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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 938182b | In the newly sighted, learning to see demands a radical change in neurological functioning and, with it, a radical change in psychological functioning, in self, in identity. The change may be experienced in literally life-and-death terms. Valvo quotes a patient of his as saying, 'One must die as a sighted person to be bom again as a blind person,' and the opposite is equally true: one must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| bf33d51 | I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize--PS50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell's bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for PS44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionar.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| dfd5495 | Whichever method is utilised--violent physical, visceral, or emotional activity--the common factor is arousal. The patient is, as it were, awoken from his migraine as if from sleep. We shall further have occasion to see, when the specific drug therapies of migraine are under discussion, that the majority of these too serve to arouse the organism from a state of physiological depression. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 7148e19 | McKenzie once called Parkinsonism "an organized chaos," and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness of the first lies in its uncertainty, its flux; the nastiness of the second in its sense of immutable heavy permanence. Typically, indeed, treatment is only possible early, before migraine has "solidified" into immovable fixed forms." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 2f0eaa6 | Now there is stillness--such a stillness as I have never heard before in all my life. Soon I shall start moving again, and perhaps I will never stop. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 1bb62b3 | The quickest way is sometimes the longest. | American Gods | ||
| a52a52b | All revelations are personal." she said. "That's why all revelations are suspect." | American Gods | ||
| 6fa6910 | We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. | American football | ||
| 84f0b8a | Our efforts to 're-connect' William all fail - even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in his quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excites and rattles him, forces him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e238018 | It remains, for me, the most powerful and elegant explanation of how we humans and our brains construct our very individual selves and worlds. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| daac0ad | The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or "maps". These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably complex, but always meaningful patterns, may change in minutes or seconds. One is reminded of C. S. Sherrington's poetic evocation of the brain as "an enchanted loom", where "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 9ce084d | He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife's head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 864843e | an octopus may have half a billion nerve cells distributed between its brain and its "arms" (a mouse, by comparison, has only 75 to 100 million). There is a remarkable degree of organization in the octopus brain, with dozens of functionally distinct lobes in the brain and similarities to the learning and memory systems of mammals. Not only are cephalopods easily trained to discriminate test shapes and objects, but some can learn by observat.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d15a68e | Day by day, week by week, the dreams, the visions, came oftener, grew deeper. They were not occasional now, but occupied most of the day. We would see her rapt, as if in a trance, her eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open but unseeing, and always a faint, mysterious smile on her face. If any one approached her, or asked her something, as the nurses had to do, she would respond at once, lucidly and courteously, but there was, even among the .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| bbce3d3 | Cualquier enfermedad introduce una duplicidad en la vida: un "ello", con sus propias necesidades, exigencias y limitaciones." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 253d68b | Henry VIII in full armor, it was said, weighed 500 pounds. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f4a53e8 | The remarkable writings of Oliver Sacks, for instance, show that the brain continually works to create and maintain the feeling of an "I" that is in control, even if there is in fact no part of the brain that can be identified as the locus of "self feeling." | Tom Butler-Bowdon | ||
| 097fbbf | Think!" cried the Professor. "This prodigious bowl was filled with ice to a depth of three hundred feet. And when we and our children are dead, seeds will have sprouted in the silt, and a young forest will nod over these stones. Here before you is one scene of a geological drama, past and future implicit in the present you perceive, and all within the span of a single human generation, and a human memory." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c24746f | I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 7f68514 | Travel now by all means--if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space. Take the prairies, for example; you're wasting your time visiting these unless you know the saga of the homesteaders, the influence of law and religion at different times, the economic problems.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| bfb84db | And go to San Francisco! It's one of the twelve most interesting cities in the world. California has immense contrasts--the utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there's beauty and interest everywhere. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| aee8758 | 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. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 6ac0861 | Increasingly now, week by week, the normal, unconscious feedback of proprioception was being replaced by an equally unconscious feedback by vision, by visual automatism and reflexes increasingly integrated and fluent. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 242cf56 | Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel--and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose--in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 9fbfcbf | A game that requires the constant conjuring of animosity. | American football | ||
| 508726d | We shall play every game to the hilt with every ounce of fiber we have in our bodies. | American football | ||
| 8ef741a | Michael was all too conscious of his condition, and when he was in his grimmest moods, he would say, "I am a doomed man," though there was a hint of the messianic in this too: he was "doomed" as all messiahs are doomed. (When my friend Ren Weschler visited him once and asked how he was, Michael replied, "I am in Little Ease." Ren looked baffled, and Michael had to explain that Little Ease was a cell in the Tower of London so small that a ma.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 380ffb0 | The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances. --IVY MCKENZIE | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 904b89f | Pride and a Daily Marathon, | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ff1b0f6 | This gave me a feeling of what seemed wrong with American medicine, that it consisted more and more of specialists. There were fewer and fewer primary care physicians, the base of the pyramid. My father and my two older brothers were all general practitioners, and I found myself feeling not like a super-specialist in migraine but like the general practitioner these patients should have seen to begin with. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e08bc3e | Specifically, he wonders - and one in turn may wonder whether these thoughts were perhaps incited by his working with patients, in a hospital, in the war - he wonders whether there might be situations or conditions which take away the certainty of the body, which do give one grounds to doubt one's body, perhaps indeed to lose one's entire body in total doubt. This thought seems to haunt his last book like a nightmare. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f1df557 | Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 437720f | When I visited Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., (it is the only university in the world for deaf and hearing-impaired students) and talked about the "hearing impaired," one of the deaf students signed, "Why don't you look at yourself as sign impaired?"4 It was a very interesting turning of the tables, because there were hundreds of students all conversing in sign, and I was the mute one who could understand nothing and communicate .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ce355f7 | dh fqd rjlun rjl w `yn, fhw y`rf nh fqd rjl w `yn. wlkn dh fqd nfs -nfsh- flys bmknh n y`rf dhlk lnh lm y`d mwjwd hnk ly`rf | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 60902e5 | Such epileptic hallucinations or dreams, Penfield showed, are never phantasies: they are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind, accompanied by the emotions which accompanied the original experience. Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by ordinary memory, suggested to Penfield that the brain retained an almost.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| b4fe73c | I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, "You're in the papers." There was a very nice essay-review in the paper which called Migraine "balanced, authoritative, brilliant," or something of the sort. But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal foll.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 4456c88 | It also gave me a feeling of vulnerability and mortality which I had not really had before. In | Oliver Sacks | ||
| efc2b3c | I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any at.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 5916713 | But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 5b93d1b | entered my life and have been with me, for better or worse, ever since. A carefree life became a careful one, to some extent. I felt this was the end of youth and that middle age was now upon me. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| ba8175b | Ci ricordano che siamo sovrasviluppati in fatto di competenza meccanica, ma manchiamo di intelligenza, intuizione, consapevolezza biologiche; ed e questo, soprattutto, che dobbiamo riguadagnare, non solamente in medicina, ma nella scienza in generale. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| b15f6a1 | cognitive | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 16bcd46 | parked the bike in a side road--and fainted. The second accident occurred at night in heavy | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8c6aef7 | But 8 years ago, he found himself unexpectedly falling in love when he was in his 77th year, with Bill Hayes, a younger American writer. He opened himself up to love and he now has someone to share his life with. His life is a lesson that it is never too late to fall in love. | Oliver Jack |