Greg Detre
Saturday, May 10, 2003
. Looking more deeply, however, he noticed a curious difference between his memories of the two bombs. "After the first one fell" - the bomb that didn't explode - "Michael and I went down the road at night in our pajamas, not knowing what would happen. In that memory, I can feel myself into the body of that little boy. And in the second memory" - the thermite bomb - "it's as if I'm seeing a brilliantly illuminated scene from a film: I cannot locate myself anywhere in the scene."
softened by the slight anomaly that phonologists call the gliding of liquids, so that "bronze" comes out "bwonze," which gives his speech an endearing boyish quality. Age has mellowed his appearance. Back in 1961, when he was a consulting physician for the Hell's Angels in California, he set a state weightlifting record for the 600-pound squat.
�Are you a human being or are you a tape-recorder?� he was asked
migraine auras
Paul Baran's original conception of a failure-resistant communications system, however - the blueprint for the Internet - was inspired by conversations with neurobiologist Warren McCulloch, in which McCulloch described the ability of synaptic networks in brain-injured patients to route around damaged tissue (see "Founding Father," Wired 9.03).
luria - romantic science
The "great crisis" in neuropsychology, as Sacks' Russian mentor saw it, was reconciling two modes of scientific observation. One reduces complex phenomena to their constituent parts - the way neurology had narrowed its focus from observation of behavior to specific areas in the brain and then to individual neurons - which Luria paralleled with the evolution of chemistry, from the study of gross matter to the study of compounds, to the study of individual atoms and elements. The other mode relies on the description of phenomena and intuition to comprehend the interactivity of whole systems. Either one, he thought, was inadequate without the other.
A British academic and disability-rights advocate named Tom Shakespeare has christened Sacks "the man who mistook his patients for a writing career.