Is there any reason, we must wonder, why particular songs (or scenes) are ‘selected’ by particular patients for reproduction in their hallucinatory seizures?
In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.
I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in t...
I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) thi...
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 tryi...
I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, Speed and In the River of Consciousness.
I feel glad to be alive—I’m glad I’m not dead! sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.
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—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I wen...
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 oct...
He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him sudd...
He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’—rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.
Having Tourette's is wild, like being drunk all the while. Being on Haldol is dull, makes one square and sober, and neither state is really free...You 'normals', who have the right transmitters in the...
Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have rema...
Even worse, this sort of pain had an affective component all its own, which I found difficult to describe, a quality of agony, of anguish, of horror—words which still do not catch its essence. Neuralg...
Dr. Sacks treats each of his subjects—the amnesic fifty-year-old man who believes himself to be a young sailor in the Navy, the disembodied woman whose limbs have become alien to her, and of course th...
Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music…[but] of the evolutionary origin...
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
Dangerous wellness, morbid brilliance, a deceptive euphoria with abysses beneath – THIS is the trap promised and threatened by nature – in the form of some intoxicating disorder, or by ourselves in th...
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 in...
Categorization is the central task of the brain, and reentrant signaling allows the brain to categorize its own categorizations, then recategorize these, and so on. Such a process is the beginning of...