Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
Physiological confirmation of such filling in by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory...
Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains...
Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effecti...
Patients with delirium were almost always on medical or surgical wards, not on neurological or psychiatric wards, for delirium generally indicates a medical problem, a consequence of something affecti...
PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made; natural disasters, acts of God, seem somehow easier to accept. (...). This is the cas...
Neurology’s favourite word is ‘deficit’, denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of ide...
Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of ‘judgment’—
Natural selection almost always builds on what went before…. It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in...
Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful...
Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. —Kierkegaard
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
It also gave me a feeling of vulnerability and mortality which I had not really had before. In
In England, one was classified (working class, middle class, upper class, whatever) as soon as one opened one’s mouth; one did not mix, one was not at ease, with people of a different class—a system w...
In 1986, I read a remarkable article by Israel Rosenfield in The New York Review of Books in which he discussed the revolutionary work and views of Gerald M. Edelman. Edelman was nothing if not bold....
In 1968, I read Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist.
I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for...
I wondered if what one normally calls normal was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emerg...
I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.
I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, You’re in the papers. There was a ver...