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...
Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as the Mozart of psychology.
To what extent are we the authors, the creators of our own experiences? How much are these predetermined by the brains or senses we are born with, and to what extent do we shape our brains through exp...
To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must recollect ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narra...
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 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 real functional machinery of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or maps. These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably...
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...
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...
In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a seco...
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 often dream... of my parents and of my former patients - all long gone but loved and important in my life.