Kyle->GetThoughts();



Something, but not much
19 November 2008 @ 10:22 AM MST
Current Music: Trendy Mixes
Current Mood: Sleepy
I haven't posted anything interesting this month. Mostly because there hasn't been anything interesting that I want to write about that I didn't write about on my other blog and I don't particularly want to just copy posts.

Last night I stayed up later than I should have to finish reading The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. It's a collection of stories about patients that Oliver Sacks encountered during his years as a practicing neurologist (I think he was a neurologist anyways). It's rather interesting. There are a lot of weird ways that the human brain can malfunction.

The first story, where the title comes from, is about a man who loses all brain function pertaining to faces. He doesn't see faces as faces anymore, nor does he have any memory of what faces are, or that he can't see them. The title comes from his visit to Dr. Sacks when he was preparing to leave and began looking around for his hat. His wife was standing near him and he reached over and tried to pick up her head as his hat to put on so he could leave.

The book contains several other random stories. People with Korsakov's syndrome (like the guy in Memento if you've seen it), people who have phantom pains and how phantom limbs make using prosthetics easier, a pair of twin savants who can't perform simple arithmetic but "see" numbers instantly when a collection is presented to them and who communicate with each other in a type of game where they some come up with prime numbers and tell them to each other and each really enjoys the process (Prime numbers up to 25 digits long!). The same twins can instantly tell you what day of the week any date within the next 10,000 or previous 10,000 years will/did fall. Same thing for calculating the date of Easter for that time period. Fascinating.

So, it's an interesting little read.

I will have a rather interesting post to read about soon, but it will be lengthy and will require more work to compose.

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