And Finally

by Henry Marsh

Hope is one of the most precious drugs doctors have at their disposal.

Hope is a state of mind, and states of mind are physical states in our brains, and our brains are intimately connected to our bodies (and especially to our hearts).

Our memory of our past self is largely a self-serving construct,

The lockdown was an entirely novel and universal experience, overshadowed at first for me by Kate’s illness and the constant stream of death statistics in the media, as though there was some kind of deadly Olympiad in progress, with countries competing for the most deaths.

Blind people do not dream in visual images yet demonstrate rapid eye movements.

psychoanalysis developed many of the features of a religious cult.

was lazy and greedy – constantly buying upgrades and new models and then too lazy to recycle things when I no longer needed them or get them mended if they broke down

PFI was supposed to be a cheaper and more efficient way of building hospitals and schools than direct government funding, but as many warned at the time, the opposite was true. PFI was a con, little short of an economic crime, for which nobody has been held to account.

Much of what goes on in hospitals – the regimentation, the uniforms, the notices everywhere – is about emphasising the gap between staff and patients, and helping the staff overcome their natural empathy. It is not about helping patients.

being a patient is an essentially disempowering and humiliating experience.

But the research will continue, funded by anxious, ageing billionaires, who are driven by the selfish, hedonistic greed that is destroying so much of life on our planet.

Free will might be a legal necessity for an ordered society, but it is an illusion. Our decisions are determined by our past.

Most experiments along these lines have been on WEIRD psychology students – WEIRD being western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – so it is hard to know just how much they mean.