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...
The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or master interpretation; the music is collectively...
The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances. —IVY MCKENZIE
The hateful mood of a migraine—depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible—tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion.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 r...
The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love.
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 tend...
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...
Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems;
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...
Similar considerations arise with regard to recovery and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or cr...
She has succeeded in operating, but not in being.
She has no words, and we lack words too. And society lacks words, and sympathy, for such states.
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.
Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say dete...
Rousseau habla de un lenguaje humano original o primordial, en el que todo tiene su nombre natural y auténtico; un lenguaje tan concreto, tan particular, que es capaz de captar la esencia, la mismidad...
PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines—elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of t...
Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but...
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.
Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.
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 messi...