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 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 ‘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 old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery — h...
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 profoun...
The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he su...
The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote...
The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture is so different: so completely sun-oriented, sky-oriented, wind- and...
The Allegory of the Wolf Boy (At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity).
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.
That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even dissociations) that people h...
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.
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 ‘...
Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and s...
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a b...
Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.
Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
It gave me a deeper sense of science as a communal enterprise, of scientists as a fraternal, international community, sharing and thinking on each other’s work, and of Crick himself as a sort of hub,...