1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
5671
5672
5673
5674
5675
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9687b8e | Football doesn't build character. It eliminates weak ones. | American football | ||
| 893c07e | When the going gets tough, the tough get going. | American football | ||
| 422acce | Cortical maps are dynamic, and can change as circumstances alter. Many of us have experienced this, getting a new pair of glasses or a new hearing aid. At first the new glasses or hearing aids seem intolerable, distorting - but within days or hours, our brain adapts to them, and we can make full use of our new new optically or acoustically improved senses. It is similar with the brain's mapping of the body image, which adapts quite rapidly .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 0b05865 | In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind.62 This sort of singing language of meanings, without individual words as we understand them, he calls Hmmm (for holistic-mimetic-musical-multimodal)--and it depen.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f0d0e2d | too-muchness had no doubt been noticed at school, for it was around this time that I received a school report that said, 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| a3c7d4d | read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the 'memory hole' peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 165ba99 | Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been forged in the fires of psychosis. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f612411 | The sense of personal space, of the self in relation to other objects and other people, tends to be markedly altered in Tourette's syndrome. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 4b1c66d | To be ourselves we must have ourselves--possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| eba407a | The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessy to the will of of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e1c3184 | That which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is not part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d5c5482 | I had long wanted to see "true" indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, "I want to see indigo now--now!" And then, as if thrown b.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 4df9ee2 | Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful contrivances, examples of nature's imagination, natural selection, at work. Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of yea.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 22fd581 | Thus higher-order memorization is a multistage process, involving the transfer of perceptions, or perceptual syntheses, from short-term to long-term memory. It is just such a transfer that fails to occur in people with temporal lobe damage. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| f6bde46 | My favourite 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, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 37bc7c6 | a 'Divine mathematics,' with which one could create the richest possible reality by the most economical means, and this, it now seemed to me, was everywhere apparent: in the beautiful economy by which millions of compounds could be made from a few dozen elements, and the hundred-odd elements from hydrogen itself; the economy by which the whole range of atoms was composed from two or three particles; and in the way that their stability and i.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 45a2be6 | not so long ago, all humans heard voices--generated internally, from the right hemisphere of the brain, but perceived (by the left hemisphere) as if external, and taken as direct communications from the gods. Sometime around 1000 B.C., Jaynes proposed, with the rise of modern consciousness, the voices became internalized and recognized as our own.21 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 15646bc | The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 92e1327 | We would sit down fifteen, sometimes twenty, to the table on seder nights: my parents; the maiden aunts - Birdie, Len, and before the war, Dora, sometimes Annie; cousins of varying degree, visiting from France or Switzerland; and always a stranger or two would come. There was a beautiful, embroidered tablecloth which Annie had brought us from Jerusalem, gleaming white and gold on the table. My mother, knowing that sooner or later there woul.. | hospitality kindness | Oliver Sacks | |
| 56da8ae | Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist on Mars, | Steve Silberman | ||
| 013136f | Hume wrote, 'that we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.' In some sense, he had been reduced to a 'Humean' being - I could not help thinking how fascinated Hume would have been at seeing in Jimmie his own philosophical 'chimaera' incarnate, a gruesome reduction of a man to mere disconnected, incoherent flux and chan.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 80e127f | I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer--as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, but whether by sight or sound, how, he is unable to say. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d2426a3 | The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. WITTGENSTEIN | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 7510846 | William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Wheather the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was less of a concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious cha.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 418c6a2 | For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness', or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too .. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 71b7917 | He followed this with a letter in which he spoke of the "central resonances of a peripheral injury." He went on, "You are discovering an entirely new field. . . . Please publish your observations. It may do something to alter the 'veterinary' approach to peripheral disorders, and to open the way to a deeper and more human medicine." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 77c8c2b | I monitored their medications, their often unstable neurological states, but I did my best, too, to see that they had full lives--as full as possible, given their physical limitations. I felt that trying to open up the lives of these patients, who had been immobilized and shut up in hospital for so many years, was an essential part of my role as their physician. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 7d9bb3e | That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning--a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy--was ignored or bypassed; "care" was purely mechanical and medical." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 970521c | the enhancement of evoked potentials spread forward into the left temporal lobe, which is normally regarded as purely auditory in function. This is a very remarkable and, one suspects, fundamental finding, for it suggests that what are normally auditory areas are being reallocated, | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 0cfd52f | We soon discovered one strong interest that we shared; we were both fascinated by "the sixth sense," proprioception: unconscious, invisible, but arguably more vital than any or all of the other five senses put together. One could be blind and deaf, like Helen Keller, and still lead a fairly rich life, but proprioception was crucial for the perception of one's own body, the position and movement of one's limbs in space, crucial indeed for th.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| e7bd48e | I did much of my writing in a little alcove by the bar, where I could be alone, private, invisible, yet warmed and stimulated by the vivid life at the bar. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 162e7b9 | My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, "I remember it exactly as you described it." But regarding the second bombing, he said, "You never saw it. You weren't there." I was staggered at Michael's words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real? "What do you mean?" I objected. "I can see it all in my mind's eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 39d3114 | The leg incident taught me in a way which I could not, perhaps, have learned otherwise about how one's body and the space around one are mapped in the brain and how this central mapping can be profoundly deranged by damage to a limb, especially if this is combined with immobilization and encasement. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| eac3e33 | My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 72f9a28 | Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life's misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| fdc0b6f | At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 508c997 | When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form.... Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there. | nonfiction science | Oliver Sacks | |
| a63dce7 | I worked with Mr. I., this was giving way to a very different vision of the brain-mind, a vision of it as essentially constructive or creative. I added that I had now started to wonder whether all perceptual qualities, including the perception of motion, were similarly constructed by the brain.73 | Oliver Sacks | ||
| d9d5628 | Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of "tone" within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of.. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c030b58 | As our central nervous system--and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex--grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols.... We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture (Geertz, 1973, p. 49). | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 8f0bed5 | I had found myself thinking of time--time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion--whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless "moments" which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain." | Oliver Sacks | ||
| c12c431 | There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example, Islay by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of those who sign. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| 10c79eb | The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity," Wittgenstein says. Thus it may take an outside view to show the native users of a language that their own utterances, which appear so simple and transparent to themselves, are, in fact, enormously complex and contain and conceal the vast apparatus of a true language" | Oliver Sacks | ||
| b8a7a0c | in Edelman's view, very little else is programmed or built in. A baby turtle, on hatching, is ready to go. A human baby is not ready to go; it must create all sorts of perceptual and other categorizations and use them to make sense of the world--to make an individual, personal world of its own, and to find out how to make its way in that world. Experience and experiment are crucially important here--neural Darwinism is essentially experient.. | Oliver Sacks |