There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example, Islay by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of thos...
The mare in nightmare originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called Old Hag in Newfoundland).
The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfu...
The sense of personal space, of the self in relation to other objects and other people, tends to be markedly altered in Tourette’s syndrome.
The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or p...
The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear—she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything—she...
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning—a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy—was ignored or bypassed;
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...
Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
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...
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 were real, often passionate individuals with real problems—and sometimes choices—of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could...
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...
One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes.
Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.
Nie dostrzegamy pewnych aspektównajważniejszych dla nas spraw z powodu ich prostoty i tego, że bardzodobrze je znamy. (Nie można pewnychrzeczy spostrzec, ponieważ wciąż masię je przed oczami.) Człowie...
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’—