I often dream... of my parents and of my former patients – all long gone but loved and important in my life.
My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her – and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
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.
Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.
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 this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
The old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery – half-appalled, half-amused – seeing for the first time exactly what is wrong and, in the same moment, exactly what there is to be done. This is the therapeutic moment.
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 take a little every morning for my health.
I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, “Speed” and “In the River of Consciousness.
Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger’s not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs.
In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature. Steve.
Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer – everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well – and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also.
They were all, in a sense, amateurs – self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution – and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world.
The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.
God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.
I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight.
To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.
The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.
The drowsiness which often accompanies or precedes a severe common migraine is occasionally abstracted as a symptom in its own right, and may then constitute the sole expression of the migrainous tendency. The.
Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought’, independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.
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, and swim till I die.