Individuality

Source: Favim

Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.
Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.

~ Oliver Sacks

Quote on illness

Source: Unknown/Favim

Defects, disorders, diseases … can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. …Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too — for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force on it an unexpected growth and evolution.

~Oliver Sacks

Quote on illness

Source: Unknown/Favim

Defects, disorders, diseases … can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. …Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too — for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force on it an unexpected growth and evolution.

~Oliver Sacks