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.)
While some of these near-death experiences are marked by a sense of helplessness and passivity, even dissociation, in others there is an intense sense of immediacy and reality, and a dramatic accelera...
When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look...
What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.
We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to s...
Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, one of the first synoptic articles to come out of his collaboration with Christof Koch at Caltech. I felt very privileged to see this manuscript, in...
Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.
This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience—and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of...
This is what I get very upset at...' Temple, who was driving suddenly faltered and wept. 'I've read that libraries are where immortality lies... I don't want my thoughts to die with me... I want to ha...
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting th...
Substituirile risipisera oare senzatia absentei trupului, despre care vorbea la început? Câtusi de putin. Ea continua sa simta, din cauza persistentei pierderii proprioceptiunii, ca trupul ei e mort,...
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past;(...).We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recall...
Para ser nosotros mismos hemos de tenernos a nosotros mismos, hemos de poseer, de reposeer si es preciso, nuestras historias biográficas. Hemos de <> nosotros mismos el drama interior, la narración, l...
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finishe...
Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr P.’s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable—of what happens to a science which eschews the judgme...
My favourite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals – my old and valued friends – Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum,...
In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of...
I never took amphetamines again—despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).
I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams