Letters, p.69
Letters, page 69
If I have another attack of cinematographic vision—I have not had one since 1994—I will try to make some better observations, in particular as to the effects of head-movement!
I have not yet heard whether the NY Rev. Books will publish the piece,[*6] and, if so, in what form—tho’ the Editor has told me that he “likes it,” though also that it may be “too long,” unless abridged. So I await further word. I have some impulse, I confess, to add to the piece, to deal with “the stream of consciousness” since the piece started off, initially, as a sort of meditation on “time,” and one especially stimulated by the Wm James quote. Now looking through Chapter XV of the Principles (“The Perception of Time”), I find myself fascinated by the James Mill passage (pp 605–606)—which makes me think of some of my amnesiac (Korsakovian) patients. James himself is so rich, almost every sentence is pregnant in unexpected ways.
Meanwhile I can gaze, through my kitchen window, at a large exhaust fan (as I must presume it to be—tho’ at first I thought it was a sort of anemometer) which glitters in odd ways when the sun hits it, and shows me all the phenomena of the continuous illumination “wagon-wheel” effect. At the same time I find a renewed interest in high-speed cinematographs for recording and analysing animal movement—and this led me to write a little Letter to the Editor on elephants’ gaits[*7] (this was in Nature last month), and another on insect flight (in yesterday’s Science Times).[*8] There are all these odd spin-offs to the central question(s) of Continuity vs. Discreteness, or how they are related.
I will write a (shorter!) letter separately to Francis—this one is, in a sense, to you both.
My thanks for your interest, and best wishes,
Oliver
To Francis Crick
June 28, 2003
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Francis,
I was delighted to get your letter (of June 5), and am sorry for this somewhat belated reply—altho’ I wrote a long letter to Christof (which I am also posting today) addressing some of the questions which both of you raised.
I am glad you liked Uncle Tungsten, and that you had some personal “resonances” to it; I wonder how much “continuity” you see between that teenager at Mill Hill who talked about the “Bohr atom” and the Periodic Table—your “Double Helix” self, and your present self. (When Freud wrote a letter to Karl Abraham in 1924 he said, “It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the Petromyzon. Nevertheless I must be he, and I think I was happier about the discovery than about others since”!!) I suppose we all have several, overlapping, mutually-penetrating lives.
I wrote to Zihl myself—I had met him, briefly, in ’95—wondering about [his patient’s] experiences, and in particular whether she had akinetopsia in her visual imagery or dreaming, but I could not get any more information about this. I get the impression that her “standstills” lasted for several seconds each, in contrast to the several-a-second “frames” of cinematographic vision (and the hours-long standstills of my ?“zombified” postencephalitic patients). Christof raised other questions about “cinematographic” vision, which I tried to answer (not too successfully!) in my letter to him.
I shifted ground, without quite meaning to (or realizing it) in my “Perceptual Moments” (or “Snapshots”)[*9] piece from the original plan, which was to go from motion-perception, the flow of visual awareness, to the (Jamesian) “flow of consciousness” and what constitutes “continuity” here (this may be an enormous subject, because, as far as I can see, James devotes a good deal of his vol I[*10] to exactly this question). The “movie” analogy is obviously only good to a very limited extent. But I somehow departed from clinical/personal description (which is my strong point) to trying to say something about the basis of consciousness, the mind/brain problem etc—and this is not my own thinking—and can be a real minefield! I remember, when we first met, how you sat me down next to you at the dinner table, and had me tell you clinical stories, descriptions etc, and how these instantly generated hypotheses in your mind (it was similar with the color-blind painter, and the marvellous letter you sent me about him). I sometimes fear I am not very good at abstract thinking, and that my strength lies in description—and I am very sure of cinematographic vision as a phenomenon. It would be fascinating, as (you and) Christof suggested in his letter, if it could be elicited by TMS[*11] to the motion-complex (or higher).
Sooner or later, I guess, we are bound to find ways of showing the activities of small sets of neurons rising and staying above threshold, and the correlation of this with (a) consciousness. We seem to be lacking in the middle, “meso” scale between the grossness of brain-imagery, EEG, TMS etc, and (multiple) single-neurone recordings. I have written a little about this in a later draft of the piece. But, at present, it is in limbo, and I still have no word about its publication (or otherwise) in the N.Y. Rev. Books. On the other hand, my piece on visual imagery in the blind(ed), “The Mind’s Eye,” will be in the (double) issue of the New Yorker which comes out on July 7.
My good friend Ralph (Siegel) tells me he will soon be in La Jolla again, and he can convey other thoughts, and my greetings, to you. I hope I can visit you myself when I am next there,
With all my thanks, and warmest good wishes,
To Deepak Chopra
Alternative Medicine Advocate
[August 2003]
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Deepak Chopra,
There has been a surprisingly large “resonance” to my “Mind’s Eye” piece, and I have been startled at the number of letters received, and their variety; but none of them startled me as much as yours! I am delighted, first, that the piece had resonances for you, and that you know some of my (miscellaneous) other writings—which include a couple of essays on consciousness written about ten years ago (and published in the NY Rev. of Books). I then, frankly, got so appalled at the size of the problem (and also the veritable spate of books on the subject) that I retreated, in a manner of speaking, to earlier interests—botany and chemistry. But in the past few months I have been attracted back to mind/brain problems, the nature of consciousness etc, have again written on the subject (only a rough draft of a piece, and not yet published, or perhaps even publishable), and I am taking off over the weekend to La Jolla, where I will spend time with Crick and Koch, and with Gerald Edelman, whom I have been corresponding with.
I can, of course, only go a little way with them, as perhaps I can only go a little way with you, because I feel I am essentially a describer, a storyteller, a phenomenologist (or, to put things reductively, a clinician), and I never dare to go or think too far beyond clinical (or personal) experience. And yet, of course, one has to. I am very divided as to whether we will ever resolve the brain/mind “dilemma,” as you put it (which is different in character from the relatively straightforward wave-particle “duality”), or whether (as Colin McGinn and other “mysterians” suggest) the problem is actually beyond human power to resolve, or even conceive properly—due to our “cognitive closure.” Having said this I also have a feeling that there is no essential problem at all, but a single phenomenon which (so to speak) looks both ways, outward to physiology, chemistry, physics etc, and inward to introspection and subjectivity. But what sort of phenomenon could do this?
I have read the two very thought-filled papers by Herms Romijn—many thanks for sending these to me. He certainly builds up a wonderful picture of the dendritic tree as having “an infinite spectrum of possibilities to rapidly integrate in dynamic fashion the flow of information that continually arrives at its surface…by recording the information into a profile of highly ordered, electric/magnetic fields,” with thousands of rapidly-changing “sinks” and “sources.” He brings out the quantitative complexity of even a single dendritic arbour quite beautifully. And then, of course, there are 1010 of these—perhaps arranged (as Crick & Koch envisage) into “coalitions” of (perhaps) 10–100,000 neurones each; and all of these variously interacting, integrated, orchestrated (“bound”) together.
No doubt there are enormously complex, continually shifting (electric/magnetic) fields—and yet I am not persuaded that it is “fields” of this type which are the crucial phenomenon—the phenomenon which, Janus-like, looks both ways. (I should say that I have been very attracted by some sorts of “field” theory in the past—particularly in relation to gestalt psychology, patterns perception, etc. etc.)
I confess to being out of sympathy with some of the additional notions which Romijn explores, viz. “regression” (“former lives”), a collective unconscious, archetypes etc; and the cosmic dimension of this (“the submanifest order of being” etc.) is quite beyond me—tho’ I think Bohm was a genius, and (as Freeman Dyson likes to say) that Nature’s imagination is far richer than ours…and far stranger. But, to come back to the grounds of my own thinking, my concern is always with the affected (and acting) Individual, the individuality of experience, of illness or injury, of all life’s impacts, of adaptation, of strengths and weaknesses, of will & action, and I have little capacity or desire to go beyond this.
In general, I am not a theorist—and my books and writings, such as they are, are designed to provide examples of one sort and another, which others, more theoretically-minded, can perhaps use. I remember when I first met Crick, fifteen years ago or so, he took me by the shoulders, sat me down, and said “Tell me stories!” and for hours I told him (clinical) stories of different sorts, while he generated dozens of hypotheses—when I told him the story of my colorblind painter, he made suggestions which would have led to a whole century of research!
But I hesitate to theorize about consciousness even in a circumscribed body-mind sort of way, and could not possibly venture to anything beyond this—models which (as you put it) might go “a little deeper into the notion of resonance as a fundamental activity of a non-local ground of Being.” This I have to leave to you—and perhaps a successor to your gifted friend, the remarkable but now-deceased Herms Romijn. […]
With kind regards,
Oliver Sacks
To Bill Borden
Psychologist
November 17, 2003
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Bill,
What a lovely, thoughtful letter—and what a gorgeous packet of good things from Berlin, Chemnitz, Buenos Aires (which I will mull over, and return to you when I see you at the NY Mineralogical Club next month—I have no idea what I will say, or present; or no idea yet).
Your travels with Allen[*12] sound quite idyllic, in their combination of Museums, Botanical Gardens, Concerts (plus a conference or two).
For myself, I went with Kate to Stockholm last month—had a lecture or two there, and an honorary degree—but we were also able to go to Köping, the little town where Scheele[*13] had his apothecary-shop and lab (the older part of the town has a very sweet, 18th-century, Scheele-like feeling about it—one could easily imagine him there); and to Ytterby (where, as you say, Y, Yb, Tb, Er[*14] as well as Sc, Ho, Tm etc. were found, and a new scandium mineral, thortveitite (I have misspelt it) quite recently. And, very recently, tho’ microscopically, a new scandium phosphate, the Sc-analogue of xenotime); the old mine is closed, but there are lumps of quartz, and some darker, heavier lumps (gadolinite, I liked to imagine) scattered around; and one can take a boat-ride through the archipelago to a little fortress-island which has a (tiny) mining/mineral museum, and photos of the active mining days.
And then we went to Tallinn, where there is a wonderfully-preserved medieval inner town; a quaint, crowded, idiosyncratic Natural History Museum; and (this I have never seen before or elsewhere) an amazing permanent exhibit of Lichens and Mosses (a huge range of these is endemic to Estonia). Thence to Prague—music everywhere!—and so back here. Kate joins me in sending our warmest regards to you both,
Thanks again!
Oliver
To Michael Herrick
Executive Director, Windhorse[*15]
December 22, 2003
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Michael,
More thanks than I can say, and to all of you, for letting us visit you, talk to some of your clients, and get a good idea of what an extraordinary venture Windhorse is—I could not have got this sense adequately without actually visiting it.
I have been transcribing some of my scribbled notes, and thinking about the five people I saw: Jeremy, Aimee, Greg, Chaya, and David, and how utterly different and (in their so-different ways) intriguing they all were. Seeing people in their homes on Saturday was quite as crucial (perhaps more so) than seeing them in the office—I have always felt that “house-calls” were the most valuable. […] I think it was very important that, after my years in the depressing (and often horrible) wards of a State Hospital, I was able to see a deeply hopeful, deeply different, enterprise like Windhorse, where there is no sense of an inexorably advancing organic disease (tho’ the organic is no more denied than the precipitants and contexts of illness), but of a condition which, while it may be lifelong (in terms of an underlying vulnerability or propensity) is one which can be understood, fought, worked with, controlled, essentially by human means (tho’ a little drug-assistance may be needed sometimes), and in a way which will allow a full and happy life. Jeremy put it very well when I asked him whether he had wholly “recovered,” whether he felt it was now “all over.” He said, “Having had a schizophrenic break and recovered, you have to spend the rest of your life managing it, learning to recognize its intimations and ruses, the dark and cunning powers still in the mind. It is my belief that they are still there. 40% of my mind is schizophrenic, but there is 60% which watches and fights back.”
David too spoke of “perpetual vigilance,” a life, in some ways, spent on “the edge.” The business of motives is very complex, for although, clearly, most of your people want to “function,” live fully in the world, have relationships, work, be imaginatively free and creative etc. yet they have also seen (and, to varying degrees, explored) very deep and dangerous, but also rich and extraordinary, realms of the mind which the “ordinary” person knows nothing about—and to this extent they feel “special,” and might not want it otherwise. (Tho’ few would go as far as my brother, who speaks of the generality of people as “rottenly normal”—but he has had (on the whole) a tormentedly limited life, and is angry and resentful. I cannot help wondering how different this might have been if he had the advantage of a Windhorse fifty-five years ago.)
Again, all my/our thanks for your openness and generosity. I very much hope that I can visit Windhorse again (I see it, in part, as Ed’s[*16] legacy to the world), perhaps in the Spring. And do talk with Kate about the thought of a talk, or something, which might assist the place, help draw attention and funds to it.
With best wishes,
Oliver
* * *
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OS almost invariably replied to correspondents who were incarcerated, as well as to those who were either very old or very young. Emma Roth, a sixth-grade student, wrote to say that she had read three of OS’s books and asked whether she could interview him for a science article she was writing. She offered to come at any time that would be convenient for him. “My mom,” she noted, “said I could miss school for this and I am SURE my school would understand.” During the interview (Emma brought her pet white rat along), OS showed her his mineral collection; she wrote him again afterward, enclosing a selenite egg as a thank you.
To Emma Roth
Middle School Student
December 29, 2003
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Emma,
What a grand surprise! Your charming, warm, funny letter—with its Thurber-like drawings in every margin—and the fabulous egg of selenite (along with its chemical composition and molecular weight).
No, I do not have any selenite, and I will cherish the lovely egg you sent—it has an extraordinary, eerie, moon-like glow (hence the name, I suppose), indeed it seems to have a light of its own. It immediately made me think of a short story by H. G. Wells (“The Crystal Egg”), which I must have read when I was about your age—I enclose a copy of this, hope you may enjoy it too. (In one of his early books, The First Men in the Moon, the insect-like inhabitants of the Moon are called Selenites).
