The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, published 2017
The Creative Self
My favorite essay so far,
p141 Early in 1982, I received an unexpected packet from London containing a letter from Harold Pinter and the manuscript of a new play, A Kind of Alaska, which, he said, had been inspired by a case history of mine in Awakenings. In his letter, Pinter said that he had read my book when it originally came out in 1973 and had immediately wondered about the problems presented by a dramatic adaptation of this. But, seeing no ready solution to these problems, he had then forgotten about it. One morning eight years later, Pinter wrote, he had awoken with the first image and first words ("Something is happening") clear and pressing in his mind. The play had then "written itself" in the days and weeks that followed...
He contrasts this with yet another play about the same case history, written more quickly four years earlier by another playwright,
p142 ...was the problem essentially one of incubation, that... [the other playwright] had not allowed himself enough time for the experience of reading Awakenings to sink in? Nor had he allowed himself, as Pinter did, time to forget it, [there were many direct quotes from the book] to let it fall into his unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts...
He goes on to describe how Henri Poincare would struggle with, give up on a problem, only for a solution to pop into his head while he was doing something else entirely and not even thinking about the problem.
p144 ...It seemed clear, as Poincare wrote, that there must be an active and intense unconscious (or subconscious, or preconscious) activity even during the period when a problem is lost to conscious thought, and the mind is empty or distracted with other things. This is... the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self. Poincare pays tribute to this unconscious self: it "is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; . . . it knows how to choose, to divine. . . . It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed."
...
p147 Creativity -- that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, when a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerges -- seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think that if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.
At such times, when I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me, certainly the best part of me.
I suspect anyone who has done much writing has experienced what Sacks is describing here. (I skipped the part about music and Wagner which sounded a little too much like Adrian in Doctor Faustus composing with the assistance of his Mephisto.) I can't help seeing in this either the work of the OS that runs under the App of our consciousness, or else our contact (he did use the term transcendence) with the Dreamer of our dream.
He has written about the subjective nature of our perception of reality but hasn't been explicit about how this perception is presented to our conscious self by something else that takes in whatever our senses receive and edits that into the Reader's Digest version of reality we are aware of. Is there any reason to doubt that it is this same "something" that is digesting these problems and then, after their incubation, presenting us with the surviving chicks?
To push this metaphor over the edge, it goes without saying that only fertile eggs will hatch into viable ideas, plays, or compositions. Also, in this interpretation, we are all both Mozart and Salieri. Salieri on our own, but Mozart when we are in touch with that inner, better, self.
Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science
p203 ...Gunter Stent, considering "prematurity" in scientific discovery in 1972, wrote, "A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge."...
...
p205 Scotoma, surprisingly common in all fields of science, involves more than prematurity; it involves a loss of knowledge, a forgetting of insights that once seemed clearly established, and sometimes a regression to less perceptive explanations. [Ptolemy's geocentric theory is sited.] What makes an observation or a new idea acceptable, discussable, memorable? What may prevent it from being so, despite its clear importance and value?
Freud would answer this question by emphasizing resistance: the new idea is deeply threatening or repugnant and hence is denied full access to the mind...
It is not enough to apprehend something, to "get" something, in a flash. The mind must be able to accommodate it, to retain it. The first barrier lies in allowing oneself to encounter new ideas, to create a mental space, a category with potential connections -- and then to bring these ideas into full and stable consciousness, to give them conceptual form, holding them in mind even if they contradict one's existing concepts, beliefs, or categories. [Military history is all about this difficulty.] This process of accommodation, of spaciousness of mind. is crucial in determining whether an idea or discovery will take hold and bear fruit or whether it will be forgotten, fade, and die without issue.
There is so much more to say about this. There's that notion that Native Americans were unable to see the first European sailing ships off their shores because they had never seen anything visually similar. A visual equivalent of, "connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge" above. Then there's Proust's notion that the artist must train the audience to be able to comprehend the new form of art on display.
And military history is simply variations on the theme of someone (or some State or army) making an advance and everyone else struggling to comprehend what has changed. The poor Austrian generals facing Napoleon, and the European armies facing the Germans at the beginning of WW2, are obvious examples of this. Though my favorite would be the generals on both sides in the American Civil War struggling to understand why the battlefield maneuvers of Napoleon's time suddenly stopped working in the age of the mini-ball.
And then there's my not retaining much from my first reading of Pirenne. (Which book I will be getting back to soon.) What's curious here is that I had all the connections from before. The historical road leading to the Middle Ages was well paved for me. What I lacked was what came later. The history and political science that came later, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Knowing more of that is what has made Pirenne so much more valuable this time.
And that's it for Oliver Sacks. His last book. (Though there are still some earlier books that I haven't read.) This was as good as I had hoped. And the view of the creation of the book provided by Hayes certainly helped. Another great mind gone.
The River of Consciousness
by Oliver Sacks
Alfred 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.
