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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 375bcf9 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| fd0d429 | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 23009d9 | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d6f09f7 | Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. | American Civil War | ||
| 2b34e5a | 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." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 11e722c | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8755998 | 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." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| b8dff4a | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 6e8a983 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| aaafc3a | 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" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8e44b64 | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e81df96 | Ralph pointed out his car to me, its license plate bearing just four letters, A T G C--the four nucleotides of DNA--and | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 0b50724 | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e344998 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 1b6096c | In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology: | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8351593 | 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" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| cd48fcc | Santiago de Cuba | cuba cuban-history santiago | Captain Hank Bracker | |
| ae0fb3e | In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ebda797 | I did not seem to have any special project to animate me. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 76de3d7 | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d7ec371 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f9e5786 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 819216b | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| cea66a1 | He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 920c85f | There was a hubbub in Billy's head all night. He would hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush. He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, a tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc.. | China Miéville | ||
| 782114f | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d2d0907 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 0dc2e0f | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c4e5374 | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e442f65 | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 73a2ad7 | Experientia docet, | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 75379f1 | 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")." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 5370ed3 | 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." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 19d3eb7 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 44cabee | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c4a77a9 | All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 72af254 | 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? | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 25fe5d3 | 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: | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 670d90b | This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| a43aea1 | Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems; | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ef6acc0 | 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 .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 075e8dc | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 605f494 | 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. | inspiração | Oliver Sacks | |
| fc83e5b | 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.. | Oliver Sacks |