Quotes from Floyd Skloot

Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind.

My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.

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.

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.

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.

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.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

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.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

Dementia resembles delirium in the same way an ultra-marathon resembles a dash across the street. Same basic components, vastly different scale. If you've run delirium's course once or twice in your life, try to imagine a version that never ends.