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...
I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I w...
I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater pound-ages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at—the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San...
I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.
Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals—aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly...
He followed this with a letter in which he spoke of the central resonances of a peripheral injury. He went on, You are discovering an entirely new field. . . . Please publish your observations. It may...
For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inven...
Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
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 after my fall and my near death, fear and caution
At some second transcendent moment in evolution, Edelman proposed, the development of higher-order consciousness was made possible in humans (and perhaps a few other species including apes and dolphin...
As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.-DONNE
Who could have dreamed that in this blind, palsied woman, hidden away, inactivated, over-protected all her life, there lay the germ of an astonishing artistic sensibility (unsuspected by her, as by ot...
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...
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...
Fossilised dream-sequences preserved as such in the cortex, precise replicas of past experience; they appear to be mnemic images which unfold, given the initial activation (epileptic, migrainous, expe...
You care, you really care for me! Of course, Eric said. How could you doubt it? But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents car...
Wystan loved medical talk, and he had a soft spot for physicians. (In his book Epistle to a Godson, there are four poems dedicated to doctors, including one to me.)