Two Readings on Perception: Part I

Fresh off The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, I picked up a collection of clinical stories that had been recommended by a friend, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. This is the first book of Sacks' I've read, but I had high expectations as he consistently gets excellent reviews and had a moving NYTimes op-ed piece about his cancer diagnosis a while back: My Own Life

This book blew my mind. I never realized how little I knew about neurological disorders, and how bizarrely interesting they could be. Every chapter had a "WHAAAAT?" moment, to the point where I was getting distracted by Wikipedia tangents related to right hemisphere brain damage. And this book was published back in 1985! I would love to: 1) read an updated equivalent, 2) find out what happened to the patients, 3) what (if any) progress we've made with the disorders, and 4) see what else Sacks has written. So fascinating!

Agnosia in the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Of particular interest:
- "idiot savants" (now called "savant syndrome" for obvious reasons) and prime numbers; generally the idea that you would perceive the world only through numbers as a compensation for lacking the capacity for "normal" emotional connections. The closest I could come to imagining this was the scene in The Matrix where Neo sees the world in code. Yes, this is the second consecutive blog post dropping a Matrix reference.
- The soothing appeal of music and nature for many of the patients, to where some were only able to function with a degree of "normalcy" while humming a tune.
- This quote, in reference to a woman who vividly recalled a childhood memory she had previously never been aware of, which "suggested to Penfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime's experience" (p. 137). See also: Hyperthymesia. Pause to consider that a moment. Is this how your life flashes before your eyes in a near-death experience? Why can't we access all these memories anytime? (Because it would be too overwhelming and swamp the present?) Is this still the current theory? Actually mind-boggling. I also enjoy realizing the limits of current science when studying the brain; it's the deep-sea of the body. Unexplored science is always inspiring and humbling.

Also of particular interest, with regard to having a scientific/biological explanation for a condition: "This does not detract in the least from their psychological or spiritual significance. If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoyevsky in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as "portals" to the beyond or the unknown?" (p. 130). A potentially dangerous point, yet interesting in the context of ayahuasca, or DMT, which traditionally has been used for religious spirit journeys and has some epic hallucination stories (DMT: You Cannot Imagine a Stranger Drug or a Stranger Experience).

Bottom line: The brain is powerfully weird, people.