The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Oliver Sacks
Touchstone: New York, 1998
Seattle Public Library
616.8 Sa147M 1998
On "musical epilepsy:" Such epileptic hallucinations or dreams ... are never phantasies: they are always memories, and memories of the most precise and vivid kind, accompanied by the emotions which accompanied the original experience. Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by ordinary memory, suggested that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime's experience, that the total stream of consciousness was preserved in the brain, and, as such, could always be evoked or called forth, whether by the ordinary needs and circumstances of life, or by the extraordinary circumstances of an epileptic or electrical stimulation (137-8).
