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Book: The River of Consciousness
Quotes of Book: The River of Consciousness

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 _ The River of Consciousness
My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, "I remember it exactly as you described it." But regarding the second bombing, he said, "You never saw it. You weren't there." I was staggered at Michael's words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real? "What do you mean?" I objected. "I can see it all in my mind's eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn't there?" "You never saw it," Michael repeated. "We were both away at Braefield at the time.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful contrivances, examples of nature's imagination, natural selection, at work. Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of years. This, for Darwin, was the meaning of flowers, the meaning of all adaptations, plant and animal, the meaning of natural selection.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
an octopus may have half a billion nerve cells distributed between its brain and its "arms" {a mouse, by comparison, has only 75 to 100 million}. There is a remarkable degree of organization in the octopus brain, with dozens of functionally distinct lobes in the brain and similarities to the learning and memory systems of mammals. Not only are cephalopods easily trained to discriminate test shapes and objects, but some can learn by observation, a power otherwise confined to certain birds and mammals. They have remarkable powers of camouflage and can signal complex emotions and intentions by changing their skin colors, patterns, and textures.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
By asking why, by seeking meaning {not in any final sense, but in the immediate sense of use or purpose}, Darwin found in his botanical work the strongest evidence for evolution and natural selection. And in doing so, he transformed botany itself from a purely descriptive discipline into an evolutionary science. Botany, indeed, was the first evolutionary science, and Darwin's botanical work was to lead the way to all the other evolutionary sciences-and to the insight, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings-and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
Gooddy refers here to "personal" time, as contrasted with "clock" time, and the extent to which personal time departs from clock time may become almost unbridgeable with the extreme bradykinesia common in postencephalitic parkinsonism. I would often see my patient Miron V. sitting in the hallway outside my office. He would appear motionless, with his right arm often lifted, sometimes an inch or two above his knee, sometimes near his face. When I questioned him about these frozen poses, he asked indignantly, "What do you mean, 'frozen poses'? I was just wiping my nose.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
If the last few decades have seen a surge or resurgence of ambiguous memory and identity syndromes, they have also led to important research-forensic, theoretical, and experimental-on the malleability of memory. Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist and memory researcher, has documented a disquieting success in implanting false memories by simply suggesting to a subject that he has experienced a fictitious event. Such pseudo-events, invented by psychologists, may vary from comic incidents to mildly upsetting ones {for example, that one was lost in a shopping mall as a child} to more serious incidents {that one was the victim of an animal attack or an assault by another child}. After initial skepticism {"I was never lost in a shopping mall"} and then uncertainty, the subject may move to a conviction so profound that he will continue to insist on the truth of the implanted memory even after the experimenter confesses that it never happened in the first place.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
While some of these near-death experiences are marked by a sense of helplessness and passivity, even dissociation, in others there is an intense sense of immediacy and reality, and a dramatic acceleration of thought and perception and reaction, which allow one to negotiate danger successfully. Noyes and Kletti describe a jet pilot who faced almost certain death when his plane was improperly launched from its carrier: "I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude. The procedures I needed were readily available. I had almost total recall and felt in complete control.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or "motivated" to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-creative activities, is deeply pleasurable in itself. Both the innovative and the imitative impulses come together in pretend play, often using toys or dolls or miniature replicas of real-world objects to act out new scenarios or rehearse and replay old ones. Children are drawn to narrative, not only soliciting and enjoying stories from others, but creating them themselves. Storytelling and mythmaking are primary human activities, a fundamental way of making sense of our world. Intelligence, imagination, talent, and creativity will get nowhere without a basis of knowledge and skills, and for this education must be sufficiently structured and focused. But an education too rigid, too formulaic, too lacking in narrative, may kill the once-active, inquisitive mind of a child. Education has to achieve a balance between structure and freedom, and each child's needs may be extremely variable.
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Oliver Sacks _ The River of Consciousness
Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement-such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all. Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one's influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one's own. In Wagner's overture to Rienzi, one can almost trace this emergence. There are echoes, imitations, paraphrases, pastiches of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and others-all the musical influences of his apprenticeship. And then, suddenly, astoundingly, one hears Wagner's own voice: powerful, extraordinary {though, to my mind, horrible}, a voice of genius, without precedent or antecedent. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement."
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