I mentioned in my last post that I am very much interested in communication because of my inability to communicate with Mike, my older brother, who is autistic, profoundly retarded and nonverbal. I would like to discuss the concept of communication in general, see how its underlying principles apply to language, and the problems that […]
I was greatly impressed by a recent book, Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë, who presents a different way to look at consciousness. He believes that current approaches to the question of consciousness are wrongheaded: instead of looking for consciousness as arising inside a person’s head, it is a result of interaction of with […]
This picture is from a home movie. I took it from a TV set after the 8mm was transferred to videotape. The movie was made before 1961, since Mike went to Willowbrook about then. My brother Mike is autistic, low functioning and has never spoken. I am pushing Mike on the Irish Mail. The Irish […]
I Love Books I have books all over the house. When I get interested in something, I buy all the books I can find about the subject. Sometimes, when I read a book that references other books, I must get those books as well. For instance, I remember reading The Art of Hunger, a book […]
My mother got a brand new VW bug in the early 1960s. It was shiny and red. I particularly remember one bright sunny day. I had just gotten a pair of binoculars, and to try them out, I pointed its gaze to Mom’s car parked on the street. I can still see the sparkling red […]
Below is a collage that I assembled from childhood photos, photos I took during my quest to discover who my older autistic brother is, and a rubber brain – the thing that looks like a wrinkly tush. A collage should have meaning even if the viewer isn’t privy to the exact references the artist had […]
First reaction When I first heard of this malady a couple of days ago, I must admit, it appealed to my macabre sense of humor, especially when Wikipedia[1] described Americans afflicted with strokes speaking with English accents after recovery, a Norwegian shrapnel victim in 1941 suddenly speaking with a German accent, and so on. It […]
In this month’s Scientific American (May 2013), there is an article called ‘Seeds of Dementia’ by Lary C. Walker and Mathias Juker. Without going into detail, Walker and Juker, through their research, became reasonably certain that mis-folded amyloid beta (Aβ) proteins provide the point around which larger masses of Aβ proteins aggregate, causing synapses to clog […]
I used rolls of 35mm film when I took photographs. Instead of printing each negative, which could be expensive, the developed film was cut into strips and laid out in contact with photographic paper in the dark room. A sheet of glass was placed on top to flatten them out, and they were all exposed at one […]
Review of Part 1: Empirical Evidence Relating Emotion and Expression I briefly reviewed Charles Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this fascinating account, Darwin established that expressions are related to mental states and that the nervous system acts on the body in response to environmental stimuli. Through his observations, […]
