Word: agnosia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lost in the commotion. An Anthropologist on Mars is still another collection of wide-ranging essays that he calls "neurohistories," an anecdotal form that combines science, sympathy and old-fashioned storytelling. Where most clinicians study at arm's length a case of amnesia, say, or autism or agnosia (inability to recognize a word or a shape), the British-born physician tries to see through the eyes of the patient. "The study of disease," says Sacks, "demands the study of identity, the inner worlds that patients, under the spur of illness, create...
...relentless, acerbically orchestrated commentaries. "Music," he says, "is power, passion, pulse, pain." In the psychologically astute The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, for example, Nyman used a Schumann song, Ich grolle nicht, as the musical foundation of the opera to illustrate the eponymous victim's visual agnosia: unable to synthesize visual images, the man relied on Schumann's music to help him apprehend the world. In The Piano, Scottish folk tunes suffused the keyboard reveries that gave the mute heroine Ada her soaringly distinctive if wildly anachronistic voice: the result was a blend of rigorous Minimalism, frank...
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