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...
Experience and experiment are crucially important here—neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
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...
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. —
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 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...
Ralph pointed out his car to me, its license plate bearing just four letters, A T G C—the four nucleotides of DNA—and
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...
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...
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...
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...
Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact
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...
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...
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...