Word: stimuli
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wrists. Some nurses report that Cruzan can turn toward persons who speak to her and that she has cried on several occasions, once when a valentine card was read to her. But doctors say she is oblivious to the environment except for reflexive responses to sound and painful stimuli. "We have literally cried over Nancy's body, and we've never seen anything," says her anguished father Joe Cruzan. "Sometimes you swear she is looking right at you, but then you move three or four steps. She has no awareness of herself...
Calvino explores hearing and smell with comparable insight and deftness. In A King Listens, a monarch whose power depends on his remaining glued to his ! throne becomes a paranoiac, his mind an echo chamber of suspicion, as he is deprived of all stimuli -- save for the aural -- from beyond his hall. And in The Name, the Nose, three characters try to track down unknown women whose odors have intoxicated them...
...characters burdened with the necessity of being typical have a hard time simply being themselves. Peter and Paul are so busy representing alternate responses to stimuli that they seem ganglions rather than real folks. Deighton can rarely resist the temptation to point out the big issues behind his narrative. He interrupts a scene of trench warfare with a sweeping comment on some of the combatants: "They were Germans, and their readiness to obey instructions was a measure of their civilization, and their tragedy...
When the craft finally skids to a halt at the bottom of the humongous Eastman-Kodak screen, fog bubbles up from the floor of the theater, and olfactory stimuli (Blown circuits, melted metal, Vicks Vapor Rub) tingle the audience's orgiastically flaring nostrils. Honest: Huxley's Feelies are alive and well and playing every hour on the hour (even as you read this) in the heart of Central Florida...
...this is some way from the flat pre-1916 Matisses, and one of its governing impulses was the artist's desire to measure himself not only against the visual stimuli of the Cote d'Azur but against the heritage of the 19th century, whose former citizen he was. Its masters speak both to and from his Nicois canvases. The hushed green density of Large Landscape, Mont Alban, 1918, is an amalgam of Courbet and Corot, though the slow, wristy drawing that drives the eye round the curve of the road and follows the slant of the windblown pines is entirely...