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A review by sausome
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
4.0
Collection of thoughtful essays about various psychological, neurological, and general biological phenomenon. This collection is a bit of an overview of all Sacks has come to think about and learn, scientifically, in his life of scientific scholarly pursuits.
From the essay, "Speed":
P. 41 - "Sometimes when one is falling asleep, there may be a massive, involuntary jerk (a 'myoclonic' jerk) of the body. Though such jerks are generated by primitive parts of the brain stem (they are, so to speak, brain-stem reflexes) and as such are without any intrinsic meaning or motive, they may be given meaning and connect, turned into acts, by an instantly improvised dream."
From the essay, "Sentience: The Mental Lives of Plants and Worms":
P. 73 - "He (Jennings) felt that we humans are reluctant to attribute any qualities of mind to protozoa because they are so small: 'The writer is thoroughly convinced, after long study, of the behavior of this organism, that if Amoeba were a large animal, so as to come within the everyday experience of human beings, its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis we attribute these things to the dog.' Jennings' vision of a highly sensitive, dog-sized Amoeba is almost cartoonishly opposite of Descartes's notion of dogs as so devoid of feelings that one could vivisect them without compunction, taking their cries as purely 'reflex' reactions of a quasi-mechanical kind."
P. 75 - "It has even been shown, in a highly social species of paper wasp, they individuals can learn and recognize the faces of other wasps. Such face learning has hitherto been described only in mammals; it is fascinating they a cognitive power so specific can be present in insects as well."
From the essay, "Mishearings":
P. 125 - "Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality - it does not occur to one to question them."
From the essay, "A General Feeling of Disorder":
P. 152 - "Though there are many (one is tempted to say, innumerable) possible presentations of common migraine - I describe nearly a hundred such in my book - it's commonest harbinger may be just an indefinable but undeniable feeling of something amiss. This is exactly what Emil du Bois-Reymond emphasized when, in 1860, he described his own attacks of migraine. 'I wake,' he writes, "with a general feeling of disorder.'"
From the essay, "Speed":
P. 41 - "Sometimes when one is falling asleep, there may be a massive, involuntary jerk (a 'myoclonic' jerk) of the body. Though such jerks are generated by primitive parts of the brain stem (they are, so to speak, brain-stem reflexes) and as such are without any intrinsic meaning or motive, they may be given meaning and connect, turned into acts, by an instantly improvised dream."
From the essay, "Sentience: The Mental Lives of Plants and Worms":
P. 73 - "He (Jennings) felt that we humans are reluctant to attribute any qualities of mind to protozoa because they are so small: 'The writer is thoroughly convinced, after long study, of the behavior of this organism, that if Amoeba were a large animal, so as to come within the everyday experience of human beings, its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis we attribute these things to the dog.' Jennings' vision of a highly sensitive, dog-sized Amoeba is almost cartoonishly opposite of Descartes's notion of dogs as so devoid of feelings that one could vivisect them without compunction, taking their cries as purely 'reflex' reactions of a quasi-mechanical kind."
P. 75 - "It has even been shown, in a highly social species of paper wasp, they individuals can learn and recognize the faces of other wasps. Such face learning has hitherto been described only in mammals; it is fascinating they a cognitive power so specific can be present in insects as well."
From the essay, "Mishearings":
P. 125 - "Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality - it does not occur to one to question them."
From the essay, "A General Feeling of Disorder":
P. 152 - "Though there are many (one is tempted to say, innumerable) possible presentations of common migraine - I describe nearly a hundred such in my book - it's commonest harbinger may be just an indefinable but undeniable feeling of something amiss. This is exactly what Emil du Bois-Reymond emphasized when, in 1860, he described his own attacks of migraine. 'I wake,' he writes, "with a general feeling of disorder.'"