Neurologists have a host of clinical tests that let them observe what a brain-damaged patient can and cannot do.

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

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.

In 'A Poetics of Optics,' Equi writes that 'all images bank on alchemy.' This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga.