I find the human brain to be endlessly fascinating. At least until the recent advent of AI’s hallucinations, it was our only known source of flights of fancy, musings, dreaming up gods and religions, and generally trying to make sense of this spinning world.
I usually take the combo of my brain and my body as being “me.” That unique combo has, with one notable exception in the early 2000’s, always more or less marched in lockstep and functioned as a singular unit. But what is the “self,” if and when the mind and body go their separate ways?
The bulk of Sacks’ work here is an exploration of cases where the mind/body fusion is broken or otherwise confused. A few sample cases: A man who doesn’t recognize his own left leg (and is disgusted by it’s presence), a woman who lost all proprioception (the ability to tell where your body parts are in time/space without needing to get visual confirmation to make that determination). A man whose brain could not process images from the left side of his field of view. A man whose very being ceased to exist at a certain point in his life, leaving him to live in a state of suspended animation from his midlife onward. A man who lost the ability to recognize faces; not just the ability to recall who was who, but literally not being able to tell the difference between a fire hydrant and a human child.
All fascinating stuff.
Coming back to my personal episode, in 2001, I was walking up our basement stairs in our little shack of a house in North Seattle when I realized that my right calf muscle wasn’t working as it should. I couldn’t do a heel lift on my right leg. There was some disconnections between my right calf muscle and brain… the message just didn’t get through. I went through a few rounds of neurological testing, got checked for Parkinson’s (not as much fun as it sounds) and, after a few weeks of doctors shrugging and giving me the “let’s wait and see” advice, the muscle slowly started to respond to signals from my brain. It was a small enough issue that I could go hours at a time without even remember the problem existed, but it was a disconcerting period in my life. What if the symptoms extended up and/or down my leg? What if it moved over to my left leg?
Aside from that weird little blip, I think the closest lack of proprioception experience I can come up happened when I went into the dentist just a few weeks ago for my routine cleaning. It was time to have a set of x-rays taken and as the dental hygienist was wedging various wheelbarrow-sized equipment into my mouth to take the pictures, I lost all sense of control and placement of my tongue. Was my tongue in the way? Was it out of the way? Was it doing something weird/slightly obscene? I don’t know, because my tongue proprioceptors seemed to check out for a few minutes. While not an exact match, that’s pretty damn close to what I felt with my calf. A part of my body just seemed to be hanging around but lacking a connection to my brain. Super weird. And the thought of having that experience extended to my entire body is simply terrifying.
If anyone has any interest in such oddities of the human experience, Sacks is a fluid, entertaining writer who is able to translate his professional neurologist expertise and package it up in a way to make it accessible to the laity.
ReMarkable 