Everything in its place – Oliver Sacks – 2019
Patients may sometimes dream of the onset of a disease before it physically manifests.
Patients with multiple sclerosis may dream of remissions a few hours before they occur.
With a broken leg, It was time to advance from using two crutches to just one. I tried twice and fell flat on my face. Then I fell asleep and had a dream in which I grabbed the crutch and set off with perfect confidence. Waking from the dream, I grabbed the crutch and set off with perfect confidence.
The first impression of parkinsonism in him was a change in the style of his dreams. He would dream that he could move only in slow motion, or that he was ‘frozen’. He would dream that space and time themselves had changed…
Dostoievsky was prone to seizure (temporal lobe epilepsy) and describe them as : “I felt the heaven was going down upon earth and that it engulfed me. I have really touch God. For all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.” Ecstatic epilepsy occur only in 1 or 2% of patients. A number of medical condition can lead to Out of Body Experience (OBE) – Cardiac arrest or arrhythmias or a sudden lowering of blood pressure or blood sugar, often combined with anxiety or illness. Not infrequently OBE can turn into Near Death Experience. Cicoria – PhD in Neuroscience – saw no contradiction between religion and neurology: if God worked on a man or in a man, He would do so via the nervous system, via part of the brain potentially specialised for spiritual feeling and belief.
The dark tunnel described in most NDs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the ‘bright light’ represent a flow of visual excitation from the brainstem to the visual cortex (the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital pathway).
The tendency to spiritual feeling and religion beliefs lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, strong in some people, less developed in others.
With intensive practice, for some of congregants, the mind may leap from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God, feels God. These visions have the reality of perception, and this is because they activate the perceptual systems of the brain, as all hallucination do.
After six days and night of continued hiccupping, Mr B. was exhausted and frightened. I suggested hypnosis. We found an hypnotist and were astounded when he managed to induce a hypnotic state in Mr. B. He them planted the suggestion : you will wake up and no longer have hiccups. Then he snapped his finger and Mr.B. came to, looking slightly confused, but free of hiccups. There were no relapses.
He had learn Transcendental Meditation as a way of dealing with otherwise uncontrollable ticking in public places. It is just autohypnosis. You have a mantra, a little word a phrase repeating slowly in you mind, and you soon get into a sort of trance and become oblivious to everything.
Front lobes also exert an inhibiting or constraining influence on ‘the blind force of sub-cortex’, the urges and passions that might overwhelm us if left unchecked. Children – and monkeys – have less developed frontal lobe and tend to do the first thing that occur to them, rather than pausing and reflect.
It is often said that people with Alzeimer’s do not realize they are impaired. In my experience, it is more common for patients to realise their condition at first. T. Debaggio was able to publish two insightful memoirs about his own early-onset. The sense that everything is lost with a diagnosis of Alzeimer’s is all too common among neurologists. In fact all sorts of neurological functions seem remarkably able to resist even widespread neuronal dysfunction.
This sense of wonder that keep us passionate and productive to end of our lives.
TSE – transmissible spongiform encephalopathies . The disease agents (known as prions) are difficult to isolate, capable of surviving most drastic conditions as well as usual sterilisation procedures. TSE agents show no evidence of containing DNA. They do not replicate like virus (or multiply autonomously like bacteria). One has to envisage a new form of disease process, one akin to chemical chrystalisation whereby tiny prions pleated forms of normally present brain protein, act as centres of chyrstallisation, causing rapid transformations of the surrounding crystalline protein. Prions are not virus or alive as we define those words: they seem to belong to a purely crystalline world.
Manic Depressive Psychosis: Manic state if one of elation, of pleasurable excitement; the depressive state is the precise opposite (misery, dejection)
Asylum emerged with the virtual annihilation of Europe’s lepers by the Black Death and the use of the now vacant leprosia to house the poor, the ill, the insame and the criminal (so Michel Foucault suggests).
Geel, not far from Antwerp is a unique experiment that has gone on for 7 centuries. Families in this town opened their homes to the mentally ill, they would adopt a boarder, a welcome guests during more agricultural times.
One must not condescend to one’s younger self.
Reading is a hugely complex task, one that calls upon many parts of the brain, but it is not a skill humans have acquired through evolution (unlike speech). It depends on a tiny area in the brain virtual cortex. This is where the elementary shape or letter recognition takes place.
Think Again, Again 