In looking at the photographs, I ask myself if I remember what happened at the time or am I picking up cues from the pictures and inferring what must have happened? I do know, that in this first picture, Michael is reaching for me, though it may look like he’s fending me off. Michael liked […]
[Note: part of this post was excerpted and posted previously. ] My aim in this post is to explore the depiction of mental disorders and disabilities in the medium of photography and my personal experience in wrestling with this. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a disorder is an abnormal physical or mental condition and […]
Imagine that you had an unmanageable child: a child who didn’t understand anything, who sucked up all the care you could give, who seldom responded and did so only after you expended maximal effort. Suppose you had other children. You could not afford private care. If you were offered a solution, would you take it? Suppose there […]
I haven’t done much reading about misalignment of the eyes. I do know that if the eyes are not aligned properly in an infant, stereoscopic vision does not develop naturally. From the picture in the last post, you can see that my brother’s right eye looks off to the side while the left seems fixed […]
This is an important picture to me. I took this was at his 40th birthday party. It wouldn’t win any prizes, but it showed me something that I always sought from my older brother: attention. The fact that Michael has never spoken or seemed to acknowledge me probably explains this craving. My quest for his attention was […]
This is me with my Brownie camera: Maybe I was 8 years old. My Dad had a 1957 Chevy, but I don’t think that’s it in the background. Dad probably took this picture in the parking lot somewhere. It might have been at this public park near Willowbrook[1] where we used to go when we visited […]
These are a couple of pictures from early visits to see Mike at Willowbrook[1] by my parents, my younger brother and me. I think the picture with my father was at Al Deppe’s, a combination food stand and arcade. It was a cool place for my younger brother and me. It had a violin-piano […]
I just finished The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. R.E. Cytowic[1], about synesthesia. He raised some extremely interesting topics. Although the primary focus of the book is about synesthesia, he mentions the importance of the ‘emotional brain’ – physically embodied by the limbic system – in all aspects of human life and experience. One […]
This is the neuroscience part of the blog I’m reading The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic, M.D.[1] This book is about the phenomenon of synesthesia, where a sensory stimulus triggers sensations by several senses, such as a visual stimulus producing a sound. Dr. Cytowic describes an encounter with one of his friends who, […]
