The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
There's something fascinating about scary things. Maybe it isn't this way for everyone, but for me the things that disturb me exert a huge attraction. That's why - when I saw "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" (By Oliver Sacks) on the shelf of a bookstore this past weekend - I knew I would be buying it, and reading it, and possibly not sleeping because of it.
It is a book of real-life horror stories, from a neuropsychological perspective. Stories of people who have lost all sense of who they are, and any ability to form new memories, so they must re-invent themselves from scratch every 5 seconds or so in a frantic race to establish themselves before it all disappears and they have to start again.
Stories of people who loose most of their memories of life, but from the present backwards so that they think they are 20 when in fact they are 60. Unable to create new memories to replace these, every time they open their diary they find that it contains records of the next 40 years of the "future" that they had already lived. And every morning when they awake, they look in the mirror to discover that they have aged 40 years overnight.
There is a woman who went to sleep and dreamed of her childhood in Ireland - of a celebration with music and dancing. Only when she woke up, the music didn't stop. It just kept going.
There is also a man who through a stroke not only lost his vision, but simultaneously loot all memory of ever having had vision, or hearing about it, or ever knowing that anyone else had some weird sense where they could "see" things.
And a story of a woman who was raised from birth without being allowed to use her hands, until she became convinced that they were artificial and she did not really have hands. She lived like that for 60 years, until the day she discovered that the "useless lumps of clay" on the end of her arms were in fact part of her body.
Stories of diseases that give people more energy, and make them think faster, act faster, and overall feel so "dangerously well" that they loose themselves in the bursts of impulsive behavior, running everywhere, flirting shamelessly and offering themselves to strangers, often having to struggle with every ounce of strength just to remember that they had an existence separate from the mad, dizzying impulse that their life has become.
Stories like this may be part of why I want to understand the mind so badly...because understanding diminishes fear, and these things creep me out.
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all...Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing...I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother's..."
- Luis Bunuel
It is a book of real-life horror stories, from a neuropsychological perspective. Stories of people who have lost all sense of who they are, and any ability to form new memories, so they must re-invent themselves from scratch every 5 seconds or so in a frantic race to establish themselves before it all disappears and they have to start again.
Stories of people who loose most of their memories of life, but from the present backwards so that they think they are 20 when in fact they are 60. Unable to create new memories to replace these, every time they open their diary they find that it contains records of the next 40 years of the "future" that they had already lived. And every morning when they awake, they look in the mirror to discover that they have aged 40 years overnight.
There is a woman who went to sleep and dreamed of her childhood in Ireland - of a celebration with music and dancing. Only when she woke up, the music didn't stop. It just kept going.
There is also a man who through a stroke not only lost his vision, but simultaneously loot all memory of ever having had vision, or hearing about it, or ever knowing that anyone else had some weird sense where they could "see" things.
And a story of a woman who was raised from birth without being allowed to use her hands, until she became convinced that they were artificial and she did not really have hands. She lived like that for 60 years, until the day she discovered that the "useless lumps of clay" on the end of her arms were in fact part of her body.
Stories of diseases that give people more energy, and make them think faster, act faster, and overall feel so "dangerously well" that they loose themselves in the bursts of impulsive behavior, running everywhere, flirting shamelessly and offering themselves to strangers, often having to struggle with every ounce of strength just to remember that they had an existence separate from the mad, dizzying impulse that their life has become.
Stories like this may be part of why I want to understand the mind so badly...because understanding diminishes fear, and these things creep me out.
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all...Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing...I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother's..."
- Luis Bunuel
posted by PredictionsOfMemory | 11:44 AM
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