Lesion Quotes

Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.

Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rockstar and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values

Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. ... We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless--epically useless in my current state--but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either. People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox. ... But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. ... What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

Tally-When you looked around at everyone else how come you didn’t notice they were brain damaged? Az - We didn’t have much to compare our fellow citizens with. Only a few colleagues who seemed different from most people, more engaged, but that was hardly a surprise. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep. Before the operation there were wars and mass hatred and clear cutting. Whatever these lesions make us, it isn’t a far cry from how humanity was in the rusty era. These days we’re just a bit easier to manage.

Go away and bleed to death,’ said his onetime saviour sharply. ‘On behalf of the female sex I feel I may cheer every lesion.

You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of 'serious lesions' or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

This is why Jesus would urge Mari [Mary Magdalene] to look after the women noting, ''Cultivate their regard for you because those women who are naturally drawn to you are exceptional people, sensitive women who are very close to spiritual freedom. However, before they can achieve this ultimate goal, you must first tend to their psychological wounds, the visible and the invisible lesions they have experienced at the hands of men, just as we once did in your homeland. It is only if these existential traumas are healed properly that these women can finally reach equanimity of spirit and heart.

the marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you'll think "they'll remember me now," but (a) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal

Much like the removal of moles and skin lesions is done to prevent them from growing into more serious skin abnormalities, removing minor discord before it becomes a calamity is an important use of our time. Most people don’t like to make waves and they swallow frustration and bury true feelings, not wanting to compromise temporary tranquility, never realizing that massive turmoil doesn’t start out massive—it grows beneath the skin like a cancer that could have been avoided with early detection.

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

A shiver ran through me. Freaks looked almost human -- and weren't. They had lesions on their skin, razor-sharp teeth, and claws instead of fingernails. I'd heard you could detect them by smell, though in the tunnels, that could be hard.

What place is this,” Drizzt asked the cat quietly, “that I call home? These are my people, by skin and by heritage, but I am no kin to them. They are lost and ever will be. “How many others are like me, I wonder?” Drizzt whispered, taking one final look. “Doomed souls, as was Zaknafein, poor Zak. I do this for him, Guenhwyvar; I leave as he could not, His life has been my lesion, a dark scroll etched by the heavy price exacted by Matron Malice’s evil promises. “Goodbye, Zack!” he cried, his voice rising in final defiance. “My father. Take heart, as do I, that when we meet again, in a life after this, it will surely not be in the hellfire our kin are doomed to endure.

You die. You get old and die. Your anger curdles, your grief dries, your talent fades on the page. Your cells metastasise into an army dedicated to the overthrow of you. You become dependent on paid strangers for the maintenance of your blood and your brittle bones. You understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions, tumours, and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the emblem of your shame.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But… The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now," but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

LAWS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD I Gomers don’t die. II Gomers go to ground. III At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse. IV The patient is the one with the disease. V Placement comes first. VI There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a #14 needle and a good strong arm. VII Age + BUN = Lasix dose. VIII They can always hurt you more. IX The only good admission is a dead admission. X If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever. XI Show me a BMS who only triples my work and I will kiss his feet. XII If the radiology resident and the BMS both see a lesion on the chest X ray, there can be no lesion there. XIII The delivery of medical care is to do as much nothing as possible.

Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM

And now they are back, but they are different, because nobody comes back from the dead the same. You emerge always with a little bit of the underworld on you, the lesion, the scar, having seen unspeakable things.

Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future - so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for rules of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships - and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task.

Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.

The crescent moon, The night’s lucent lesion. We are felled oaks beneath it, Branches full of empty. Look closer. What we share is more Than what we’ve shed.

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future—so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic.

She loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows that other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even when we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.

It is strange how a first love, by the lesions it leaves on our heart, may open the way for later loves, but yet fail to offer us, in the identical character of our symptoms and sufferings, the means of curing them.

If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next. The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illness. One is a momentary bout of melancholy. The other is a debilitating condition that requires medical treatment. Would you feel better about having a cancerous lesion if I likened it to the rash I had last week? The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between a mood that will soon pass, and a serious illness that disrupts your ability to function and will take years to treat. The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between Cleveland and Bangkok, or your frying pan and the surface of the sun. So, no, we (depressives) do not feel better when you tell us about your rash. We'll do our best to be polite about it, but no, it really doesn't help at all.

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

Give yourself a great self-respect to know who you are then your confidence will shine on you

Yet I have learned. In chronicles of sorrow, too, there are joys, In lesions of silence, immeasurable noise. And certainly in the very pit of the heart Beneath the trouble in the valves There is kindness. Certainly in the ruby heart of this plum's seasons, A silent reason for hope.

The truth may well turn out to be stranger than we think,” says Simon. “It may be that much of what we are accustomed to describe as evil, and evil freely chosen, is instead an illness due to some lesion of the nervous system, and that the Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum.

The good, the bad, the virgin, and the harlot: no one is spared, all go rose-spattered with plague lesions. I see no sense, no judgment before doom strikes. Death takes us all with the black malady or the sweating sickness, or the white blindness or the winter croup, or the crops failing or bitter water in our mouths.

The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart. Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.

I was just a kid when I first met Bella, but I knew she was someone special, something otherworldly and someone who would leave a searing golden lesion on me.

You don't know what you're going to do in a situation until faced with it. Life lesion learned. I was going to have to banish 'never' from my repertoire.

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colors are affected in the first place,and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colors; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological color is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.

Excess aspartame and glutamate may be able to gradually destroy neuronal pathways, causing memory loss, brain lesions, and dementia often well before any chronic illness is apparent.

Scene VI (1940) It is our fault we love only the skull of Beauty Without knowing who she was, of what she died. We have the thief's guilt, but not his booty, The liar's spasm without ever having lied. The sick locust scrapes his injured song, His thorax only partially destroyed. Retching is prohibited. It's wrong. The murderer feels no hate he can avoid. Now flies bite worst where the skin is broken. Illness triumphs. Lesions. Soon tumors sprout. The bloated plants quiver, the seeds will be shaken. 'Your head's bashed in, darling. Look out.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

The values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future – so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic.

Sociopaths are liars who manipulate toward a desired outcome, but they tend not be as callous as psychopaths. Psychopathy can be genetic, the structure of the brain, and it can include chemical and physical components—a lesion on a particular part of the brain, not unlike the sociopath—but it’s marked by more-aggressive, remorseless traits: where a sociopath might manipulate, the psychopath attacks

When they hypnotize us, ammonia becomes rose water, charcoal becomes chocolate, a top hat becomes a baby to be cradled. We drink, we eat, we rock our long-lost babies from the before. Their questions are never to do with the before. What before? What is the question? We are never sure, only that they have one and they have an answer, too. To be hypnotizable is proof of the invisible lesion on our brains and so proof of our hysteria.

Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see.

The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.

Although it seems that most people with endometriosis begin having symptoms at or around the time of their first period (whether they know it or not), calling endometriosis a “period problem” doesn’t account for the phenomenon of endometrial lesions found in the pelvic cavities of fetuses. Fetuses who have, clearly, not menstruated. Endometriosis has been discovered during fetal autopsies, a finding that seriously challenges the widely held belief that endometriosis is strictly a menstruation-dependent disease.

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.

The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampantin the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhea and dementia.

Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhea and dementia.

Moving beyond mere correlation, if you lesion the amygdala in an animal, rates of aggression decline. The same occurs transiently when you temporarily silence the amygdala by injecting Novocain into it. Conversely, implanting electrodes that stimulate neurons there, or spritzing in excitatory neurotransmitters (stay tuned), triggers aggression.4

When summer and winter in autumn divide The sun will uncover a secret inside. Should winter from summer irrevocably part The whole of the book will fall quickly apart. Yet if the seasons join hands together The order of things will last forever. These are the words of Endymion spring. Bring only the insight the Inside brings. The child may see what the man does not A future time which time forgot: Books yet to be and books already written Within these pages lie dormant and hidden. Yet darkness seeks what light reveals A shadow grows: these truths conceal. These are my words, Endymion spring. Bring only the insight the Inside brings. The silence will end-the sum approaches Mark my word-the shadow encroaches. The present had passed-the past has gone The future will come-once Two become One. The sun must look the shadow in the eye Then forfeit the book lest one half die. The lesion of darkness cannot be healed Until, with Child's Blood, the whole is sealed. These are the words of Endymion spring. Bring only the insight the Inside brings.

Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...

One might go to the bakery, perhaps," he said. "But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker's daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover," he said, "the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. but that's what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn't suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who've had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive surgery." We didn't go to the bakery. Straight home instead.

One group was given AF and then fed diets containing 20% protein. The second group was given the same level of AF and then fed diets containing only 5% protein. Every single rat fed 20% protein got liver cancer or its precursor lesions, but not a single animal fed a 5% protein diet got liver cancer or its precursor lesions. It was not a trivial difference; it was 100% versus 0%.

This was plain as plain to Dick. He looked around, hoping his eye would catch on something, so that spirit instead of imagination could carry on for an hour. But there was nothing and after a moment he turned back to Collis. He has told Collis some of his current notions, and he was bored with his audience’s short memory and lack of response. After half an hour of Collis he felt a distinct lesion of his own vitality.

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

I ignored the evidence before me and held him in the Light, pictured him glowing with the Divine that still existed in him. And he changed over those minutes, a falling away of the layers of not-God, not-love, of man-made cover, of an ego's false protections. Then he was weeping. Silently shaking as tears spilled onto his cheeks. We sat until he was still. We sat awhile longer. I stood and waited a few minutes more. Then I opened my arms. He hesitated but came to me, and I held the Divine that he still contained, and I held the man with all his lesions, and I held myself for being there, reaching out, even as the not-God in me roared with an ache to inflict grievous harm on this man, to make him feel all he had inflicted on others. When I had given everything I could, I pulled away. I left him before the not-love in me reared up, before it suffocated that of the Divine.

If the next generation of nanotechnology could be used in medicine to repair organs and tissue from inside the human body, then it could just as easily be programmed to destroy them, making it the ultimate weapon of assassination. Imagine clouds of these things flying to their targets to either be breathed in like a virus or ingested with food or drink, and then creating fatal haemorrhages or lesions that lead to death from apparently natural causes.

People with a right parietal lobe injury, for example, will commonly suffer from a syndrome called spatial hemi-neglect. Depending on the size and location of the lesion, patients with hemi-neglect may behave as if part or all of the left side of their world, which may include the left side of their body, does not exist! This could include not eating off the left side of their plate, not shaving or putting makeup on the left side of their face, not drawing the left side of a clock, not reading the left pages of a book, and not acknowledging anything or anyone in the left half of the room. Some will deny that their left arm and leg are theirs and will not use them when trying to get out of bed, even though they are not paralyzed. Some patients will even neglect the left side of space in their imagination and memories.3 That the deficits vary according to the size and location of the lesion suggests that damage that disrupts specific neural circuits results in impairments in different component processes.

A number of other studies have been conducted on the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and all have found comparable outcomes. For example: 60 people with limb-threatening diabetic infections were split into three groups: 1) full-thickness skin ulcer; 2) deep-tissue infection and osteomyelitis; 3) gangrenous lesions. All ulcers in group 1 healed and 92 percent of those in group 2 healed. All people in group 3 healed after surgical excision, debridement of necrotic tissue, and treatment with honey ointment (which also included royal jelly).

Disgust plays a role in sexuality analogous to its role in food selection by guiding people to the narrow class of culturally acceptable sexual partners and sexual acts. Once again, disgust turns off desire and motivates concerns about purification, separation, and cleansing. Disgust also gives us a queasy feeling when we see people with skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body. It is the exterior that matters: Cancer in the lungs or a missing kidney is not disgusting; a tumor on the face or a missing finger is.

Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered. In other words, we had visual proof that the effects of trauma are not necessarily different from—and can overlap with—the effects of physical lesions like strokes.

What is the cause of insanity? Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact, about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and injuries. But the other half—and this is the appalling part of the story—the other half of the people who go insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with their brain cells. In post-mortem examinations, when their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently just as healthy as yours and mine. Why do these people go insane?

There is an ongoing debate in the forensic medical community about the influence of brain injuries and abnormalities on the commission of violent crime. A number of killers, subjected to imaging studies or as a result of postmortem examination, have been found to have brain lesions of various sorts. Those in the deterministic camp, who believe that much aberrant behavior is influenced by distinct physiological causes, point to these lesions as proof that this is why the criminal acted the way he did. Those in the “free will” camp suggest that these lesions may be more symptom than cause—that is, they are the result of injuries produced by the impulsive, risk-taking behavior that these guys display as children.

Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered. In other words, we had visual proof that the effects of trauma are not necessarily different from—and can overlap with—the effects of physical lesions like strokes. All trauma is preverbal.

The first, and more traditional, involved the ingestion of mercury as well as the topical application of this liquid metal to chancres and lesions. The second, more modern theory favored other metals and chemicals—gold, silver, copper, bromine, iodine, and nitric acid—to be taken internally or applied in ointments. Both approaches were hazardous to patients’ health. Of these two methods, Gothenburg’s Kurhuset appears to have favored non-mercurial cures. Elisabeth, during her stay, was treated internally with hydroiodic acid, the main components of which are iodine and hydrogen; her genital warts would have been dehydrated with a cream or cut off. After receiving this cure for seventeen days, Elisabeth went into premature labor. On April 21, while under lock and key at the Kurhuset, she gave birth to a stillborn seven-month-old girl.* She did not cite the father’s name on the birth certificate.

It is ironic that none of those who took issue with Schweitzer’s theology and cursed his writings gave up fame and fortune or membership in the highest stratum of German society to live among the poorest of the poor. They prepared their critiques in the comfort of the pastor’s study or the university library, while Schweitzer nailed patches of tin on the roof of his free medical clinic at Lambarene by the banks of the Ogoove River. Theologians who sat in endowed chairs took his Christology to task, while he scraped infectious lesions off blue-black natives in the steaming misery of equatorial Africa. Albert Schweitzer deserves to be remembered as the greatest Christian of the twentieth century, yet he did not believe in literal miracles— the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, or the second coming, just to name a few. All he did was walk away from everything the world calls good to follow Jesus.

Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?' 'Forty hours?' 'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.' 'The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery. 'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!' 'You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse.

neurophysiologist Olaf Blanke, who came across the phenomenon unexpectedly. He had triggered it with electrical stimulation to the temporal parietal cortex of a patient’s brain while trying to locate the focus of a seizure.8 He has also studied a bevy of patients who complain of an FoP. He found that lesions in the frontoparietal area are specifically associated with the phenomenon and are on the opposite side of the body from the presence.9 This location suggested to him that disturbances in sensorimotor processing and multisensory integration may be responsible. While we are conscious of our location in space, we are unaware of the multitude of processes (vision, sound, touch, proprioception, motor movement, etc.) that, when normally integrated, properly locate us there. If there is a disorder in the processing, errors can occur and our brains can misinterpret our location. Blanke and his colleagues have found that one such error manifests itself as an FoP. Recently, they cleverly induced the FoP in healthy subjects by disordering their sensory processing with the help of a robotic arm.10

In 1861, just a year after Gage’s death, this view was further cemented through the work of Pierre Paul Broca, a physician in Paris who documented a patient who appeared normal except that he had a severe speech deficit. The patient could understand and comprehend speech perfectly, but he could utter only one sound, the word “tan.” After the patient died, Dr. Broca confirmed during the autopsy that the patient suffered from a lesion in his left temporal lobe, a region of the brain near his left ear. Dr. Broca would later confirm twelve similar cases of patients with damage to this specific area of the brain. Today patients who have damage to the temporal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, are said to suffer from Broca’s aphasia. (In general, patients with this disorder can understand speech but cannot say anything, or else they drop many words when speaking.) Soon afterward, in 1874, German physician Carl Wernicke described patients who suffered from the opposite problem. They could articulate clearly, but they could not understand written or spoken speech. Often these patients could speak fluently with correct grammar and syntax, but with nonsensical words and meaningless jargon. Sadly, these patients often didn’t know they were spouting gibberish. Wernicke confirmed after performing autopsies that these patients had suffered damage to a slightly different area of the left temporal lobe.

Depression” is a problematic word. We all believe we know what it means because we toss it off so easily: “Oh, I’m depressed; I got a run in my stocking.” At the same time, when we are describing severe psychopathology, we presume that because the word is descriptive, it offers a definition as well. We move to the next step and presume that because we can take a picture of the brain and “see” depression, it therefore is real. It has been occurring to me more and more, not just from these conversations, but also from my work, that when the brain is in clearly different states—and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders80 says they are the same pathology—maybe our definition of the psychopathology is too broad. We need to redefine the nature of suffering to understand how it may be a condition more like dukkha, instead of a disease with a physiological cause as specific as something like a brain lesion. That is not to deny that true psychopathology exists, or that the patients I take care of do not suffer from a brain disease. I believe very strongly that they do. But I also see patients who, with focused attention and by acquiring new skill sets, can bring themselves out of it in the same way that William James did when he decided to focus his attention from inside to outside. The ability to focus attention means your brain is in a different state. Maybe we ought to understand those as different definitions of illness. What I’ve learned from all of you is that maybe we have to start making those distinctions more strongly. That will allow us to focus attention on how to handle ourselves in a world with natural levels of suffering, and help us not stigmatize people who don’t have the brain capacity to even start. Those are two separate items.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

This curious effect was noticed as far back as 1892, when textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. It was first clinically described in 1975 by neurologist Norman Geschwind of Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. He noticed that epileptics who had electrical misfirings in their left temporal lobes often had religious experiences, and he speculated that the electrical storm in the brain somehow was the cause of these religious obsessions. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity. He notes, “Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems suffused with meaning. The patient will say, ‘Finally, I see what it is all really about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the universe—the cosmic scheme.’ ” He also notes that many of these individuals are extremely adamant and convincing in their beliefs. He says, “I sometimes wonder whether such patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy have access to another dimension of reality, a wormhole of sorts into a parallel universe. But I usually don’t say this to my colleagues, lest they doubt my sanity.” He has experimented on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and confirmed that these individuals had a strong emotional reaction to the word “God” but not to neutral words. This means that the link between hyperreligiosity and temporal lobe epilepsy is real, not just anecdotal. Psychologist Michael Persinger asserts that a certain type of transcranial electrical stimulation (called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS) can deliberately induce the effect of these epileptic lesions. If this is so, is it possible that magnetic fields can be used to alter one’s religious beliefs? In Dr. Persinger’s studies, the subject places a helmet on his head (dubbed the “God helmet”), which contains a device that can send magnetism into particular parts of the brain. Afterward, when the subject is interviewed, he will often claim that he was in the presence of some great spirit. David Biello, writing in Scientific American, says, “During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence, or the wonder of the universe.” Since this effect is reproducible on demand, it indicates that perhaps the brain is hardwired in some way to respond to religious feelings.

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.

During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.

Approximately eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley have been analyzed. They reveal a clear picture of the health changes that accompanied the shift from foraging to corn farming around 1200 AD. Archaeologist George Armelagos and his colleagues reported that the farmers’ remains show a 50 percent increase in chronic malnutrition, and three times the incidence of infectious diseases (indicated by bone lesions) compared with the foragers who preceded them. Furthermore, they found evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, and a fourfold increase in porotic hyperostosis, indicating iron-deficiency anemia in more than half the population.

Heart Disease Starts in Childhood In 1953, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association radically changed our understanding of the development of heart disease. Researchers conducted a series of three hundred autopsies on American casualties of the Korean War, with an average age of around twenty-two. Shockingly, 77 percent of soldiers already had visible evidence of coronary atherosclerosis. Some even had arteries that were blocked off 90 percent or more.20 The study “dramatically showed that atherosclerotic changes appear in the coronary arteries years and decades before the age at which coronary heart disease (CHD) becomes a clinically recognized problem.”21 Later studies of accidental death victims between the ages of three and twenty-six found that fatty streaks—the first stage of atherosclerosis—were found in nearly all American children by age ten.22 By the time we reach our twenties and thirties, these fatty streaks can turn into full-blown plaques like those seen in the young American GIs of the Korean War. And by the time we’re forty or fifty, they can start killing us off. If there’s anyone reading this over the age of ten, the question isn’t whether or not you want to eat healthier to prevent heart disease but whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you very likely already have. Just how early do these fatty streaks start to appear? Atherosclerosis may start even before birth. Italian researchers looked inside arteries taken from miscarriages and premature newborns who died shortly after birth. It turns out that the arteries of fetuses whose mothers had high LDL cholesterol levels were more likely to contain arterial lesions.23 This finding suggests that atherosclerosis may not just start as a nutritional disease of childhood but one during pregnancy. It’s become commonplace for pregnant women to avoid smoking and drinking alcohol. It’s also never too early to start eating healthier for the next generation.

In this regard, the delicate cell bodies, dendrites, and axons are like the many other fluid-filled tubes within the body. The quality of their function is susceptible to changes in pressure, distortion, viscosity. Their need for constant irrigation is acute: If fresh oxygen is held back from a neuron for merely three to five seconds, it is rendered completely unexcitable.4 And necessary substances must circulate inside the cell as well as around it. If a long dendrite or axon is pinched, closing its length off from the rest of the cell’s fluid, the excitability of the isolated branch quickly decays and eventually the pinched axon or dendrite will atrophy. You can park a truck on top of an electrical wire and it will continue to work nicely. It will work, in fact, until it is completely severed. In contrast there are many intermediate stages of malfunction in a nerve short of this final breakage—or lesion—most of them having to do with the relative effectiveness of the delivery and circulation of nutritional fluids and the adequate flushing of toxins and wastes. These intermediate malfunctions do not normally stop the system; they just make it less efficient. They confuse sensations, cloud thoughts, disturb the precision of our muscular efforts, make us numb in some spots, unaccountably sensitive in others, eliminate responses, force compensations. Insofar as effective bodywork can be of direct benefit to the circulation of bodily fluids, it can help to support the actual metabolic bases of nerve function, and this benefit is above and beyond the question of the value of any actual sensations it may produce.

La erosión del régimen porfiriano obedece a todos estos factores, pero una de sus lesiones de fondo es parecida a la que pondría en jaque la hegemonía del PRI: el choque de nuevos y viejos actores desatados por la modernización económica y social, en un molde político rígido que no sólo no se renovaba, sino que, en el caso de Díaz, envejeció físicamente, empezando con el propio Díaz, hasta dibujar una clase dirigente que era al final, en todos los niveles, una verdadera asamblea de ancianos.

Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath — and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts.

Visual agnosia is the inability of the brain to make sense of or make use of some part of an otherwise normal visual stimulus and is typified by the inability to recognize familiar objects or faces. This is distinct from blindness, which is a lack of sensory input to the brain due to damage to the eye, optic nerve, or the primary visual cortex. Visual agnosia is often due to stroke affecting the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain. The specific dysfunctions vary depending on the type of agnosia. Some sufferers are unable to copy drawings but are able to manipulate objects with good dexterity. Commonly, patients can name the object, here a tea cup, categorize it, but cannot describe its function; or the reverse, be able to drink from it appropriately but not know its name or describe its uses. Lesion studies clearly demonstrate that even crystallized objects, your left foot, or here a tea cup, are not “things” in long-term memory but are concepts constructed from multiple brain modules at the moment of perception (Farah, 1999).

major threat to the psychoanalyst’s creativity in working with his patient is the patient’s relentless, aggressive attack on the analyst’s work with him. Attacks of this sort produce narcissistic lesions in the psychoanalyst. It is much easier for the analyst to tolerate aggression against any other aspects of his personality or behavior. The training analyst unable to tolerate the narcissistic candidate-analysand’s aggression may foster an unconscious collusion with the analysand, so that the latter’s aggression, particularly the destructive implications of unconscious envy, will not be explored. The

In what’s fondly called the spinning disk experiment, Jenkins trained them to reach through the bars of their cage and keep a couple of digits in contact with wedge-shaped grooves in a four-inch disk that was spinning like an old LP. The monkeys had to modulate carefully the force they applied to the disk: too little, and their fingers would lose contact with the disk; too much and their fingers would ride along as if on a carousel. But if the animals did it just right, maintaining contact without getting taken for a ride, they were rewarded with a banana-flavored pellet. “I’d sit there for hours, hand-training a hungry monkey until he got it,” says Jenkins. Then, some 500 times a day, the monkeys practiced the move; if successful, they got a pellet. “We made sure the monkeys were hungry, and put the disk near them,” recalls Allard. “Once they had mastered the task and were performing it hundreds of times a day for several weeks, we went in to their brains. We found a fourfold increase in the area of the somatosensory cortex responding to signals from these fingers.” This wasn’t a response to something as traumatic as an amputation, a lesion, or a nerve transection, as the earlier work had been. The researchers didn’t have to cut the animal to get a change in its brain: the rezoning was purely a response to purposeful behavior.

The oxymoronic term blindsight may seem bizarre, but it accurately describes these individuals’ Shakespearean condition: to see, but not to see. A lesion in the primary visual cortex should make a person blind, and it does deprive such patients of their conscious vision—they assure you that they cannot see anything in a specific part of the visual field (which corresponds precisely to the destroyed area of cortex), and they behave as if they were blind. Incredibly enough, however, when an experimenter shows them objects or flashes of light, they accurately point to them. 10 In a zombielike manner, they unconsciously guide their hand to locations that they do not see—blindsight indeed. Which intact anatomical pathways support unconscious vision in blindsight patients? Clearly, in these patients, some visual information still makes it through from the retina to the hand, bypassing the lesion that makes them blind. Because the entry point into the patients’ visual cortex had been destroyed, the researchers initially suspected that their unconscious behavior arose entirely from subcortical circuits. A key suspect was the superior colliculus, a nucleus in the midbrain that specializes in the cross-registration of vision, eye movements, and other spatial responses. Indeed, the first functional MRI study of blindsight demonstrated that unseen targets triggered a strong activation in the superior colliculus. 11 But that study also contained evidence that the unseen stimuli evoked activations in the cortex—and sure enough, later research confirmed that invisible stimuli could still activate both the thalamus and higher-level visual areas of the cortex, somehow bypassing the damaged primary visual area. 12 Clearly, the brain circuits that take part in our unconscious inner zombie and that guide our eye and hand movements include much more than just old subcortical routes.

You terrify me.” “What?” “You terrify me,” she said distinctly. It was like being harpooned. “I don’t mind the article. I told myself it was okay. It was okay. It is. But it frightens me that you can do that kind of thing anytime you want. You could buy half this city. You can take care of me. You can give me everything I ever wanted, everything I need, everything I might ever have dreamed of but might otherwise be unable to have, now. Because of…” She let go of one arm long enough to gesture to her body, the spine with its bright white lesions. “You offer me a way to have everything, to give up fighting. To just…give it up, give in, go gracefully into that good night. And the frightening thing is, I want to go. I want to never have to lift another finger, never have to worry about money again in my life, but then who would I be?” “You’d be Kick.” “No. Because who is Kick? I am what I do. And if it’s all done for me, what’s left?” “I don’t understand.” “I know. And it’s tempting to let you do it, anyway. But I can’t, because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore, who I am.” “You are Kick.” “I was Kick. Before.” I put the cup down, stood, and lifted the coffee table up and set it to one side out of the way. She watched me. I knelt at her feet. “You are Kick.” I bent and kissed her bare instep. “I know your skin.” I leaned forward, so that my cheek rested on her feet and each of my palms were flat on her hips. “I know the shape of your muscle, the heft of your bone.” I lifted my head. Her eyes met mine. I came to my knees and leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth. “I know your mouth.” I ran my hand over her hair, down the side of her neck. Her pulse beat hard. I know your pulse.” I kissed the other corner. Her lips opened. “I know your breath.” A light, almost not-there kiss, like kissing a butterfly’s wings. “I know your scent. I know you. I always will.

Having never experienced what it’s like to be truly alone, I didn’t understand the potency of loneliness until I was fully submerged in it. The realisation that I didn’t have any friends in the city opened an anxiety floodgate. Demons I had spent years of my life slaying suddenly awoke from their slumber and reared their ugly heads in my direction. It was as though they could sense it—that telling lesion in my emotional state that beckoned them to come knocking once more. I didn’t even know why making friends suddenly mattered so much to me. It’s not like it mattered back home. But then again, I had friends back home. I guess when you take something for granted and it’s suddenly lost—you tend to feel a bit lost in return.

Most people think of stomach acid as bad, the sort of thing that causes heartburn. In fact, sufficient stomach acid prevents heartburn by thoroughly digesting your food. (The burning sensation from heartburn is actually from the poorly digested food rotting in your gut and shooting up into your esophagus, not from excess stomach acid). Sufficient stomach acid, or hydrochloric acid (HCl), prevents food poisoning, parasites, and other bad bugs from gaining a foothold in your digestive tract. Lastly, plenty of HCl stimulates the gallbladder and pancreas to complete digestion and preserve the integrity of the whole gastrointestinal tract. The production of HCl depends on the hormone gastrin, which diminishes with hypothyroidism. This can cause such digestive complaints as heartburn, bloating, and gas; hinder the absorption of such vital nutrients as B12, iron, and calcium; and lead to inflammation, lesions, and infections of the intestines. Hypothyroidism and low HCl often go hand in hand.

Los restos paleontológicos revelan pruebas fascinantes de agresión entre hombres. Se han hallado trozos de lanzas y cuchillos alojados en los restos de cajas torácicas humanas. Las lesiones de cráneo y costillas son más frecuentes en el esqueleto masculino que en el femenino, lo que indica que el combate físico era una actividad fundamentalmente masculina.

Hence the alteratives are those agents that promote metabolism. In folk medicine these were traditionally called “blood purifiers” because a poorly burning metabolism often causes toxins that work their way to the surface to cause skin lesions

Vast quantities of government money went into research and development of drugs and food founded on chemistry and mass production. Regulations changed to support corporations and eliminate herbs. At the same time, there was a fundamental change in medicine. Drugs became molecularly specific weapons directed against germs or specific molecular lesions. Herbs, suited to general physiological imbalances, no longer fit the prevailing view of the human body.

The doctor did not inquire what might've been the source of the trauma, as if the lesions and scars on the Old Musician intimated the blunt force of ideology, that politics is not mere rhetoric in this place of wars and revolutions and violent coups but a bludgeon with which to forge one's destiny." -The Music of the Ghosts, p. 9

As his career blossomed, Campbell became one of the most respected nutritional biochemists in the world. A scientist with a diversity of research interests, Campbell was particularly interested in the connection between toxic chemicals and cancer. As fate would have it, he happened upon an obscure research paper, published in India, reporting on a study in which rats exposed to a Class IA carcinogen (aflatoxin) were fed either a 5 percent protein diet or a 20 percent protein diet. Campbell found himself puzzled by the results, which were completely counterintuitive: Every single rat fed the 20 percent protein diet developed liver cancer or its precursor lesions, whereas not a single animal fed the 5 percent protein diet developed liver cancer or a precursor lesion!

En la parte delantera del avión me encontró a mí inconsciente, con la cara cubierta de sangre y de contusiones negruzcas, y con la cabeza hinchada como una pelota de baloncesto. Me miró el pulso y se sorprendió al ver que mi corazón aún latía. Sin embargo, mis lesiones parecían tan graves que no me dio esperanzas de vida, así que él y Zerbino continuaron, ahorrando esfuerzos para aquellos a los que creían que podían ayudar.