The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real founda...
Such epileptic hallucinations or dreams, Penfield showed, are never phantasies: they are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind, accompanied by the emotions which accompanied...
Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems;
She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions a...
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.
In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:
I monitored their medications, their often unstable neurological states, but I did my best, too, to see that they had full lives—as full as possible, given their physical limitations. I felt that tryi...
I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday—a special bottle that could neither leak nor break—he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, I t...
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not kno...
At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming and most painful.
ونهاية كل استكشافنا ستكون الوصول إلى حيث بدأنا ومعرفة المكان للمرة الأولى. (إليوت)
The personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason,...
The hateful mood of a migraine—depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible—tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. Resolution by secretion thus r...
The best way of doing this, I found, was to write, to describe the hallucination in clear, almost clinical detail, and, in so doing, become an observer, even an explorer, not a helpless victim of the...
One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel. There are moments, and it is only...
My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on thi...
My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, I remember it exactly as you described it. But regarding the second bombing, he said, You never saw it. You weren’t there. I was st...
In the mid-1950s, when I was in medical school, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between our neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders.