In Part Three, “Transports,” Sacks describes cases in which strong imagery coupled with memory and unusual temporal lobe and limbic system stimulation can “transport” a person, and cause a changed state of perception. In the first chapter of this section, “Reminiscence,” Sacks recollects a partially deaf woman in her eighties. Upon dreaming of her childhood in Ireland, especially the songs she recalled dancing and singing to, the woman woke up with the songs still clearly playing. At first, the music was constant and conversation could only be held during the quieter songs, but it gradually faded so that she would only hear a few parts of songs throughout the day. An EEG showed that the cause was temporal lobe seizures and amygdala and limbic system disturbances due to a stroke. Sacks also encountered another woman in her eighties with similar symptoms, whose temporal lobe seizures caused her to hear three specific songs in her head, songs that she tended to hum before the seizures started. Because these epileptic hallucinations were vivid recapturances of past consciousness, it indicates that the brain might somehow keep an iconic record of memories.…show more content… For example, one woman taking L-Dopa found herself using colloquialisms and social behaviors that had long ago faded. Basically, L-Dopa had “released” a “dormant” memory trace from the past. Chapter Seventeen, “A Passage to India,” chronicles the life of a girl who, at the age of seven developed a brain tumor, that became fatally malignant and untreatable when she was eighteen. This resulted in temporal lobe seizures that manifested themselves as dream-like visions of her beloved childhood in India, which developed steadily until the patient was almost as if in her own, peaceful world until her
