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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 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.
- Travels with My Aunt, Augusta's travel stories
Augusta's erotic and criminal memories challenge medicalized assumptions about sexuality and old age.
Quotes
“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”
“I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields”
“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”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”