11 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2024
    1. Over a 10-year period, up until three weeks before his death, we exchanged 150 letters. After Oliver passed away, I had to find a way to handle my sadness. So, I revisited all our letters and wrote a new book, Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks, as a tribute to exploration, letter-writing, friendship, and Oliver Sacks.

      for - book - Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks - from Psychology Today website - article - What Oliver Sacks Taught Me - Susan R. Barry - 2024 - Jan. 23 - to

      to - book - Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks - Susan R. Barry - 2024, Jan 30 - https://hyp.is/6ir6jME9Ee-vLEu_PiRFsw/theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/winter-2024/dear-oliver/

    2. once I began to see in 3D, I realized how wrong I had been. My theoretical knowledge of stereopsis did not prepare me in the least for the experience of seeing in stereo. Dr. Sacks must have suspected that stereopsis would provide me with an astonishing new way of seeing, one that I could not even have imagined

      for - cliche - the finger pointing to the moon - the finger is not the moon - language is NOT the experience it describes - from Psychology Today website - article - What Oliver Sacks Taught Me - Susan R. Barry - 2024 - Jan. 23

    3. I answered Dr. Sacks’s question casually, saying that I believed that I knew what it was like to see in 3D. After all, I was a neurobiology professor and had read plenty of scientific papers on stereopsis.

      for - association - person with 2D vision - trying to imagine what it's like to see in 3D - What's it like to be a bat? - from Psychology Today website - article - What Oliver Sacks Taught Me - Susan R. Barry - 2024 - Jan. 23 - adjacency - seeing in 2D - then in 3D - Deep Humanity BEing journey - from Psychology Today website - article - What Oliver Sacks Taught Me - Susan R. Barry - 2024 - Jan. 23

  2. Oct 2024
    1. Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library by [[Jennifer Schuessler]]

      The voluminous papers of the celebrated neurologist include letters, notebooks, drafts and other traces of a man who couldn’t stop writing.

      You have to love the boos, notebooks, papers, fountain pen, typewriter, computer, printer, and even writing software all pictured in this... Add the glasses and it just reeks of someone who reads and writes.

    2. For Sacks, wrestling with the meaning of experience — his own, his patients’ — continued until the very end. One folder, with the jaunty title “Some Deaths I’ve Liked,” contains the wry and humorous last words of scientists and others, starting with his brother Michael, whose lifelong struggle with schizophrenia greatly affected Sacks. In his telling, Michael sat up abruptly in his hospital gurney and announced, “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette,” before immediately falling dead.
    3. “He was the first person I knew who had his own personal copying machine,” she said. “He was terrified of losing things, so he often made a lot of copies.”

      quote from Kate Edgar, Sacks' assistant and editor

  3. Mar 2023
  4. Apr 2022
    1. Oliver Sacks wrote that gardens are powerful in healing us.

      Oliver Sacks wrote:

      I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.

      If gardens and potentially tending gardens is restorative, how might we create user interfaces that are calm and gentle enough to make tending one's digital garden a healthful and restorative process for our psyches?