Losing Touch

Losing Touch PDF Author: Jonathan Cole
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778872
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
What is like to live without touch or movement/position sense (proprioception)? The only way to understand the importance of these senses, so familiar we cannot imagine their absence, is to ask someone in that position. Ian Waterman lost them below the neck over forty years ago, though pain and temperature perception and his peripheral movement nerves were unaffected. Without proprioceptive feedback and touch the movement brain was disabled. Completely unable to move, he felt disembodied and frightened. Then, slowly, he taught himself to dress, eat and walk by thinking about each movement and with visual supervision. In Losing Touch, the narrative moves between biography and scientific research, theatre, documentary and zero gravity. He has been married three times, and built up successful careers in disability access audit, using his impairment to his advantage, and in rare turkey breeding and journalism. The neuroscience has led to data on movement without feedback, the pleasantness of touch, gesture, pain and body orientation in space. The account shows how the science was actually done but also reveals Ian's journey from passive subject to informed critic of science and scientists and that the science has given him both more understanding but also greater confidence personally. His unique response to such a rare condition has also led to a BBC documentary, theatrical portrayals and a weightless flight with NASA. As a young man he sought triumph over his impairment; now, nearly 65, he has more mature reflections on living with such an extraordinary loss, the limits it has imposed and the opportunities it has enabled. He gives his views on scientists and on others he has met including Oliver Sacks and Peter Brook. In an Afterword those from science, the arts and philosophy give an appreciation of his contribution. The book is the result of nearly 30 years close collaboration between author and subject.

Losing Touch

Losing Touch PDF Author: Jonathan Cole
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191087696
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What is like to live without touch or movement/position sense (proprioception)? The only way to understand the importance of these senses, so familiar we cannot imagine their absence, is to ask someone in that position. Ian Waterman lost them below the neck over forty years ago, though pain and temperature perception and his peripheral movement nerves were unaffected. Without proprioceptive feedback and touch the movement brain was disabled. Completely unable to move, he felt disembodied and frightened. Then, slowly, he taught himself to dress, eat and walk by thinking about each movement and with visual supervision. In Losing Touch, the narrative moves between biography and scientific research, theatre, documentary and zero gravity. He has been married three times, and built up successful careers in disability access audit, using his impairment to his advantage, and in rare turkey breeding and journalism. The neuroscience has led to data on movement without feedback, the pleasantness of touch, gesture, pain and body orientation in space. The account shows how the science was actually done but also reveals Ian's journey from passive subject to informed critic of science and scientists and that the science has given him both more understanding but also greater confidence personally. His unique response to such a rare condition has also led to a BBC documentary, theatrical portrayals and a weightless flight with NASA. As a young man he sought triumph over his impairment; now, nearly 65, he has more mature reflections on living with such an extraordinary loss, the limits it has imposed and the opportunities it has enabled. He gives his views on scientists and on others he has met including Oliver Sacks and Peter Brook. In an Afterword those from science, the arts and philosophy give an appreciation of his contribution. The book is the result of nearly 30 years close collaboration between author and subject.

Losing Touch

Losing Touch PDF Author: Jonathan Cole
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778872
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book

Book Description
What is like to live without touch or movement/position sense (proprioception)? The only way to understand the importance of these senses, so familiar we cannot imagine their absence, is to ask someone in that position. Ian Waterman lost them below the neck over forty years ago, though pain and temperature perception and his peripheral movement nerves were unaffected. Without proprioceptive feedback and touch the movement brain was disabled. Completely unable to move, he felt disembodied and frightened. Then, slowly, he taught himself to dress, eat and walk by thinking about each movement and with visual supervision. In Losing Touch, the narrative moves between biography and scientific research, theatre, documentary and zero gravity. He has been married three times, and built up successful careers in disability access audit, using his impairment to his advantage, and in rare turkey breeding and journalism. The neuroscience has led to data on movement without feedback, the pleasantness of touch, gesture, pain and body orientation in space. The account shows how the science was actually done but also reveals Ian's journey from passive subject to informed critic of science and scientists and that the science has given him both more understanding but also greater confidence personally. His unique response to such a rare condition has also led to a BBC documentary, theatrical portrayals and a weightless flight with NASA. As a young man he sought triumph over his impairment; now, nearly 65, he has more mature reflections on living with such an extraordinary loss, the limits it has imposed and the opportunities it has enabled. He gives his views on scientists and on others he has met including Oliver Sacks and Peter Brook. In an Afterword those from science, the arts and philosophy give an appreciation of his contribution. The book is the result of nearly 30 years close collaboration between author and subject.

Losing Touch

Losing Touch PDF Author: Sandra Hunter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780743831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Arjun brought his family to North West London after Indian independence, but hopes of a better life rapidly dissipate. His wife Sunila spends all day longing for an Aga and a nice English tea service, his son hates anything Indian, and his daughter, well, that’s a whole other problem. Reeling from the death of his younger brother, Arjun vainly attempts to enforce the values he grew up with, while his family eagerly embrace the new. But when his right leg suddenly fails him, Arjun’s growing sense of imbalance is more than external. Offering an intimate and touching portrait of an immigrant family precariously balanced on the cusp of East and West, Hunter’s strikingly sympathetic characters remind us of our own shortfalls, successes, hypocrisies - and humanity.

Losing Touch with Nature

Losing Touch with Nature PDF Author: Mary Thomas Crane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Aristotelian naturalism and its discontents -- Losing touch with nature -- Spenser and the new science -- Shakespeare: New forms of nothing -- Matter and power -- Epilogue: What about Bacon?

Out of Touch

Out of Touch PDF Author: Geoffrey L. Greif
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195357345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The breakdown of the family has moved in recent years to the forefront of national consciousness. All manner of social ills, from poor academic performance to teenage drug use and gang crime, have been attributed to high divorce rates and the collapse of the traditional two-parent family. Targets of particularly harsh criticism are parents who lose all contact with their children after a divorce. So-called "deadbeat dads" are denounced in political speeches and ridiculed on billboard advertisements; mothers who lose touch with their children are stigmatized as emotionally unstable or lacking maternal instincts. Everyone seems to understand the importance of children being raised by two-parent families and the damage that can occur when one parent loses contact completely. What is significantly less clear is why this loss of contact occurs and what can be done to prevent it. In Out of Touch, Geoffrey Greif explores these issues with clarity, compassion, insight, and an evenhandedness rarely encountered in an arena far more susceptible to acrimonious debate than sympathetic understanding. Setting out to find the reality beneath the catchall categorization of out-of-touch parents as deadbeats, substance abusers, child mistreaters, or criminals, Greif focuses on those parents who tried and, for a vast array of reasons, failed to maintain contact with their children. It is their voices, in a discussion dominated up till now by the custodial parent, that we most need to hear, Greif argues, if we are to uncover ways to avoid such failures in the future. Rather than offering dry statistics and abstract generalizations, Greif lets us hear these voices directly in 26 in-depth interviews with estranged parents and with children caught in the crossfire of painful divorces. Extending over a period of two to ten years, these interviews, and Greif's perceptive analyses of them, reveal the whole spectrum of logistical, emotional, and legal difficulties that keep parents and children apart. From the ordinary problems of visitation rights and child support to the more complex and troubling issues--bitter court battles, accusations of sexual abuse, domestic violence, children rejecting a parent, child kidnapping, and many others--Out of Touch vividly and often heartbreakingly presents all the ways that fathers and mothers, even with the best intentions, can lose contact with their children. But the book does more than tell the stories of failed relationships. Its concluding chapter offers a series of specific and extremely helpful suggestions for families--parents, children, grandparents--who find themselves in danger of complete estrangement. Greif outlines how families can employ support systems, communication skills, mediation, and many other strategies to overcome the most difficult obstacles that occur after a divorce. It is here that the lessons gleaned from the broken relationships of the past become invaluable advice for the future. Informed by fresh perspectives, moving personal accounts, and a clear-sighted approach to a tangled issue, Out of Touch is a timely and deeply important book about both the forces that drive parents and children apart and the understanding that can keep them together.

Out of Touch

Out of Touch PDF Author: Michelle Drouin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262545993
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A behavioral scientist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex—although of course sex is an important part of intimacy. But how important? Drouin reports on surveys that millennials (perhaps distracted by constant Tinder-swiping) have less sex than previous generations. She discusses pandemic puppies, professional cuddlers, the importance of touch, “desire discrepancy” in marriage, and the value of friendships. Online dating, she suggests, might give users too many options; and the internet facilitates “infidelity-related behaviors.” Some technological advances will help us develop and maintain intimate relationships—our phones, for example, can be bridges to emotional support. Some, on the other hand, might leave us out of touch. Drouin explores both of these possibilities.

Reclaiming Your Self

Reclaiming Your Self PDF Author: Brian DesRoches
Publisher: Wellness Institute, Inc.
ISBN: 9781587410338
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
From an expert in the field comes the first and only complete step-by-step plan for recovery from codependence--the self-destructive behavior that results when people are so obsessed with the needs of others that they neglect their own.

Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary Reference Book with CD-ROM

Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary Reference Book with CD-ROM PDF Author: Cambridge University Press
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521691963
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 1162

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Book Description
The Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary defines the vocabulary students need to succeed in high school and beyond. Entries cover more than 2,000 content-area vocabulary items, as well as general academic vocabulary and full coverage of everyday words and phrases. The CD-ROM lets students search for vocabulary by subject area, includes audio of all entry words, offers word family and frequency information, and has a thesaurus and instant lookup feature. The CD-ROM is compatible with Windows XP/Vista and with Mac OSX 10.4 (32-bit only).

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547549253
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1003

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Book Description
"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."-Jonathan Lethem Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.

Melancholic Joy

Melancholic Joy PDF Author: Brian Treanor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350177768
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a “melancholic joy” that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.