Is there any reason, we must wonder, why particular songs (or scenes) are ‘selected’ by particular patients for reproduction in their hallucinatory seizures?
I found the Guam visit very important at a human level, too. While the postencephalitic patients had been put away for decades, living in a hospital, often abandoned by their families, people with lyt...
Gooddy refers here to personal time, as contrasted with clock time, and the extent to which personal time departs from clock time may become almost unbridgeable with the extreme bradykinesia common in...
Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had...
Some sense of ongoing, of next, is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless moment. And whereas for the r...
Se abrían a sus pies continuamente abismos de amnesia, pero él los salvaba, con ingenio, mediante rápidas fabulaciones y ficciones de todo tipo. Para él no eran ficciones, era como veía de pronto o in...
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
Our efforts to ‘re-connect’ William all fail – even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garde...
Only in the realm of mishearing—at least my mishearings—can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into...
Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations—normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, inclu...
Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence?
McKenzie once called Parkinsonism an organized chaos, and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness...
Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist.
It was backbreaking, round-the-clock work, and it made us realize how hard the nurses and aides and orderlies worked in their normal routines, but we managed to prevent skin breakdown or any other pro...
It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by lysis, a gradual abate...
Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been forged in the fires of psychosis.
Increasingly now, week by week, the normal, unconscious feedback of proprioception was being replaced by an equally unconscious feedback by vision, by visual automatism and reflexes increasingly integ...
In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes...
In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.