“ I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I alw… Oliver Sacks
“ GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown’s Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg’s Biological Fou… Oliver Sacks
“ 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. Oliver Sacks
“ But one almost always emerges gradually from a coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully l… Oliver Sacks
“ Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the… Oliver Sacks
“ As our central nervous system—and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex—grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizi… Oliver Sacks
“ And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the co… Oliver Sacks
“ And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life. — Oliver Sacks
“ The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed d… Oliver Sacks
“ Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential fo… Oliver Sacks
“ Nelson feels that the dark tunnel described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the bright light represents a flow of visual ex… Oliver Sacks
“ Large numbers of highly qualified men and women left England in the 1950s (in the so-called brain drain), for professions and universities were crowded in England, and (as I saw when I did my neurolog… Oliver Sacks
“ If one loses half the visual field from a stroke or other injury, one may or may not be aware of the loss. Monroe Cole, a neurologist, became aware of his own field loss only by doing a neurological e… Oliver Sacks
“ At sixteen, Michael was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and given twelve treatments of insulin shock therapy; this entailed bringing his blood sugar down so low that he lost consciousness and then… Oliver Sacks
“ Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes. Oliver Sacks
