on a beam of the morning star, carrying a cacao tree.
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Oliver Sacks |
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aa05040
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The best way of doing this, I found, was to write, to describe the hallucination in clear, almost clinical detail, and, in so doing, become an observer, even an explorer, not a helpless victim of the craziness inside me.
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Oliver Sacks |
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7b8fe9b
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Compact and clearly defined at its center, migraine diffuses outwards until it merges with an immense surrounding field of allied phenomena. The only boundaries which exist are those which we are forced to adopt for nosological clarity and clinical action. We construct such boundaries and limits, for there is none in the subject itself.
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Oliver Sacks |
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f6442cc
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A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it. And
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Oliver Sacks |
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fcb1a84
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Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal)." No"
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Oliver Sacks |
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ab7fc00
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Temple started to become excited. 'I want to get this out before you get to the airport,' she said, with a sort of urgency. She had been brought up an Episcopalian, she told me, but had rather early 'given up orthodox belief' - belief in any personal deity or intention - in favour of a more 'scientific' notion of God. 'I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe - not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe..
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Oliver Sacks |
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890e6d8
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Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates.
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Oliver Sacks |