Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist who has often written about the search for meaning through personal loss and the struggle for coherence in a fragmented world. Some of his work has dealt with his battle with neurological damage caused by a virushe contracted in 1988...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
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A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
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A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.
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One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.
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Neurologists have a host of clinical tests that let them observe what a brain-damaged patient can and cannot do.
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Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.
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Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind.
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Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
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In the spring of 1993, I married Beverly and moved to the woods. This is something I could never have imagined myself doing.
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I used to be able to think. My brain's circuits were all connected, and I had spark, a quickness of mind that let me function well in the world.
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Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.
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At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.
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Dementia is, after all, a symptom of organic brain damage. It is a condition, a disorder of the central nervous system, brought about in my case by a viral assault on brain tissue. When the assault wiped out certain intellectual processes, it also affected emotional processes.
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When memories fade, can one ever really return home?
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Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.