Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative.
It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by “lysis,” a gradual abatement of the suffering accompanied by one or more secretory activities. As.
None of us had ever encountered, or even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.
That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning – a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy – was ignored or bypassed;.
We may see very clearly how the wrong sound, or “anti-music,” is pathogenic and migrainogenic; while the right sound – proper music – is truly tranquillising, and immediately restores cerebral health. These effects are striking, and quite fundamental, and put one in mind of Novalis’s aphorism: “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.
If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoievski in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as ‘portals’ to the beyond or the unknown?
We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a “third world” of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?
The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.
Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.
For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.
Visual illusions, too, fascinated me; they showed how intellectual understanding, insight, and even common sense were powerless against the force of perceptual distortions. Gibson’s inverting glasses showed the power of the mind to rectify optical distortions, where visual illusions showed its inability to correct perceptual ones.
Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal...
You have done useful, honorable work. Come home. All is forgiven.
Even worse, this sort of pain had an affective component all its own, which I found difficult to describe, a quality of agony, of anguish, of horror – words which still do not catch its essence. Neuralgic pain cannot be “embraced,” fought against, or accommodated. It crushes one into a quivering, almost mindless sort of pulp; all one’s powers of will, one’s very identity, disappear under the assault of such pain. I.
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, and there it has been left for the last forty-nine years. –.
I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is “hardwired” or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain.
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.
Culture is as crucial as Nature.
Did being in love itself flood the body with opioids, or cannabinoids, or whatever?
Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.