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Author: Oliver Sacks
Quotes of Author: Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
Nelson feels that the "dark tunnel" described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the "bright light" represents a flow of visual excitation from the brainstem, through visual relay stations, to the visual cortex {the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital pathway
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Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific-it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.
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Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in twenty or thirty seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation but instead insists on a supernatural one.
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Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
But one almost always emerges gradually from a coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur. Alexander
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
Only in the realm of mishearing-at least my mishearings-can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor {one of my favorite mathematicians}, tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to "Kiss my feet!
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Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations-normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one's body, from the perspective of one's own eyes, one's head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment-video goggles, mannequins, rubber arms, and so on-to confuse one's visual input and one's proprioceptive input and create an uncanny sense of disembodiedness.
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Oliver Sacks _ Everything in Its Place: First
That which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is not part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where.
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Oliver Sacks _ Gratitude
When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate-the genetic and neural fate-of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
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Oliver Sacks _ Gratitude
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
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Oliver Sacks _ Gratitude
I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
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Oliver Sacks _ The Man Who Mistook His Wife
She has succeeded in operating, but not in being.
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Oliver Sacks _ The Man Who Mistook His Wife
At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming and most painful.
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