Read Online Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Oliver Sacks
Tags: General, sci_psychology, Medical, Biography & Autobiography, Psychology, Literary Criticism, Psychopathology, Mental Illness, Neuropsychology, Social Scientists & Psychologists, Clinical Psychology, Neurology, Physiological Psychology
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distressed and puzzled if the smallest changes were made in the house. ('You changed the curtains today!' he once expostulated to his wife. 'How come? So suddenly? They were green this morning.' But they had not been green since 1978.) He recognised most of the neighbouring houses and shops-they had changed little between 1978 and 1983-but was bewildered by the 'replacement' of the cinema ('How could they tear it down and put up a supermarket overnight?'). He recognised friends and neighbours-but found them oddly older than he expected ('Old so-and-so! He's really showing his age. Never noticed it before. How come everyone's showing their age today?'). But the real poignancy, the horror, would occur when his wife brought him back-brought him, in a fantastic and unaccountable manner (so he felt), to a strange home he had never seen, full of strangers, and then left him. 'What are you doing?' he would scream, terrified and confused. 'What in the hell is this place? What the hell's going on?' These scenes were almost unbearable to watch, and must have seemed like madness, or nightmare, to the patient. Mercifully perhaps he would forget them within a couple of minutes.
Such patients, fossilised in the past, can only be at home, oriented, in the past. Time, for them, has come to a stop. I hear Stephen R. screaming with terror and confusion when he returns-screaming for a past which no longer exists. But what can we do? Can we create a time-capsule, a fiction? Never have I known a patient so confronted, so tormented, by anachronism, unless it was the 'Rose R.' of Awakenings (see 'Incontinent Nostalgia', Chapter Sixteen).
Jimmie has reached a sort of calm; William (Chapter Twelve) continually confabulates; but Stephen has a gaping time-wound, an agony that will never heal.
3
The Disembodied Lady
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.
–Wittgenstein
What Wittgenstein writes here, of epistemology, might apply to aspects of one's physiology and psychology-especially in regard to what Sherrington once called 'our secret sense, our sixth sense'- that continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious.
Our other senses-the five senses-are open and obvious; but this-our hidden sense-had to be discovered, as it was, by Sherrington, in the 1890s. He named it 'proprioception', to distinguish it from 'exteroception' and 'interoception', and, additionally, because of its indispensability for our sense of ourselves; for it is only by courtesy of proprioception, so to speak, that we feel our bodies as proper to us, as our 'property', as our own. (Sherrington 1906, 1940.)
What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.
Jonathan Miller produced a beautiful television series, The Body
in Question, but the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question-they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, its certainty, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty. Thus, in his last book (On Certainty), he opens by saying: 'If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.' But then, in the same breath, on the same opening page: 'What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it . . . '; and, a little later, 'Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking!'
Indeed, his book might be
Such patients, fossilised in the past, can only be at home, oriented, in the past. Time, for them, has come to a stop. I hear Stephen R. screaming with terror and confusion when he returns-screaming for a past which no longer exists. But what can we do? Can we create a time-capsule, a fiction? Never have I known a patient so confronted, so tormented, by anachronism, unless it was the 'Rose R.' of Awakenings (see 'Incontinent Nostalgia', Chapter Sixteen).
Jimmie has reached a sort of calm; William (Chapter Twelve) continually confabulates; but Stephen has a gaping time-wound, an agony that will never heal.
3
The Disembodied Lady
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.
–Wittgenstein
What Wittgenstein writes here, of epistemology, might apply to aspects of one's physiology and psychology-especially in regard to what Sherrington once called 'our secret sense, our sixth sense'- that continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious.
Our other senses-the five senses-are open and obvious; but this-our hidden sense-had to be discovered, as it was, by Sherrington, in the 1890s. He named it 'proprioception', to distinguish it from 'exteroception' and 'interoception', and, additionally, because of its indispensability for our sense of ourselves; for it is only by courtesy of proprioception, so to speak, that we feel our bodies as proper to us, as our 'property', as our own. (Sherrington 1906, 1940.)
What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.
Jonathan Miller produced a beautiful television series, The Body
in Question, but the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question-they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, its certainty, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty. Thus, in his last book (On Certainty), he opens by saying: 'If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.' But then, in the same breath, on the same opening page: 'What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it . . . '; and, a little later, 'Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking!'
Indeed, his book might be
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