Excerpts: "As an undergraduate I heard the Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen start a lecture course on animal behaviour with the words, “Some people try to extrapolate from our studies to human behaviour but if you wish to learn about the behaviour of man don’t ask the ethologist; turn rather to the great writers. Read Dostoevsky, read Tolstoy.” I paraphrase, but the sense is right. In the event it was another Russian who caught my imagination and my feeling for nature....somehow I came across this:“The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things...When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and colour,it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner.When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in... I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception”... Nabokov understood, and perhaps this is what drew him to literature... — that imagination can circumvent both dull experiment and dull exposition, and deliver ideas in a flash. For this reason — the supremacy of imagination — there has always been a cross-fertilisation between science and literature. You may find it in the borrowing of ‘quark’ from Finnegans Wake (“Three quarks for Muster Mark”)... The essence is the idea and the enquiry. “What if ?” is the question posed in both literature and science. What if the Thane of Cawdor were to have an ambitious wife and a fatal flaw in his disposition? What if a young Raskolnikov were to attempt the ultimate intellectual violence, the justification of murder? What if a grown man were to fall in love with a pubescent girl? Or... what if a gravitational field were to create a curvature of the space–time continuum? What if electrons were to be both wave and particle? What if God really were to play dice?...The unreliable particle and the unreliable narrator are two sides of the same weirdly spinning coin. And just as scientists employ thought experiments to focus their ideas, so a work of literature is a thought experiment about this uncertain human condition.Simon Mawer

Excerpts: "The Russian name Nabokov means "leaning sideways" or "on one's side" (perhaps the closest English approximation would be "Sideman"). It seems that this name itself contains the formula of his style and conveys the magic of this bending, this slanting movement of all things: not straight but skewed on its side like a ray of light at sunset. Thus, the sum of all Nabokovian works turns out to be the justification of this magical surname, which is the first and most important word uttered about the writer, earmarking him, and setting the path for his own words."[...]Nabokov's style always grips the thing at the edge of presence - the thing bends somewhere, it heels, almost disappearing and finally sending off some kind of washed-away reflection. "

A phenomenological survey of auditory verbal hallucinations...Phenom Cogn Sci (2010) 9:213–224 F. Larøi.
www.charlesfernyhough.com/.../Jones+10PCS.p...

First paragraph: “Just before falling asleep” observed Vladimir Nabokov, “I often become aware of a kind of a one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts” (Nabokov 1999, p. 20).Nabokov also recorded experiencing, on the verge of sleep, images of “gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.” (p. 20). In addition to the auditory and visual hallucinations Nabokov reported, hallucinations in other modalities are also found on the borders of sleep. These can include olfactory experiences, tactile experiences (such as the sensation of being touched), or a sensed or felt presence in the absence of any perceptible evidence (Cheyne et al.1999). This no man’s land between sleeping and waking has long been known to be a fertile state for hallucinatory experiences. Not only have artists such as Nabokov noted this but also many religious figures, such as St. Teresa of Ávila and Emanuel Swedenborg (Jones and Fernyhough 2008). While the richness of Nabokov’s “hypnagogic mirages” (p. 21) may be unusual, almost all individuals in the general population will undergo hallucinatory experiences on the borders of sleep during their lifetime (Ohayon 2000)"