Previous - 95. War stories
Painting
"A sane person might inquire why I waited until the coldest week of the year to paint the back of our building," I thought to myself as I shivered up on my aluminum extension ladder while filling knots in the plywood sheet that serves as our basement door. There are reasons, I tell myself. For one thing I thought our painting would have been done weeks ago. I had no idea it would prove so hard to schedule painters. And I had no idea we would be having such a wet season. Until a few days ago, it hadn't even occurred to me to worry about the unprotected wood back there -- and when I went back to check on it, I found they had used a good quality, though knotty, plywood that seems to be holding up well.But it was also clear to me that I could handle this myself. Once I start thinking how I can do something I'm pretty much doomed to do it.
Musicophilia
I've come to the section on my old friend synesthesia. Here's a great passage that highlights a bit of what fascinates me about this condition:p180 Synesthesia seems to go with an unusual degree of crossactivation between what, in most of us, are functionally independent areas of the sensory cortex... There is some evidence that such "hyperconnectivity" is indeed present in primates and other mammals during fetal development and early infancy, but is reduced or "pruned" within a few weeks or months after birth... behavioral observations of infants suggest "that the newborn's senses are not well differentiated, but are instead intermingled in a synesthetic confusion."
Perhaps, as Baron-Cohen and Harrison write, "we might all be colored-hearing synthetes until we lose connections between these two areas somewhere about three months of age." In normal development... a synthetic "confusion" gives way in a few months, with cortical maturation, to a clearer distinction and segregation of the senses, and this in turn makes possible the proper cross-matching of perceptions which is needed for the full recognition of an external world and its contents -- the sort of cross-matching which ensures that the look, the feel, the taste, and the crunch of a Granny Smith apple all go together. In those individuals with synesthesia, it is supposed, a genetic abnormality prevents complete deletion of this early hyperconnectivity, so that a larger or smaller remnant of this persists in adult life.
And then there's this:
...The rapidity with which synesthesia can follow blindness would scarcely allow the formation of new anatomical connections in the brain and suggests instead a release phenomenon, the removal of an inhibition normally imposed by a fully functioning visual system...
p182 Within weeks of losing his sight, Jacques Lusseyran developed a synesthesia so intense as to replace the actual perception of music...
I had no sooner made a sound on the A string, D or G or C, than I no longer heard it. I looked at it. Tones, chords, melodies, rhythms, each was immediately transformed into pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. . . . At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colors of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright that I could not remember having seen it on any object. When it was the oboe's turn, a clear green ran all through me, so cool that I seemed to feel the breath of night. . . . I saw music too much to be able to speak its language.
Oddly, this reminds me of the account of blind people who were confused and overwhelmed -- and not really pleased -- when they were able to finally see after a surgical procedure. And, of course, that was in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, before she talked about "the tree with the lights in it," which I've been thinking about this whole chapter. Whatever the thing-in-itself is in fact, we are unsettled when the way we perceive it changes.
Now we are at Tourette's. It turns out there is a "phantasmagoric" form of Tourette's where people respond uncontrollably to music. There are two different ways of viewing this and both interest me. First there's the notion that we are in some way an instrument played by music. Just as a movie score can move us against our will to feel a certain way, for some people a piece of music can force them to move and mimic and in other ways respond.
Then there's the other way:
p231 Tourette's brings out in stark form questions of will and determination: who orders what, who pushes whom around. To what extent are people with Tourette's controlled by a sovereign "I," a complex, self-aware, intentional self, or by impulses and feelings at lower levels in the brain-mind? Similar questions are brought up by musical hallucinations, and brainworms, and varied forms of quasi-automatic echoing and imitation. Normally we are not aware of what goes on in our brains, of the innumerable agencies and forces inside us that lie outside or below the level of conscious experience -- and perhaps this is just as well. Life becomes more complicated, sometimes unbearably so, for people with eruptive tics or obsessions or hallucinations, forced into daily, incessant contact with rebellious and autonomous mechanisms in their own brains....
Many of the dysfunctions Sacks has written about here are in fact failures of consciousness or "self," as we've learned about those terms in the previous blog. It is so tempting to view these cases as software app failures due to scrambled code or damaged media or maybe a failed chip.
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