The River of Consciousness
by Oliver SacksAlfred A. Knopf, published 2017
My book club -- we might as well re-brand ourselves The Oliver Sacks Book Club -- is reading Sacks's final book, a collection of essays he completed as he knew he was dying.
I'm only a few pages into the second essay, "Speed," and he has already referenced H.G. Wells, Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and William James.
The reference to William James, yet again, made me think how differently I would have structured my education if I had it to do over again... he did just talk about The Time Machine. He also has described, which is just as important, what a curious (in both senses of the word) child he was. "Me too!" as we are all saying these days.
If I was reading the Communist Manifesto and Samuel Eliot Morison's fourteen volume history of the U.S. Navy in World War Two, at fourteen, there's no reason I couldn't have been reading Classical philosophy and history. I would have loved Livy.
St Augustus would have been hard going, but that's still true today. The same for Scholastic philosophy, but if I dipped into it while reading Pirenne, I might have been able to get something -- I'm imagining I would be college age by this point. And so on, century by century, building on my foundation until I finally reached the intellectual explosions of the 19th and then the 20th centuries some time in my late twenties.
At that point I would be be in a state similar to that of a person who has just completed reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time. I would have a solid foundation for moving forward -- or going back and starting over at points of interest along the way. (Or expanding to other cultures.)
Even so, I'm not sure that The Brothers K, for example, would have been as significant for me at that age and before I had read much from the 20th century. That, like Proust, might be something I would need to reread at a later date. Still, working from the ground up like this, would have paid off in the end. But could any young person have the patience for putting off the thought of his own time for so long?
p32 Here he is quoting H.G. Wells, ...now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations... the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls...
This is close to the perception of the encephalitis patients in Awakenings.
p35 Here Sacks is talking about the experience of time of people in traumatic accidents, and how things seem to take place in slow motion. Since this is an area of experience and interest for me, I have to add that our "perception" of the event is as contrived -- mostly after the fact -- as our perception of what we see is contrived. This is all the more true as in most of these cases the perceiver is unconscious at times. The details and the sequence of my truck accident are probably correct, but I also know I was unconscious at two points in the sequence. My mind had plenty of time to organize the inputs into a sort of PowerPoint presentation which is what I remember.
The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist
p96 At a higher level, Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive. The two had always to be coupled together, and in... [Freud's] Project [for a Scientific Psychology], as Pribram and Gill emphasize, "both memory and motive are psi processes based on selective facilitation . . . memories {being} the retrospective aspect of these facilitations; motives the prospective aspects." [Footnote: The inseparability of memory and motive, Freud pointed out, opened the possibility of understanding certain illusions of memory based on intentionality: the illusion that one has written to a person, for instance, when one has not but intended to, or that one has run the bath when one has merely intended to do so. We do not have such illusions unless there has been a preceding intention.]
This is very interesting to me just now as I'm having to deal with a person -- let's call her "CP" -- who seems to have become un-tethered from reality. She either is repeatedly lying about things that have happened, or she honestly believes the things she says. It is impossible to know which is the case, but I tend to think it is the latter.
Peeking ahead in this book, I've noticed that the next essay is on the "fallibility of memory," a topic I'm looking forward to, as, from what I've read of memory, it is quite pliable and subject to revision. If you remember the last time you remembered something, rather than the original event itself, then if you combine thinking (or dreaming) alternative scenarios with an intention (motive) for preferring that alternate scenario, you could end up honestly believing what you want to believe. The film Memento played with a variation on this idea.]
...Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory, nothing more guaranteed one's continuity as an individual. But memories shift, and no one was more sensitive than Freud to the reconstructive potential of memory, to the fact that memories are continually worked over and revised and that their essence, indeed, is recategorization.
If a person were to, innocently enough (though due to dominant character traits), screw up in a fairly life changing way, it would be almost irresistible to re-imagine the situation is a way that was kinder to that person's self-esteem. But here's the interesting question: Would this tactic become a tendency? Having saved the person's self-image once, would they be more likely to re-imagine any future difficult situation and to invent supporting events to go along with the re-imagined ones? Could the person slip into an almost dream-like state where it was actually impossible to distinguish dream from reality; memory for wish?
p99 ...Thus for [Gerald] Edelman, [who is continuing to work on this aspect of neurology] every perception is a creation and every memory a re-creation or recategorization.
The Fallibility of Memory
As I expected, this is a continuation of the previous essay. I'll jump to where he returns to my point. Here he's talking about plagiarism and cryptomnesias and what in Coleridge's case turned into "literary kleptomania,"
p113 ...as Holmes [his biographer] explores in the second volume of this biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge's plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and was more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, "his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak."
p114 Earlier... Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, with the German writer Jean Paul Richter -- an affinity which led him to translate Richter's writings and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way, conversing and communing in his notebooks with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from each other.
...
p115 Freud was fascinated by the slippages and errors of memory that occur in the course of daily life and their relation to emotion, especially unconscious emotion... [this leads to] accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood... he started to wonder whether such recollections have been distorted by fantasy and whether some... might be total fabulations, constructed unconsciously, but so convincingly that the patients themselves believed in them absolutely. The stories that patients told, and had told to themselves... could have a very powerful effect on their lives, and it seemed to Freud that their psychological reality might be the same whether they came from actual experience or from fantasy.
p116 [The case of Binjamin Wilkomirski who wrote a memoir, Fragments, about his childhood as a Jew in a concentration camp... only he was not a Jew and had not been in a concentration camp,] ...it seemed... that Wilkomirski had not intended to deceive his readers... He had, for many years, been engaged in an enterprise of his own -- basically the romantic reinvention of his own childhood, apparently in reaction to his abandonment by his mother at the age of seven.
p117 Apparently, Wilkomirski's primary intention was to deceive himself. When he was confronted with the actual historical reality, his reaction was one of bewilderment and confusion. He was totally lost, by this point, in his own fiction.
...
p120 There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true... depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way... and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves -- the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory...
I'm a little surprised he doesn't go into how the memory process is now believed to happen in the brain. How an older memory is physically replaced by the new one. Still, this was most of what I was hoping for.
Mishearings
p125 ... While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception -- the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.
That hasn't been my experience. My hearing of voices is not getting any better, but I'm not aware of experiencing what Sacks is talking about here. What I do experience is not being able to make out something a person is saying at the volume they are speaking. (Sounds in general show no indication of being muted or a problem.) What I find most annoying is that I experience this same difficulty in dreams.
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