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Book: On the Move: A Life
Quotes of Book: On the Move: A Life

Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
I found the Guam visit very important at a human level, too. While the postencephalitic patients had been put away for decades, living in a hospital, often abandoned by their families, people with lytico-bodig remained part of their family, part of their community, to the end. This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the "civilized" world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
Categorization is the central task of the brain, and reentrant signaling allows the brain to categorize its own categorizations, then recategorize these, and so on. Such a process is the beginning of an enormous upward path enabling ever higher levels of thought and consciousness. Reentrant signaling might be likened to a sort of neural United Nations, in which dozens of voices are talking together, while including in their conversations a variety of constantly inflowing reports from the outside world, bringing them together into a larger picture as new information is correlated and new insights emerge.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
Where perception of objects is concerned, Edelman likes to say, the world is not "labeled"; it does not come "already parsed into objects." We must make our perceptions through our own categorizations. "Every perception is an act of creation," as Edelman says. As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those mappings that correspond to successful perceptions-successful in that they prove the most useful and powerful for the building of "reality.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
in Edelman's view, very little else is programmed or built in. A baby turtle, on hatching, is ready to go. A human baby is not ready to go; it must create all sorts of perceptual and other categorizations and use them to make sense of the world-to make an individual, personal world of its own, and to find out how to make its way in that world. Experience and experiment are crucially important here-neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
I had found myself thinking of time-time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion-whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless "moments" which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
I worked with Mr. I., this was giving way to a very different vision of the brain-mind, a vision of it as essentially constructive or creative. I added that I had now started to wonder whether all perceptual qualities, including the perception of motion, were similarly constructed by the brain.73
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? 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."
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
The leg incident taught me in a way which I could not, perhaps, have learned otherwise about how one's body and the space around one are mapped in the brain and how this central mapping can be profoundly deranged by damage to a limb, especially if this is combined with immobilization and encasement.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
I did much of my writing in a little alcove by the bar, where I could be alone, private, invisible, yet warmed and stimulated by the vivid life at the bar.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
We soon discovered one strong interest that we shared; we were both fascinated by "the sixth sense," proprioception: unconscious, invisible, but arguably more vital than any or all of the other five senses put together. One could be blind and deaf, like Helen Keller, and still lead a fairly rich life, but proprioception was crucial for the perception of one's own body, the position and movement of one's limbs in space, crucial indeed for the perception of their existence.
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Oliver Sacks _ On the Move: A Life
That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning-a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy-was ignored or bypassed; "care" was purely mechanical and medical.
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