anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels and the Science Masters series.
You can click on the topics to see a collection of favorite books on the subject.
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Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (Free Press 1993). -
UBS amazon.com Powell's
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf 1995). -
"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there."
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Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (Knopf 1992).
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Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist from Mars (Knopf 1995)-
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Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (University of California Press, 1989). -
"Joseph [ten-year-old deaf boy raised without sign language] saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or
generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect,
play, plan. He seemed completely literal unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities,
unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be
stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this
by a consciousness that no infant could have."
UBS amazon.com Powell's
Other books by Oliver Sacks in the Amazon.com database.
J. Z. Young, Philosophy and the Brain (Oxford University
Press, 1987). -
"I must stress how little is yet known about the programs of the brain. The code
has not yet been properly broken; but we begin to see the units of it.... We can see
that the code is somehow a matter of sequences of neural activities, providing
expectancies of what to do next."
amazon.com Powell's
Other "J. Zed" books in the Amazon.com database.
Other brain books in the Amazon.com database.
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