Oliver Sacks, "The River of Consciousness"

 – e-book

 

Read from May 30^th to June 16^th 2021

My rating: 

 

I must confess The River of Consciousness, despite its Borgesian title, did not captivate me as much as other Oliver Sacks’ books. However, Sacks being Sacks, I learned a lot from this one, too (even slightly irrelevant facts I bet I won’t forget as easily as more important ones, like the fact that there are people with Tourette’s who can catch a fly on the wings because their have a different perception of speed).

One of the most intriguing essays is The Fallibility of Memory, with the doubt it rises about what we remember, that is, what we think we remember. It seems that our memories, especially our earliest ones, are rarely reliable because our mind often mingles stories we were told or read with what really happened to us. Actually, the psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has proved (by experimentally implanting false memories in her subjects’ minds) that the so-called recovered memories of traumatic experiences, memories that ruined lives and families, could have been, in some cases, insinuated or planted by others (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker, an investigator and so on), in the minds of highly suggestible persons (children, a teenagers, bipolars, etc.).

What is clear in all these cases—whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we all have based on misattribution or source confusion—is that in the absence of outside confirmation there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what Donald Spence calls “historical truth” and “narrative truth.”

Remarkably interesting is also the essay The Creative Self. After presenting the distinction Merlin Donald made (in the Origins of the Modern Mind) between mimicry (exact imitation), imitation (which is never an exact copy of others’ behaviour), and mimesis (which, in Donald’s own words “usually incorporates both mimicry and imitation to a higher end, that of re-enacting and re-presenting an event or relationship”), Sacks underlines that “mimetic culture” has been a crucial stage in our evolution, for the creative self is nothing but a synthesis of cultural influences, borrowed ideas (a sort of involuntary plagiarism), social and intellectual influences that were assimilated and combined with personal experience to be afterwards expressed in an original way. However, even though many are born with a creative self and show a brilliant promise in their youth, they fail to fulfill this promise, because they lack that “special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled.”

The last essay, Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science, is an apt metaphor of the obstacles science had to overcome, be them religious beliefs, social prejudices or simply esthetic stereotypes, all of them floating scotomas that prevent a clear sight. Take, for example, the great naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who tried to solve the debate around evolution / natural selection in his book, Omphalos, by stating that the fossils were not ancient creatures “but were merely put in the rocks by the Creator to rebuke our curiosity—an argument which had the unusual distinction of infuriating zoologists and theologians in equal measure.”

Or Newton and Galileo, who must have been aware of chaos as part of nature but did not feel like formulating a theory about it, for they could not accept an irrational, unlawful, disorderly Nature. And more than two centuries later, Henri Poincaré still had the same feeling, admitting that the mathematical consequences of chaos deeply disturbed him. As for and Einstein, it is well known he could not bear the irrational nature of quantum mechanics, dismissing them as superficial representations of natural processes.

 

I will finish with a quote I found quite comforting given that I, like Doris Lessing, have always believed that being healthy is simply a question of luck:

Doris Lessing once wrote of the situation of my postencephalitic patients, “It makes you aware of what a knife-edge we live on.” Yet, in health, we live not on a knife edge but on a broad and stable saddleback of normality. Physiologically, neural normality reflects a balance between excitatory and inhibitory systems in the brain, a balance which, in the absence of drugs or damage, has a remarkable latitude and resilience.