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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 758a5a1 | Hallucination of particularly vile smells is called cacosmia.) | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8fcfc1f | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 83035a1 | 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. | yo | Oliver Sacks | |
| 3463cf5 | 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). | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 3092052 | 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." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 048890e | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 1116c63 | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 714fee3 | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c139406 | 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. | childhood literature science science-and-arts | Oliver Sacks | |
| e17c362 | photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way. | childhood photography science | Oliver Sacks | |
| be58650 | 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. | curiosity science shyness | Oliver Sacks | |
| 9da2a2b | 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 .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 3455258 | One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as "cognitively infectious musical agents.")" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8ff7ad4 | Something wet and cold fell into her lap. Aimee jumped in surprise, jolted out of her sensual daydreams. She stared as a large trout flopped up and down on her legs. Her gaze shot toward the river. Daniel wore a wolfish grin on his face. "You threw a fish at me?" she shouted in false anger. "I can't believe you threw a fish at me!" In truth, it was hard to believe. Mr. Tall, Dark, and Scowly had actually done something funny. Imagine that. .. | Peggy L. Henderson | ||
| ae32c88 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| aa05040 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 7b8fe9b | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f6442cc | 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 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| fcb1a84 | 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" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ea9f8f4 | The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming" -- that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement." | China Miéville | ||
| ab7fc00 | 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.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 890e6d8 | Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8a79063 | If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture--the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard. | creation-myths mythology pohnpei | Oliver Sacks | |
| 88d6981 | fossilised" dream-sequences preserved as such in the cortex, precise replicas of past experience; they appear to be mnemic images which unfold, given the initial activation (epileptic, migrainous, experimental, etc.) at the same rate as the initial perceptual experience." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 035a99d | We have seen that there are two forms of stimulus which are particularly prone to evoke migrainous reactions in predisposed individuals: inordinate excitations or arousals, and inordinate inhibitions or slumps. Within certain "allowable" limits (which vary greatly from person to person), the nervous system maintains itself in a region of equilibrium, homeostatically, by means of continuous, minor, insensible adjustments; beyond these limits.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 43f81c9 | Transient states of depersonalisation are appreciably commoner during migraine auras. Freud reminds us that "... the ego is first and foremost a body-ego ... the mental projection of the surface of the body." The sense of "self" appears to be based, fundamentally, on a continuous inference from the stability of body-image, the stability of outward perceptions, and the stability of time-perception. Feelings of ego-dissolution readily and pro.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e1a9751 | She had an intense feeling for structure, the way things were put together - whether they were human bodies, or plants, or scientific instruments or machines. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 491b3be | it is not (usually) the ideas of philosophers that change reality; nor, conversely, is it the practice of ordinary people. What changes history, what kindles revolutions, is the meeting of the two. A | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 844d817 | Patients with delirium were almost always on medical or surgical wards, not on neurological or psychiatric wards, for delirium generally indicates a medical problem, a consequence of something affecting the whole body, including the brain, and it disappears as soon as the medical problem has been righted. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| eb55694 | In 1968, I read Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 2045135 | By what warrant, therefore, is such an attack to be termed an extended epilepsy rather than a quite brief and severe, let us say, a condensed migraine? | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 99f2759 | Attacks characterised by little more than malaise are likely to be regarded as mild viral illnesses. Attacks characterised by alteration of affect and consciousness--mild drowsiness or depression--may be taken for purely emotional reactions. Both | Oliver Sacks | ||
| afaaffc | many cardinal characteristics of migraine aura, in its visual (scotomatous), tactile (paraesthetic) and aphasic forms. We | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e084c5e | patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost 'abstract' and 'propositional' thought--and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia). | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 4e4b43b | Having Tourette's is wild, like being drunk all the while. Being on Haldol is dull, makes one square and sober, and neither state is really free...You 'normals', who have the right transmitters in the right places at the right times in your brains, have all feelings, all styles, available all the time--gravity, levity, whatever is appropriate. We Touretters don't: we are forced into levity by our Tourette's and forced into gravity when we t.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 32d95c8 | Ia reshil provesti eshche odin, poslednii eksperiment. Byla ranniaia vesna, pogoda stoiala kholodnaia, i ia prishel v pal'to i perchatkakh, skinuv ikh pri vkhode na divan. Vziav odnu iz perchatok, ia pokazal ee P. - Chto eto? - Pozvol'te vzglianut', - poprosil P. i, vziav perchatku, stal izuchat' ee takim zhe obrazom, kak ran'she geometricheskie figury. - Nepreryvnaia, svernutaia na sebia poverkhnost', - zaiavil on nakonets. - I vrode by tu.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 67f6039 | Okazavshis' na meste, ia obnaruzhil patsienta riadom s krovat'iu. On lezhal na polu, pristal'no razgliadyvaia svoiu nogu. V vyrazhenii ego litsa smeshivalis' gnev, trevoga, nedoumenie i veseloe izumlenie - glavnym obrazom, nedoumenie s primes'iu ispuga. Ia poprosil ego vernut'sia v postel' i spravilsia, ne nuzhna li pomoshch', odnako vse moi pros'by i rassprosy eshche bol'she vyvodili ego iz sebia. Togda ia prisel riadom s nim na pol, i vot.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 64fc92c |
Ia uzhe otmechal, chto posle publikatsii < |
Oliver Sacks | ||
| e0b57bc | The hateful mood of a migraine--depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible--tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. "Resolution by secretion" thus resembles a catharsis on both physiological and psychological levels, like weeping for grief. The" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c9eb2fc | Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 4b9251c | And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [...] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals--my old and valued friends--Tantalum, .. | manhattan science | Oliver Sacks | |
| cfc5cff | Udivitel'noe delo - ona i pobedila, i proigrala. Vosstanoviv deistvie, ona utratila bytie. Pustiv v khod vse resursy nervnoi sistemy, a takzhe voliu, muzhestvo, vyderzhku i nezavisimost', ona prisposobilas' k novoi zhizni. Stolknuvshis' s bespretsedentnoi situatsiei, ona vstupila v skhvatku so strashnym vragom i vyzhila - ogromnym napriazheniem fizicheskikh i dukhovnykh sil. Ee mozhno prichislit' k kogorte bezvestnykh geroev nevrologii. No .. | oliver sacks | ||
| 31458ce | Tourette's syndrome is seen in every race, every culture, every stratum of society; it can be recognized at a glance once one is attuned to it; and cases of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming, were recorded by Aretaeus of Cappadocia almost two thousand years ago. Yet it was not clinically delineated until 1885, when Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist--a pu.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 974ad08 | An animal, or a man, may get on very well without 'abstract attitude' but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind--yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. | Oliver Sacks |