To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives....
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the...
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.
Ralph pointed out his car to me, its license plate bearing just four letters, A T G C—the four nucleotides of DNA—and
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...
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.
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...
It is certain that we are not given reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that o...
Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal). No
In the newly sighted, learning to see demands a radical change in neurological functioning and, with it, a radical change in psychological functioning, in self, in identity. The change may be experien...
I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.
I am now face to face with dying, but I am not finished with living.
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Compact and clearly defined at its center, migraine diffuses outwards until it merges with an immense surrounding field of allied phenomena. The only boundaries which exist are those which we are forc...
Chorea—a twinkling movement or motor scintillation—does not have its origin in the cerebral cortex, but in the deeper parts of the brain, the basal ganglia and upper brainstem, which are the parts tha...
Attacks characterised by little more than malaise are likely to be regarded as mild viral illnesses. Attacks characterised by alteration of affect and consciousness—mild drowsiness or depression—may b...
As I demonstrated this on Bob, he fell backwards onto me, completely inert and passive, with no hint of any reflexive reaction. Startled, I pushed him gently forward to the upright position, but now h...
I sometimes wonder why I have spent more than fifty years in New York, when it was the West, and especially the Southwest, which so enthralled me. I now have many ties in New York—to my patients, my s...
I had found myself thinking of time—time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the appar...
Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact