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Book: Hallucinations
Quotes of Book: Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
Thus the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,' the 'presence,' becomes the person of God.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval of genocide and relocation. In Hmong culture, there is a strong belief that night-mares can be fatal; this evil expectation, or nocebo, apparently contributed to the sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths of almost two hundred Hmong immigrants {mostly young and in good health} in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once they were more assimilated and the old beliefs lost their power, the sudden deaths stopped.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
There are similar irrefutable beliefs in patients who lose the perception of their left side and the left side of space but maintain that there is nothing missing, even though we can demonstrate convincingly that they live in a hemi-universe. Such syndromes-so-called anosognosias-occur only with damage to the right half of the brain, which seems to be especially concerned with the sense of bodily identity.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
If one loses half the visual field from a stroke or other injury, one may or may not be aware of the loss. Monroe Cole, a neurologist, became aware of his own field loss only by doing a neurological exam on himself after his coronary bypass surgery. He was so surprised by his lack of awareness of this deficit that he published a paper about it. "Even intelligent patients," he wrote, "often are surprised when a hemianopia is demonstrated, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated on numerous examinations.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessy to the will of of others is not, for human behavior always carries {or is felt to carry} a moral charge
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Wheather the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was less of a concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious charlatans or liars in the ordinary sense, nor were they confabulators or phantasm. They were, he came to feel, in altered states of consciousness conducive to hallucinations - hallucinations whose content was shaped by the questions they were asked. These exceptional mental states, he thought, were achieved by self-hypnosis, no doubt facilitated by poorly lit and ambiguous surroundings and the eager expectations of their clients.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
not so long ago, all humans heard voices-generated internally, from the right hemisphere of the brain, but perceived {by the left hemisphere} as if external, and taken as direct communications from the gods. Sometime around 1000 B.C., Jaynes proposed, with the rise of modern consciousness, the voices became internalized and recognized as our own.21"
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
I had long wanted to see "true" indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine {for general arousal}, LSD {for hallucinogenic intensity}, and a touch of cannabis {for a little added delirium}. About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, "I want to see indigo now-now!" And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved-never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought-it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain. For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum-but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi's mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display-lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth-and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists! During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a "sip" of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce-no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
Patients with delirium were almost always on medical or surgical wards, not on neurological or psychiatric wards, for delirium generally indicates a medical problem, a consequence of something affecting the whole body, including the brain, and it disappears as soon as the medical problem has been righted."
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative {which is something like veal}." No
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it. And
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Oliver Sacks _ Hallucinations
The best way of doing this, I found, was to write, to describe the hallucination in clear, almost clinical detail, and, in so doing, become an observer, even an explorer, not a helpless victim of the craziness inside me.
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