A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is a short paper with a long afterlife. McCulloch and Pitts propose an idealized model of neurons that fire or do not fire according to logical relations among their inputs.
Medical tag
Dementia Memory
Dementia, senility, amnesia, memory disorders.
Works
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
Passages
- A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, Discussion of circular networks
Recurrent circuits provide a formal way to think about memory and persistence of state.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Chapter 6
Manette at his shoemaker's bench in Defarge's garret, answering to his cell number and slowly recognizing Lucie's hair.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapters 18-19
Manette's nine-day relapse after the wedding; his clinical conversation with Lorry about the case and the destruction of the bench.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Sect. 9–10
Repetition, education and lying give ideas the vivacity of belief; a lively imagination can degenerate into madness when a ferment of the blood and spirits makes fictions indistinguishable from memories.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXVII
Personal identity through consciousness; cases of forgetting, drunkenness, sleepwalking and alternating consciousness, and their bearing on punishment.
- As We May Think, Memex description
The proposed desk extends memory by preserving linked trails through documents and records.
- As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7
The seven ages of man, ending in second childishness and the loss of the senses.
- Captains Courageous, Chapter III
Salters tells Harvey that Penn was a Moravian preacher who lost his family in the Johnstown flood and his memory with them.
- Captains Courageous, Chapter VII
The sight of the Jennie Cushman's dead briefly restores Penn's memory; afterward Disko explains how the shock lifted him out of forgetfulness and how he slid back.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8
Non compos mentis caused by disease, grief or accident; lucid intervals; persons under frenzies or losing intellect by disease; the crown as trustee for their recovery.
- Confessions, Book X.8–19
Inquiry into the structure of memory, forgetting and recollection.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, opening
Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Opening conceptual chapters
Bleuler revises dementia praecox and introduces schizophrenia as a group concept.
- Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XXXIX, Note
Death defined as a change in the body's proportion of motion and rest; the Spanish poet who after illness forgot his own works.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 10
The Struldbrugs: immortal, decrepit, forgetful and legally dead at eighty.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 5, Shadows in the Home
Dame Brinker tells how Raff was brought home from the flooded dike with his head bruised and cut, and how the fever passed but the dullness grew.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 34, The Awakening
Raff wakes believing he is still on the dike in the flood, recognizes his wife, and asks after the baby.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Heracles, final scene
Heracles wakes bound to a pillar, learns what he has done, contemplates suicide, and is persuaded by Theseus to live.
- King Lear, Recognition and loss
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Dementia praecox lectures
Psychotic symptoms are interpreted through deterioration, age of onset, and expected outcome.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Clinical books
The syndrome descriptions of melancholia, exaltation, monomania, and dementia show German psychiatry before Kraepelin.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 274c–275b
The myth of Theuth: writing as a pharmakon for memory that weakens memory.
- Summa Theologica, I, QQ. 78–79
The powers of the soul: vegetative, external and internal senses (common sense, imagination, estimative power, memory) and intellect.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- Swann's Way, Overture, the madeleine
The taste of madeleine in lime-flower tea brings back Combray after intellectual effort fails.
- The Moonstone, Third Narrative
Franklin meets Ezra Jennings, who has nursed Mr. Candy through a fever that has destroyed parts of his memory and kept notes of his wandering speech.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter XVI: Memory
Retention as a matter of brain paths, the conditions of good memory, forgetting, and pathological losses of memory.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Rip Van Winkle
Rip drinks repeatedly from the ninepin players' flagon, sleeps twenty years, and on waking at first blames the flagon; later he cannot say who he is before the village crowd.
- The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VIII
Peoples, like men, are docile only in youth; aged peoples resist reform like cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor. Revolutions are compared to illnesses that make individuals forget the past, after which a state may be reborn.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter XXVI
Grimhild gives Sigurd a horn of drink, and he forgets Brynhild entirely and remains at the Giuking court.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
His weak-minded grandfather carving fantastic figures and the boy's fear of sharing his blood.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter IX (Wreckage) and Chapter X (The Epilogue)
Three days the narrator cannot remember, his wandering through St. John's Wood, care by kindly strangers, and his later night visions of the dead.
- The Waves, Later-life sections
Aging, memory and bodily change alter the voices' relation to desire, ambition and language.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter III
In the wood where things have no names, Alice forgets her own name and the Fawn forgets what it is.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter V
The White Queen's memory works both ways; she bandages and screams over her finger before the brooch pricks it.
- Travels with My Aunt, Augusta's travel stories
Augusta's erotic and criminal memories challenge medicalized assumptions about sexuality and old age.
- Waiting for Godot, Act II
Estragon cannot recall the events of the day before; Pozzo returns blind and Lucky dumb, and both collapse.
Quotes
“there had been a strong and extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was the first cause of the malady”
“As liars, by the frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to remember them”
“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
Frequently cited
“Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
“I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields”
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord! I was--I am a minister of the Gospel. Leave him to me”
“As I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet, who had been seized with sickness, and though he recovered therefrom yet remained so oblivious of his past life, that he would not believe the plays and tragedies he had written to be his own”
Frequently cited
“This infirmity is the incurable outcome of a very common history of disease, to which we will provisionally give the name of Dementia Prcecox”
“Imagination therefore is nothing but Decaying Sense”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called _more_ wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory”
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories”
“For when the act of the imagination is hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ, for instance in a case of frenzy; or when the act of the memory is hindered, as in the case of lethargy, we see that a man is hindered from actually understanding things of which he had a previous knowledge”
Frequently cited
“the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
“There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”
“I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”