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...
Experience and experiment are crucially important here—neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The
Du Bois Reymond spoke of a general feeling of disorder at the very start of his attacks, and other patients speak, simply, of feeling unsettled. In this unsettled state one may feel hot or cold, or bo...
Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, inner speech, and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
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...
By what warrant, therefore, is such an attack to be termed an extended epilepsy rather than a quite brief and severe, let us say, a condensed migraine?
But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in twenty or thirty seconds, even though it see...
As he wrote, if we could rerun evolution, it would no doubt turn out completely differently every time.
Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician—but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment’s hesitation.
An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—
Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval o...
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.
A magic realm of timelessness had been inserted into time, an intensity of newness and presentness, of the sort usually devoured by past and future. Suddenly, wonderfully, I fount myself exempted fro...
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 t...
One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as cognitively infectious musical agents.)
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.)
Hallucination of particularly vile smells is called cacosmia.)