Hallucinations (Oliver Sacks)

I delayed reading this thinking it would freak me out (and it did, some). But it's another amazing book from Oliver Sacks. He's surprisingly honest and descriptive about his experimentation (in the 1960s) with mind-altering drugs, for one thing. His ability to describe mundane and unusual situations brought by altered mind states is so sharp, that it's like reading good literature.

---

Quotes:

Talking to oneself is basic to human beings, for we are a linguistic species; the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that “inner speech” was a prerequisite of all voluntary activity.

My first pot experience was marked by a mix of the neurological and the divine.

All of these effects seem to show, by default, what a colossal and complicated achievement normal vision is, as the brain constructs a visual world in which color and movement and size and form and stability are all seamlessly meshed and integrated.

Do the arabesques and hexagons in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of formal beauty?

One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes.

The “mare” in “nightmare” originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called “Old Hag” in Newfoundland).

if Piaget is right, children cannot consistently and confidently distinguish fantasy from reality, inner from outer worlds, until the age of seven or so.

have never had an OBE myself, but I was once involved in a remarkably simple experiment which showed me how easily one’s sense of self can be detached from one’s body and “reembodied” in a robot

I have never had an OBE myself, but I was once involved in a remarkably simple experiment which showed me how easily one’s sense of self can be detached from one’s body and “reembodied” in a robot

the brain’s representation of the body can often be fooled simply by scrambling the inputs from different senses. If sight and touch say one thing, however absurd, even a lifetime of proprioception and a stable body image cannot always resist this.