In Edelman’s view, very little else is programmed or built in. A baby turtle, on hatching, is ready to go. A human baby is not ready to go; it must create all sorts of perceptual and other categorizat...
We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.
This sense of the brain’s remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to d...
Thinking of my schizophrenic brother, Michael, I asked Shengold if I too was schizophrenic. No, he answered. Was I then, I asked, merely neurotic? No, he answered. I left it there, we left it there, a...
The structure of chaos is not static but dynamic;
The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.
The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.
Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel: I find a very high correlation, she said, between the way animals are treated and the handicapped.… Georgia is a snake pit—they treat [h...
She hoped I would send her some of my papers on neurology, of which I’ll understand not one word, but will glow with loving pride at my ridiculous, brilliant and altogether delightful nephew.
Professional musicians, in general, possess what most of us would regard as remarkable powers of musical imagery. Many composers, indeed, do not compose initially or entirely at an instrument but in t...
My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life...
My father called swimming the elixir of life, and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him...
Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to re...
If the last few decades have seen a surge or resurgence of ambiguous memory and identity syndromes, they have also led to important research—forensic, theoretical, and experimental—on the malleability...
Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel—and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose—in Freud’s words, ‘Work and Love’.
Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or motivated to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-cr...
But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.
What sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? It
They do not ‘convert’ numbers into music, but actually feel them, in themselves, as ‘forms’, as ‘tones’, like the multitudinous forms that compose nature itself. They are not calculators, and their nu...
A story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive? to which Beckett answered, I wouldn...