8 Matching Annotations
  1. 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

  2. Sep 2024
  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?

  5. Feb 2018
    1. I enjoy the works of Oliver Sacks because of his genuine interest in people and he never imposes the pretensions of narrow mindedness. This, to me, is the same reason I enjoy the works of Samuel Beckett. He does not use umbrella diagnoses, instead examines individual cases, which I believe is far superior in helping people. He seemed like a person with great benevolence for humanity.

      An example of his open mindedness is highlighted here from: ''There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the brains we have.'' (The River of Consciousness)