I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech...
I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.
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...
For ‘wellness’, naturally, is no cause for complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well. Unless, as George Eliot...
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...
Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quart...
Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a narrative and is defined by this narrative.
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...
Day by day, week by week, the dreams, the visions, came oftener, grew deeper. They were not occasional now, but occupied most of the day. We would see her rapt, as if in a trance, her eyes sometimes c...
Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity—manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly
And language, (...) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.
A whole new way of thinking seemed to ray out from Zeki’s work, and it set me thinking of the possible neural basis for consciousness in a way I had never considered before—and to realize that with ou...
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, th...
A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being . . . It is here . . . you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could...
67.What Jacob discovered in himself has similarities to a phenomenon reported in experimental animals by Arnaud Noreña and Jos Eggermont in 2005. They found that cats exposed to noise trauma and then...
Parked the bike in a side road—and fainted. The second accident occurred at night in heavy
A ‘musical epilepsy’ or a ‘personal epilepsy’ would seem a contradiction in terms. And yet such epilepsies do occur, though solely in the context of temporal lobe seizures, epilepsies of the reminisce...
We have seen that there are two forms of stimulus which are particularly prone to evoke migrainous reactions in predisposed individuals: inordinate excitations or arousals, and inordinate inhibitions...
Tranquilizers have little or no effect on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia—withdrawal, flattening of affect, etc.—which, in their insidious, chronic way, can be more debilitating, more undermini...