Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, one of the first synoptic articles to come out of his collaboration with Christof Koch at Caltech. I felt very privileged to see this manuscript, in...
To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of...
To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.
Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per ce...
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 oc...
This usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and … I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes,...
This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or
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 fath...
This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the civilized world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.
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 w...
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 be...
There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.
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.
There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider bec...
There are similar irrefutable beliefs in patients who lose the perception of their left side and the left side of space but maintain that there is nothing missing, even though we can demonstrate convi...
There are no files in my memory that are repressed,' she asserted. 'You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors—nothing is hidde...
The mare in nightmare originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called Old Hag in Newfoundland).
The ‘secret’ of Shostakovich, it was suggested—by a Chinese neurologist, Dr Dajue Wang—was the presence of a metallic splinter, a mobile shell-fragment, in his brain, in the temporal horn of the left...
The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.
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...