What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here – that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely.
The left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialized, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.
Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity – manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly.
Ucho w liczbach:” A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.
Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.
In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind –.
For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.
Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of ‘judgment’ –.
One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes.
There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.
The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he suddenly raised himself up on an elbow, said, “I’m going outside to have a smoke,” and fell back dead.
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 at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. 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.
I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.
There are no files in my memory that are repressed,′ she asserted. ‘You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors – nothing is hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can’t bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn’t generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippocampus.
I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech would have been absurd. It seemed the very summit of the world.
Vygotsky has been described – not unjustly – as “the Mozart of psychology.
I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways.
Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact.