I am currently reading “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” by Oliver Sacks. It is a book about individual cases of aphasia and similar conditions where a person suddenly and inexplicably loses their memory, ability to recognize faces, or becomes completely disassociated from their body – usually related to parietal lobe dysfunction. I include a couple of quotes:
“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all…Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing…(if I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s…) – Luis Bunuel.
“The aspects of thing that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes). The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.” – Wittgenstein