Though all the reading for this week was interesting, I made an immediate connection between the novel “Banishing Verona”, and Dr. Sack’s chapter of “An Anthropologist on Mars” by the same name. There seemed to be a profound understanding in both pieces of how autism can fit into the broader life of an affected individual. And I was moved by the underlying story in both accounts of a person living with autism, in contrast to an account of how an autistic person is forced to live life.
Years ago I had an English teacher who insisted that everything human beings said and did was motivated by a desire to be emotionally close to one-another. Parties, sex, drugs, music, television; she insisted all of these were attempts to share something. In her opinion human sentience was such a lonely existence that part of our “drive” as a species was to achieve some kind of connection with another person.
I’ve always thought she was over-simplifying things. I know there are times in my life (perhaps most of the time) when I want to be close to others, to be on the same page and have a kind of mutual understanding. But there are also times (definitely less often, but equally as distinct) when I want the opposite. Sometimes I don’t feel the need, for whatever reason, to form an artificial connection with someone I really don’t like, or I find myself in one of those moods in which I’d much rather be by myself for a while then surrounded by lots of other people.
When Dr. Sacks asks Temple if, when she looks up at the stars, she does not “get a feeling of grandeur” I was moved by her simple response. “I intellectually understand its grandeur”, she tells him wisely. This struck me as an incredibly honest and perceptive thing to say. I know I occasionally have the experience of being moved intellectually, rather then emotionally, by a sight such as the night sky. It is rare for an individual to always see things in terms of grandeur and awe; we’d wear ourselves out if everything around us produced such wonder.
Though I can’t possibly know the kind of isolation and feeling of being inherently different that some people with autism describe, I can sympathize with the feeling of not always being entirely in touch with my own emotions or those of the people around me.
Thus, I was pleased to find a fair amount of optimism and empathy in both Dr. Sack’s case study involving Temple Grandin, and the pages of “Banishing Verona”.
When Oliver Sacks describes Temple Grandin he includes his own account of the way in which she goes about her life; her dedication to her work, her own opinions about the way in which her mind is different from other’s, and her level of compassion and almost supernatural ability to empathize with herd animals. But included in his account there is also a marked understanding of the role that human interaction and emotional understanding play in Temple’s life. Sacks seems to understand that Temple’s mind isn’t merely a hallow shell, filled pitifully by her work and her logical reasoning, but is instead the hopes and confusions of a complicated and evolving human being. As always, Sacks seems optimistic in his description, continuously emphasizing both the ways in Temple is unique, and the ways in which she is striving to understand her own different.
Like Sacks, Livesey is in many ways compassionate in her description of an individual affected by Aspergers. For what does Livesey emphasize if not the idea that we’re all a bit in the dark when it comes to relationships and human interaction? What does Zeke portray if not the sort of difficulties in communication understanding that we all have to lesser extent? At one point in the book Zeke points out that sometimes, when it is socially expected of him to offer a greeting, he just doesn’t feel like it. Can’t we all sympathize with this on some level? We smile at someone even though we’re not really fond of him or her, or we stop to make small talk even if we’re in a rush to get somewhere. I know there are moments when I follow social conventions not because I feel the desire to do so, but merely because I know they are expected.
Thus, I found both Sack’s and Livesey’s perceptions of autistic patients to be refreshingly open-minded. Both chose to see human life as something broader then merely the connections we form with others; chose not to define a person’s existence merely by the ease with which they connect emotionally. Rather then seeing a high-functioning autistic individual as someone who will never be able to function in certain ways, shouldn’t we view them instead as demonstrating just how difficult communication and understanding can be for all of us? If we choose to see autistic individuals as sharing somewhat accentuated aspects of our own personalities, rather then seeing their limitations and deficits, perhaps we can better understand the mindset of those affected.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Outside Perspective
I think there is great parallel play in both the New Yorker article under the same name and Livesey’s book Banishing Verona—actually I believe they are more perpendicular than parallel, if I am going to use this geometric metaphor.
Livesey does an interesting job of making the neurology of her characters the least of the characters' worries. I constantly have to smack myself when I get frustrated when I read, thinking ‘where is the psychology; where is the disorder,” when I am not really reading the story. I really have to get in the mindset of the story, not the disorder. It brings this to a larger point. These people are not their disease. They’re not “schizos” or “mentally disabled’ no more than I am a “man” or people are “gay” or “Asian.” I think as a society we tend to be seriously label conscious –look at the modern day prom or turn on MTVs super sweet sixteen if you don’t believe me—and Livesey does a great job of tearing away for that. I wonder if it is a seriously an American problem and doesn’t exist as much in the UK, but I find that hard to believe. When I’m reading her books he characters realities seem to be so secure that they almost don’t seem ill at all. That their way of thinking, like Zeke finding places to store food and water when working, makes perfect sense, or doesn’t seem too bizarre—and infact, our reality of “normal” life seem a bit strange. Take this section on page 135 in her book into advisement:
He had noticed that before, how people slammed a loose cupboard door, poked at a hole in her show, making sure that what was already fragile fell apart.
We all do those things, perhaps subconsciously and yet her characters, that may not get things like a simple social interaction on the street, pick up deep, subtle things like this passage noted above, how we tend to prode and poke our problems, making them worse. I'm guilty of such.
Perhaps I was rash in my judgments not to see any parallels in these pieces—I was never that good in geometry, infact I believe I passed mostly because my great colouring skills shows serious “effort” on my part.
Our New Yorker articles states “people with Asperger’s syndrome can tell us of their experiences, their inner feelings and states, whereas those with classical autism cannot. With classical autism there is no ‘window,’ and we can only infer.” So they offer this unique sense of view which they CAN explain to us. Asperger’s syndrome is so interesting to me. They are anthropologists in their own right. They have to study our (because they don’t seem to belong to it in their own minds) culture and find their way. With our customs and beliefs. Think of him reading Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” to learn everything about what was proper— I know my grandmother would have been happy and he would have been invited over any Sunday dinner. Because if you think about it, our beliefs must be strange to a complete objective party. For Religion, Christians attend church and drink the blood and eat the flesh or a man, or believe they do; in death, we drain the blood of the body, we embalm the corpse with chemicals so they last, like preserve in the kitchen cabinet. To us these activities seem so normal (mostly), but it would understanding how “outside the box’ these individuals would feel existing in a world where they wouldn’t understand the individuals!
Can you think of any other rituals that would appear “strange” to the outside individual?
Do you agree with this? Would you consider them outside or just another facet of humanity?
Are they missing our or are they more connected because they must learn, understand and then accept these rituals that we naturally associate into our lives?
Or should they celebrate what they call “neurodiversity?”
Is this part of our evolution or just a simple reordering of genes?
-- I know I’ve asked a lot here so just run with an idea or try to tie them together.
On a final note:
As quoted in the New Yorker, “My first and most powerful obsession was music—the same records played again and again while I watched them spin, astonished at their evocation of aural worlds that I not only instinctively understood even as a toddler but in which I actually felt comfortable.”—Again we see music as a cure or atleast a coping mechanism. Now unfortunately I missed Sacks’s talk (and we’ve seen that in his case studies like our ever famous Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) but did he give us any insight into the magic of music? Is there some about the implicit organization of chaos with notes on a sheet of music? Or is it simply soothing? What?
Hope you all had a good study break and I look forward to seeing you Monday,
--M.
Livesey does an interesting job of making the neurology of her characters the least of the characters' worries. I constantly have to smack myself when I get frustrated when I read, thinking ‘where is the psychology; where is the disorder,” when I am not really reading the story. I really have to get in the mindset of the story, not the disorder. It brings this to a larger point. These people are not their disease. They’re not “schizos” or “mentally disabled’ no more than I am a “man” or people are “gay” or “Asian.” I think as a society we tend to be seriously label conscious –look at the modern day prom or turn on MTVs super sweet sixteen if you don’t believe me—and Livesey does a great job of tearing away for that. I wonder if it is a seriously an American problem and doesn’t exist as much in the UK, but I find that hard to believe. When I’m reading her books he characters realities seem to be so secure that they almost don’t seem ill at all. That their way of thinking, like Zeke finding places to store food and water when working, makes perfect sense, or doesn’t seem too bizarre—and infact, our reality of “normal” life seem a bit strange. Take this section on page 135 in her book into advisement:
He had noticed that before, how people slammed a loose cupboard door, poked at a hole in her show, making sure that what was already fragile fell apart.
We all do those things, perhaps subconsciously and yet her characters, that may not get things like a simple social interaction on the street, pick up deep, subtle things like this passage noted above, how we tend to prode and poke our problems, making them worse. I'm guilty of such.
Perhaps I was rash in my judgments not to see any parallels in these pieces—I was never that good in geometry, infact I believe I passed mostly because my great colouring skills shows serious “effort” on my part.
Our New Yorker articles states “people with Asperger’s syndrome can tell us of their experiences, their inner feelings and states, whereas those with classical autism cannot. With classical autism there is no ‘window,’ and we can only infer.” So they offer this unique sense of view which they CAN explain to us. Asperger’s syndrome is so interesting to me. They are anthropologists in their own right. They have to study our (because they don’t seem to belong to it in their own minds) culture and find their way. With our customs and beliefs. Think of him reading Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” to learn everything about what was proper— I know my grandmother would have been happy and he would have been invited over any Sunday dinner. Because if you think about it, our beliefs must be strange to a complete objective party. For Religion, Christians attend church and drink the blood and eat the flesh or a man, or believe they do; in death, we drain the blood of the body, we embalm the corpse with chemicals so they last, like preserve in the kitchen cabinet. To us these activities seem so normal (mostly), but it would understanding how “outside the box’ these individuals would feel existing in a world where they wouldn’t understand the individuals!
Can you think of any other rituals that would appear “strange” to the outside individual?
Do you agree with this? Would you consider them outside or just another facet of humanity?
Are they missing our or are they more connected because they must learn, understand and then accept these rituals that we naturally associate into our lives?
Or should they celebrate what they call “neurodiversity?”
Is this part of our evolution or just a simple reordering of genes?
-- I know I’ve asked a lot here so just run with an idea or try to tie them together.
On a final note:
As quoted in the New Yorker, “My first and most powerful obsession was music—the same records played again and again while I watched them spin, astonished at their evocation of aural worlds that I not only instinctively understood even as a toddler but in which I actually felt comfortable.”—Again we see music as a cure or atleast a coping mechanism. Now unfortunately I missed Sacks’s talk (and we’ve seen that in his case studies like our ever famous Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) but did he give us any insight into the magic of music? Is there some about the implicit organization of chaos with notes on a sheet of music? Or is it simply soothing? What?
Hope you all had a good study break and I look forward to seeing you Monday,
--M.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Low Flying Aircraft
A couple of weeks ago, I read a story called "Low Flying Aircraft" by J.G. Ballard. In the story, the population of humans on Earth had dwindled and it was generally accepted that the species was dying out. The cause of the sharp decrease in population was an alarming rise in a specific kind of birth defect; the majority of children were born blind, with incredibly deformed limbs and heads. Babies who were born like this were quickly euthanized to be put out of their misery.
In any case, by the end of the story it is made known that a number of these deformed children have been allowed to live into adulthood, and they have colonized abandoned parts of England. The twist at the end of Ballard's story is that these seemingly sickeningly malformed beings were not "defected" at all; they represented a new kind of species, a mutation of humans, that would inherit the Earth after the last of the humans died out.
Most importantly, these people were not blind per se - they could see and communicate with this special kind of silvery metal paint that they use to mark their surroundings. In this way they were actually superior to humans, because they could see things in the silver paint that their non-deformed predecessors couldn't.
Well, I thought about this story while I read "Prodigies," "Banishing Verona," and "Parallel Play" this week. The realization that a condition long considered a "deformity" or "disability" might actually represent a simple different way of being or experiencing the world is a common theme for all of these stories. It is in fact a common theme among bloggers who write about autism (I'm thinking specifically of a woman named Amanda Baggs whose website, Ballastexistenz, focuses on autism and disability rights).
We talked in class about the fact that homosexuality used to be considered a disease and in fact was listed in the DSM for many years. "Transgender disorder," someone pointed out, is still listed in the DSM. So is autism. Should they be? In some ways, yes, autistics are deficient. As Oliver Sacks explains, autism consists of "a consistent traid of impairments: impairment of social interaction with others, impairment of verbal and nonverbal communication, and impairment of play and imaginative activities" (246).
Well, there are some ways in which we are all "impaired," when we are compared with others. Compared to the way that my father (who is not autistic - just an example) can calculate sums in his head, I am impaired. I think that everyone comes to realize, sometime in childhood, that there are some things some people do better than others and some things some people do worse than others - that's non-debatable.
Autism isn't just about "impairment," then. It's about the impairment of a specific set of skills that we feel make us human: those that have to do with socializing. Impairment is acceptable only so long as you can make a joke about it: the fact that you can say, "Oh, I'm so bad at math," somehow makes it understandable. You can't say, "Oh, I'm so bad at relationships with other people." Somehow having a grasp of seemingly straightforward social niceties isn't something that you can laugh off. Somehow, while we don't presume that everyone is good at math or understanding literature, we do presume that all "normal" people are pretty decent at getting along with others.
Why, then? Well, I mentioned before - it makes us human, supposedly. Human relationships are far more complicated than animal ones. We take their complexity for granted because we are programmed to understand them. Autistics, however, are not.
As always, what we take for granted are our implicit abilities. Take Zeke, for example, who has to go "through the steps he'd learned from the poster he'd been given at the clinic" to understand that Verona was smiling at him (4). What kind of person, you might think, has to do that? Recognizing a smile doesn't seem like something you have to think about, or even something that you learn. Babies can understand facial expressions. It's something "built in."
Even more interesting and baffling, I think, than the thought that someone might lack an ability that is "built in" to all of our "normal," neurotypical minds, is the thought that such a person might have abilities "built in" that we DON'T have. I get the feeling that the general opinion on intelligence, before a couple of decades ago, was an "all or nothing" thing. If someone was "retarded," they were "retarded." There were no "different types" of intelligence.
Yet we see this in people like Stephen who "could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself" (203). This seems strange to us, but would it seem strange if I told you that I have always been excellent at reading but had troubles with arithmetic? You wouldn't, because the two are seemingly unconnected. I'm simply not a "math person."
But it does not always happen, however, that someone who is bad at arithmetic is automatically good at reading, or vice versa. The strange thing about autism is that it seems to come with a certain, fixed set of strengths and weaknesses, as if they were linked somehow. True, not all autistics are prodigies like Stephen, but a commonality among autistics seems to be the tendency to see parts, and not the whole - which aids in Stephen's drawings but keeps him from understanding and appreciating the "big picture." There are other commonalities: "it is typical of autistic people, sometimes in early childhood, that they acquire geometrical conepts and terms to a far greater degree than personal or social ones," says Sacks (229).
Autism doesn't seem as unpredictable and varied as, say, schizophrenia. Autistics, in my experience, don't represent entirely different expressions of the same illness - as in schizophrenia, there are different types of the disease: paranoid, catatonic, hebephrenic, etc. - but rather different points on a spectrum.
So, there are people like Zeke, who is labeled an "oddball," "gets freaked out by things most people wouldn't even notice," and has problems with recognizing facial expressions and knowing how to behave in social situations (90) - all common with autism - but does not have symptoms severe enough to keep him from going to college, having a job, having a relationship - he "passes," for the most part, as a "normal person." The symptoms of his Asperger's are more likely to be called "quirks" or "idiosyncrasies" by people who don't know him well.
And then there are people like Stephen, who can probably never live on his own; who has a very low verbal IQ of 52 (202); and who did not speak until the age of nine (201). In his emotional development and talent for art he is very similar to Jose, who lives in an institution.
I believe that Tim Page is somewhere between Stephen and Zeke on the autistic spectrum. He barely made it through school, but he is clearly independent and self-supporting. And then, I think, Asperger's syndrome is somewhere between autism and "normal." Are we all on the autistic scale?
Some tend to think so. Page writes that "there is even some question whether it [Asperger's] should be considered an affliction or merely a "difference" - one of many human variants" (5).
Sacks says,
"Stephen's development has been singular, qualitatively different, from the start. He constructs the universe i a different way - and his mode of cognition, his identity, his artistic gifts, go together. We do not know, finally, how Stephen thinks, how he constructs the world, how he is able to draw and sing. But we do know that though he may be lacking in the symbolic, the abstract, he has a sort of genius for concrete or mimetic representations ... a sort of genius for catching the formal features, the structural logic, the style, the 'thisness' (though not necessarily the 'meaning') of whatever he portrays" (241).
We all know someone who is a little awkward in social situations, although he or she does not have Apserger's or autism. We all know someone who is particularly adept at socializing. Autism represents the extreme of that "awkward" person's difficulties. It is possible to conceive of a scale where people are positioned according to their capability in math or writing. The problem is, math and writing - while unique to humans - are not typically considered the things that make us human.
But it is possible we only think that way because so many people are decent at socializing. Even if you don't consider yourself a social butterfly, it's likely you know how to respond to simple "polite" questions like, "How are you?" and "Nice weather, isn't it?" which have no real purpose beyond to engage another person socially. But is knowing the answers to these questions really what makes us people? Maybe, if you define "humanness" by a person's reactions to others. The idea that you might define a person as human by their interactions with other humans seems flawed, somehow. What, then, is a human when there are other people around?
Whatever autism is, I don't believe that it is something to be "cured," and neither do autistics. Unless the "cure" for autism cosists of a change in our understanding of autism, and not the autistics themselves. I'm sure some autistics may think that it would be nice to be able to interact more easily with other people, so that they don't have to suffer the kind of aggravation a person gets from being "different." I would like to be able to add and multiply things better. I would not, however, sacrifice my identity for it. If being bad at arithmetic is part of my identity, I wouldn't lose it. It's not always a deficit, you know. I've met many nice people from needing to ask some random person, "What's twelve times eight?" Stephen Wiltshire has built a career out of his savant talents. I'm sure that other autistic people, who may not have become famous from their autism, nonetheless experience benefits from their unique perception of the world.
In any case, by the end of the story it is made known that a number of these deformed children have been allowed to live into adulthood, and they have colonized abandoned parts of England. The twist at the end of Ballard's story is that these seemingly sickeningly malformed beings were not "defected" at all; they represented a new kind of species, a mutation of humans, that would inherit the Earth after the last of the humans died out.
Most importantly, these people were not blind per se - they could see and communicate with this special kind of silvery metal paint that they use to mark their surroundings. In this way they were actually superior to humans, because they could see things in the silver paint that their non-deformed predecessors couldn't.
Well, I thought about this story while I read "Prodigies," "Banishing Verona," and "Parallel Play" this week. The realization that a condition long considered a "deformity" or "disability" might actually represent a simple different way of being or experiencing the world is a common theme for all of these stories. It is in fact a common theme among bloggers who write about autism (I'm thinking specifically of a woman named Amanda Baggs whose website, Ballastexistenz, focuses on autism and disability rights).
We talked in class about the fact that homosexuality used to be considered a disease and in fact was listed in the DSM for many years. "Transgender disorder," someone pointed out, is still listed in the DSM. So is autism. Should they be? In some ways, yes, autistics are deficient. As Oliver Sacks explains, autism consists of "a consistent traid of impairments: impairment of social interaction with others, impairment of verbal and nonverbal communication, and impairment of play and imaginative activities" (246).
Well, there are some ways in which we are all "impaired," when we are compared with others. Compared to the way that my father (who is not autistic - just an example) can calculate sums in his head, I am impaired. I think that everyone comes to realize, sometime in childhood, that there are some things some people do better than others and some things some people do worse than others - that's non-debatable.
Autism isn't just about "impairment," then. It's about the impairment of a specific set of skills that we feel make us human: those that have to do with socializing. Impairment is acceptable only so long as you can make a joke about it: the fact that you can say, "Oh, I'm so bad at math," somehow makes it understandable. You can't say, "Oh, I'm so bad at relationships with other people." Somehow having a grasp of seemingly straightforward social niceties isn't something that you can laugh off. Somehow, while we don't presume that everyone is good at math or understanding literature, we do presume that all "normal" people are pretty decent at getting along with others.
Why, then? Well, I mentioned before - it makes us human, supposedly. Human relationships are far more complicated than animal ones. We take their complexity for granted because we are programmed to understand them. Autistics, however, are not.
As always, what we take for granted are our implicit abilities. Take Zeke, for example, who has to go "through the steps he'd learned from the poster he'd been given at the clinic" to understand that Verona was smiling at him (4). What kind of person, you might think, has to do that? Recognizing a smile doesn't seem like something you have to think about, or even something that you learn. Babies can understand facial expressions. It's something "built in."
Even more interesting and baffling, I think, than the thought that someone might lack an ability that is "built in" to all of our "normal," neurotypical minds, is the thought that such a person might have abilities "built in" that we DON'T have. I get the feeling that the general opinion on intelligence, before a couple of decades ago, was an "all or nothing" thing. If someone was "retarded," they were "retarded." There were no "different types" of intelligence.
Yet we see this in people like Stephen who "could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself" (203). This seems strange to us, but would it seem strange if I told you that I have always been excellent at reading but had troubles with arithmetic? You wouldn't, because the two are seemingly unconnected. I'm simply not a "math person."
But it does not always happen, however, that someone who is bad at arithmetic is automatically good at reading, or vice versa. The strange thing about autism is that it seems to come with a certain, fixed set of strengths and weaknesses, as if they were linked somehow. True, not all autistics are prodigies like Stephen, but a commonality among autistics seems to be the tendency to see parts, and not the whole - which aids in Stephen's drawings but keeps him from understanding and appreciating the "big picture." There are other commonalities: "it is typical of autistic people, sometimes in early childhood, that they acquire geometrical conepts and terms to a far greater degree than personal or social ones," says Sacks (229).
Autism doesn't seem as unpredictable and varied as, say, schizophrenia. Autistics, in my experience, don't represent entirely different expressions of the same illness - as in schizophrenia, there are different types of the disease: paranoid, catatonic, hebephrenic, etc. - but rather different points on a spectrum.
So, there are people like Zeke, who is labeled an "oddball," "gets freaked out by things most people wouldn't even notice," and has problems with recognizing facial expressions and knowing how to behave in social situations (90) - all common with autism - but does not have symptoms severe enough to keep him from going to college, having a job, having a relationship - he "passes," for the most part, as a "normal person." The symptoms of his Asperger's are more likely to be called "quirks" or "idiosyncrasies" by people who don't know him well.
And then there are people like Stephen, who can probably never live on his own; who has a very low verbal IQ of 52 (202); and who did not speak until the age of nine (201). In his emotional development and talent for art he is very similar to Jose, who lives in an institution.
I believe that Tim Page is somewhere between Stephen and Zeke on the autistic spectrum. He barely made it through school, but he is clearly independent and self-supporting. And then, I think, Asperger's syndrome is somewhere between autism and "normal." Are we all on the autistic scale?
Some tend to think so. Page writes that "there is even some question whether it [Asperger's] should be considered an affliction or merely a "difference" - one of many human variants" (5).
Sacks says,
"Stephen's development has been singular, qualitatively different, from the start. He constructs the universe i a different way - and his mode of cognition, his identity, his artistic gifts, go together. We do not know, finally, how Stephen thinks, how he constructs the world, how he is able to draw and sing. But we do know that though he may be lacking in the symbolic, the abstract, he has a sort of genius for concrete or mimetic representations ... a sort of genius for catching the formal features, the structural logic, the style, the 'thisness' (though not necessarily the 'meaning') of whatever he portrays" (241).
We all know someone who is a little awkward in social situations, although he or she does not have Apserger's or autism. We all know someone who is particularly adept at socializing. Autism represents the extreme of that "awkward" person's difficulties. It is possible to conceive of a scale where people are positioned according to their capability in math or writing. The problem is, math and writing - while unique to humans - are not typically considered the things that make us human.
But it is possible we only think that way because so many people are decent at socializing. Even if you don't consider yourself a social butterfly, it's likely you know how to respond to simple "polite" questions like, "How are you?" and "Nice weather, isn't it?" which have no real purpose beyond to engage another person socially. But is knowing the answers to these questions really what makes us people? Maybe, if you define "humanness" by a person's reactions to others. The idea that you might define a person as human by their interactions with other humans seems flawed, somehow. What, then, is a human when there are other people around?
Whatever autism is, I don't believe that it is something to be "cured," and neither do autistics. Unless the "cure" for autism cosists of a change in our understanding of autism, and not the autistics themselves. I'm sure some autistics may think that it would be nice to be able to interact more easily with other people, so that they don't have to suffer the kind of aggravation a person gets from being "different." I would like to be able to add and multiply things better. I would not, however, sacrifice my identity for it. If being bad at arithmetic is part of my identity, I wouldn't lose it. It's not always a deficit, you know. I've met many nice people from needing to ask some random person, "What's twelve times eight?" Stephen Wiltshire has built a career out of his savant talents. I'm sure that other autistic people, who may not have become famous from their autism, nonetheless experience benefits from their unique perception of the world.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Connections and Thoughts
The recent chapter, in LeDoux's The Synaptic Self, "The Mind Trilogy" has helped me to understand Floyd Skloot's situation a little better. I was a bit confused about the "Working Memory" but now I understand it's almost a "temporary memory storage" that allows us to complete the immediate problem put before us in a task-by-task sequential basis. From this I know understand that the reason why Skloot would get lost or confused in the middle of performing a simple exploit is because there was some sort of deficit in his working memory. Clearly Skloot's mother had more severe issues with this, as she would often (exhaustively) ask the same questions and repeat the same statements within seconds.
It is apparent that in "The Missing World" Hazel's working memory is mostly functioning and her largest impairment is in her declarative memory. I do find interesting the consistencies between the fictional account of Hazel and the empirical account of Skloot. Hazel also mentions the "shadows of memory"-- the essence of things you remembered-- knowing you once knew something, but not being able to recall the actual thing. I often wonder if this is an implicit function. Hazel got the "sense" things weren't right, that Johnathan's account of what had happened was off. Could this be a tactic developed by the brain, that in the event the brain cannot remember, we still can get a "feel" for what we had once "known" as means of self-preservation?
Charlotte's discussion of pondering whether or not it's best to forget certain things caused me to remember S. who had to train himself to forget and Skloot who discusses how it is necessary for the brain to discard "useless information" and how this process can run rampant causing us to forget "everything". This reminded me of the discussion we had in class about pharmaceutical pills used to suppress traumatic events in ones life. This got me thinking, if our memory makes us who we are, when we suppress certain memories we are actually shaping who we are. I wonder if, we can use these sort of suppressants as a means of artificial selection. Of course it would be unethical to dictate what a person should and should not remember from birth, we clearly see this through Johnathan. Obviously his plan backfired because of the blatant lying, lack of understand of memory and outside interferences. But in an isolated situation it would be interesting to see the results.
It is apparent that in "The Missing World" Hazel's working memory is mostly functioning and her largest impairment is in her declarative memory. I do find interesting the consistencies between the fictional account of Hazel and the empirical account of Skloot. Hazel also mentions the "shadows of memory"-- the essence of things you remembered-- knowing you once knew something, but not being able to recall the actual thing. I often wonder if this is an implicit function. Hazel got the "sense" things weren't right, that Johnathan's account of what had happened was off. Could this be a tactic developed by the brain, that in the event the brain cannot remember, we still can get a "feel" for what we had once "known" as means of self-preservation?
Charlotte's discussion of pondering whether or not it's best to forget certain things caused me to remember S. who had to train himself to forget and Skloot who discusses how it is necessary for the brain to discard "useless information" and how this process can run rampant causing us to forget "everything". This reminded me of the discussion we had in class about pharmaceutical pills used to suppress traumatic events in ones life. This got me thinking, if our memory makes us who we are, when we suppress certain memories we are actually shaping who we are. I wonder if, we can use these sort of suppressants as a means of artificial selection. Of course it would be unethical to dictate what a person should and should not remember from birth, we clearly see this through Johnathan. Obviously his plan backfired because of the blatant lying, lack of understand of memory and outside interferences. But in an isolated situation it would be interesting to see the results.
We Are Never Aware of Processing--Until the Processing Goes Awry
As some of you could probably tell from class last week, I am not Floyd Skloot's biggest fan (see my response to Matt's blog of last week for more on this topic). Given the problems he had with both short- and long-term memory I found him to be an unreliable narrator, inconsistencies in his text added to my unease, and, while I understood that these were separate essays put together in one book, the repetition just got on my nerves and I wondered why an editor didn't step in to smooth over some of these problems.
I tried to approach A World of Light with an open mind: I was going to be less stubborn in my definition of memoir and less critical of a man who, despite brain damage, can write beautifully. This good attitude lasted until the second essay. Why must he be so repetitive, I wondered? Why do we need to be told in every essay that his mother, Lillian, asks the sames questions over and over again. Is it Skloot's own brain damage preventing him from moving on to new territory? Is he trying to give his readers a taste of what it feels like to either have Alzheimer's, or to care for someone with the disease? If so, we get the point already. Skloot would have known that, like his previous book, his new essays would be published in one collection, and I still can't figure out why they weren't edited to remove some of the tedium. I was overjoyed with the essay "The Simple Wisdom" about his mentor, Thomas Kinsella, because it was something new and different, and literally cried, "Hallelujah!" when reading "A Stable State," in which he claims to be done writing about his illness.
Moving on isn't just something Skloot needs to do with the content of his writing, it's also what he needs to do in regards to his mother. When in my frustration I asked myself, "How is this book different from In the Shadow of Memory," I kept thinking he was speaking more psychologically in these essays, like his insights were the direct result of psychotherapy, especially in terms of his conflicted relationship with his mother. This seemed most true in his essay "Fittings," in which his struggle to come to terms with his mother's state was as tedious as his repetitiveness, and once again I wondered if his own brain damage prevented him from being more accepting. (And, in the debate over what constitutes nonfiction, I have to point out the Victoria's Secret scene on page 36. Women may surreptitiously try on panties [ew] but a salesperson is certainly not going to participate by bringing anyone a thong to try on! If a nonfiction writer is going to make stuff up it has to at least be true to life. I also couldn't help but think, after reading page 180, lines 4-5, "Really? You simmer kale in the morning? That's some breakfast.")
I am not a completely heartless beast, though, and I did sympathize with Lillian. When we read about the people who suffered from Korsakov's I did not realize people with Alzheimer's experienced the same extreme symptoms. Most poignant, I thought, was her ability to remember songs, even expanding her repoitoire before beginning to lose virtually all of her music. Like Skloot's passion for baseball, Lillian's passion was the theater; if Skloot's memory were to deteriorate significantly, I bet he'd rattle off baseball stats the way his mother sang songs.
I was just as happy to be done with The Missing World as I was to finish Skloot, but for different reasons. I enjoyed this book, yet Livesey succeeded in making me so uncomfortable that I couldn't wait for it to end. I think the portrayal of amnesia was probably pretty accurate, especially the way Hazel describes on p. 144 living in three worlds: the world she remembers; the world of shadowy memories, people or events she couldn't quite grasp; and the missing world, all that had vanished. (Lillian's Alzheimer's, on the other hand, started out similarly, until she was left with the present world only, not even aware of the missing worlds.) I believe Livesey did her homework (notice her nod to doctors like Sacks on p. 145, when Hazel says she can imagine her doctor contemplating the article he would write about her case) and was especially struck by Hazel and Charlotte's conversation on p. 195 about the relationship between memory and space, something we've read about in LeDoux and Luria's account of mnemonic S. She also did a good job making memory an important theme for all the characters: Charlotte comparing herself to Hazel, wondering if she might prefer to forget the bad times (and occasionally, as she describes on p. 214, actually forgetting the events that occured after she ran into her ex with his new girlfriend, although in Charlotte's case you can probably assume alcohol had some affect on her memory); Freddie's suppression of his past; and Jonathan's utter inability to learn from the past, echoing Charlotte's statment on p. 175: "We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free."
Chapter 7 of The Synaptic Self gave me a deeper understanidng of both Hazel and Lillian. Lillian was left with no working memory, an inevitablity of Alzheimer's, I think, because working memory depends on long-term memory. Because Hazel did have working memory, her accident and seizures probably didn't affect her frontal lobes, but I'm guessing different types of amnesia can occur due to damage in different parts of the brain. In LeDoux's explanation of working memory, visual stimuli seem to play such an important role that I wondered how people blind from birth create memories. Do other senses fill-in? And any other animal lovers in class were probably struck, as I was, by the section on consciousness. My cat only has to get in his carrying case once a year, but he remembers it's a place he'd rather not be, and he decides to fight and run away. He also knows that if I kiss his head once, leaving his head bowed will result in more kisses, which he likes. Even cats can be trained, and doesn't that have something to do with memory?
On page 192 of The Synaptic Self, LeDoux attributes to neuroscience pioneer Karl Lashley the idea that "we are never aware of processing, but only of the consequences of processing." Based on the experiences of Floyd Skloot, Lillian, Hazel, and everyone else we've read about in this course, I'd say we are never aware of processing--until the processing goes awry.
I tried to approach A World of Light with an open mind: I was going to be less stubborn in my definition of memoir and less critical of a man who, despite brain damage, can write beautifully. This good attitude lasted until the second essay. Why must he be so repetitive, I wondered? Why do we need to be told in every essay that his mother, Lillian, asks the sames questions over and over again. Is it Skloot's own brain damage preventing him from moving on to new territory? Is he trying to give his readers a taste of what it feels like to either have Alzheimer's, or to care for someone with the disease? If so, we get the point already. Skloot would have known that, like his previous book, his new essays would be published in one collection, and I still can't figure out why they weren't edited to remove some of the tedium. I was overjoyed with the essay "The Simple Wisdom" about his mentor, Thomas Kinsella, because it was something new and different, and literally cried, "Hallelujah!" when reading "A Stable State," in which he claims to be done writing about his illness.
Moving on isn't just something Skloot needs to do with the content of his writing, it's also what he needs to do in regards to his mother. When in my frustration I asked myself, "How is this book different from In the Shadow of Memory," I kept thinking he was speaking more psychologically in these essays, like his insights were the direct result of psychotherapy, especially in terms of his conflicted relationship with his mother. This seemed most true in his essay "Fittings," in which his struggle to come to terms with his mother's state was as tedious as his repetitiveness, and once again I wondered if his own brain damage prevented him from being more accepting. (And, in the debate over what constitutes nonfiction, I have to point out the Victoria's Secret scene on page 36. Women may surreptitiously try on panties [ew] but a salesperson is certainly not going to participate by bringing anyone a thong to try on! If a nonfiction writer is going to make stuff up it has to at least be true to life. I also couldn't help but think, after reading page 180, lines 4-5, "Really? You simmer kale in the morning? That's some breakfast.")
I am not a completely heartless beast, though, and I did sympathize with Lillian. When we read about the people who suffered from Korsakov's I did not realize people with Alzheimer's experienced the same extreme symptoms. Most poignant, I thought, was her ability to remember songs, even expanding her repoitoire before beginning to lose virtually all of her music. Like Skloot's passion for baseball, Lillian's passion was the theater; if Skloot's memory were to deteriorate significantly, I bet he'd rattle off baseball stats the way his mother sang songs.
I was just as happy to be done with The Missing World as I was to finish Skloot, but for different reasons. I enjoyed this book, yet Livesey succeeded in making me so uncomfortable that I couldn't wait for it to end. I think the portrayal of amnesia was probably pretty accurate, especially the way Hazel describes on p. 144 living in three worlds: the world she remembers; the world of shadowy memories, people or events she couldn't quite grasp; and the missing world, all that had vanished. (Lillian's Alzheimer's, on the other hand, started out similarly, until she was left with the present world only, not even aware of the missing worlds.) I believe Livesey did her homework (notice her nod to doctors like Sacks on p. 145, when Hazel says she can imagine her doctor contemplating the article he would write about her case) and was especially struck by Hazel and Charlotte's conversation on p. 195 about the relationship between memory and space, something we've read about in LeDoux and Luria's account of mnemonic S. She also did a good job making memory an important theme for all the characters: Charlotte comparing herself to Hazel, wondering if she might prefer to forget the bad times (and occasionally, as she describes on p. 214, actually forgetting the events that occured after she ran into her ex with his new girlfriend, although in Charlotte's case you can probably assume alcohol had some affect on her memory); Freddie's suppression of his past; and Jonathan's utter inability to learn from the past, echoing Charlotte's statment on p. 175: "We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free."
Chapter 7 of The Synaptic Self gave me a deeper understanidng of both Hazel and Lillian. Lillian was left with no working memory, an inevitablity of Alzheimer's, I think, because working memory depends on long-term memory. Because Hazel did have working memory, her accident and seizures probably didn't affect her frontal lobes, but I'm guessing different types of amnesia can occur due to damage in different parts of the brain. In LeDoux's explanation of working memory, visual stimuli seem to play such an important role that I wondered how people blind from birth create memories. Do other senses fill-in? And any other animal lovers in class were probably struck, as I was, by the section on consciousness. My cat only has to get in his carrying case once a year, but he remembers it's a place he'd rather not be, and he decides to fight and run away. He also knows that if I kiss his head once, leaving his head bowed will result in more kisses, which he likes. Even cats can be trained, and doesn't that have something to do with memory?
On page 192 of The Synaptic Self, LeDoux attributes to neuroscience pioneer Karl Lashley the idea that "we are never aware of processing, but only of the consequences of processing." Based on the experiences of Floyd Skloot, Lillian, Hazel, and everyone else we've read about in this course, I'd say we are never aware of processing--until the processing goes awry.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Living in the Cracks of Memory
Last week, we were first introduced to the disturbing concept of amnesia, and the idea of losing all your memories, or at least your explicit ones; being unable to consciously frame yourself in place and time, remember what you did last week, even what you said a few seconds ago. You can't even remember outwardly what you like or dislike (for example: damn, these new cherry ices in Bates are good). You may have some implicit recollection of past events or experiences, but you cannot call them up at will; your mental filing cabinets are dinged and battered. It's possible that a purely sensory reflex could summon traces of something you did or experienced, but even if it did, you cannot contextualize it within the larger structure of your life. In short, you are cut loose of your orientation and mental mooring, becoming lost in the places you used to know the best, having to struggle to achieve even simple tasks.
Is Bunuel (quoted in LeDoux) correct when he says that your memory is everything? Would having a vague, implicit self-knowledge help, if experiences grooved too deeply into your brain to be completely destroyed somehow managed to surface? What if you are lost in time, such as the Korsakoff syndrome sufferers -- or, like Skloot's mother, you are completely in the moment, a blank slate, forgetting events as soon as they occur? Can anything cumulative begin to regroup in your brain, or you Sacks' Lost Mariner all over again, sailing a complex sea of life and events without the steadying map that your organizing brain provides? Would it be possible to learn from your mistakes, organize experiences, and form deep personal connections if you did not have a wealth of backlogged information to draw on? Compare it to a blank book (or Word document, whichever you wish). Having nothing there will give you nothing to "read." While memory is faulty in the normal course of operations, and can add paragraphs, delete letters, and mix sentences up into syntactic gibberish, amnesia aggressively culls the pertinent information into confusing snippets that you can't "read" at all.
With this disease, your mental books are left scribbled and defaced. Is it possible to edit them back into any sort of coherency? This week's readings focus on how to reassemble the shattered pieces of the mind, and make some progress in how to cope with amnesia. Skloot, for example, has provided himself something of a stabilizing groundwork by re-learning to read and write. Since he was a writer previously, this allows him to tap into an old passion and fluently and elegantly file dispatches from within a permanently fractured psyche. It seems impossible, reading In the Shadow of Memory and A World of Light, that this man can be brain-damaged; he writes with a grace and poise that those of us with our neural circuits intact can only envy. Even more astonishing is his ability to seemingly remember what he is forgetting; he chronicles his struggles to find a missing bookbag or car key, for example, all the while conveying to us that he knows what the object of his search was; but could not consciously recollect it then.
The two figures who seem to bear the most comparison in this week's reading are Lillian Rosen, Skloot's mother, and Hazel from The Missing World. Both are women caught in a position of vulnerability due to their memory shortcomings, and both have a vague sense that something is wrong with where they are. They are moving in opposite directions in regards to their conditions, however; this is clearly exemplified to a much greater degree in Lillian, who has a memory span equal to Dory's and has no way to scratch out a deeper understanding of her situation. She is unsettled when told that her son has been married for nine years and comes to see her every week, because she can no longer process the idea of time. However, within seconds she has forgotten it, and approaches the world with a ready cheer never seen when she was still mentally capable.
Skloot desperately yearns to have a proper mother-son interaction with her, something he was denied earlier in life, but although he visits her faithfully every week, he is running in place. She never remembers him or his visits, and although she is now more mellow and tractable than she has ever been, this is nothing that can be improved or built upon. She lacks the mental volumns to remember who and what he signifies to her, aside from a transient pleasure at seeing his face ("Oh, Floyd! This is the happiest day of my life!") Clearly some of her implicit memories remain; she is not yet completely groundless, as she knows that he is her son and some of the very basic facts of her life, but she has been disconnected completely from her past with little hope of retrieving it. She doesn't remember that she lived in New York for all of her life until last year, she doesn't remember who or what she was then, and exists as a continually self-renewing entity; she is like Clyde, who thinks that each moment heralds a new awakening. Conversely, it is her amnesiac son who is charged with the thankless and hopeless task of trying to keep her oriented in the present. Skloot mentions how much he dreads his time with her, since he sees so many shades of his own future in her untenable situation. Will he, already quite significantly damaged, be consigned to the looming specter of The Home in a few years, left to while out his own decline into darkness, not even recognizing the faces of those closest to him?
In contrast, Hazel is still a relatively young woman who has most of her mental functions intact with the exception of the blanket amnesia carpeting her past few years. She's aware that something is wrong with her, and she is relatively operational. She has the ability to create and store new explicit memories, and has the mental wherewithal to question her situation and to be (rightly) suspicious that a great part of it is being kept from her. It may be a problem of the fictional narrative, but a complaint was mentioned in class last week that the period of the amnesia is too clean-cut and that she should at least regain some vague memory by triggering events. However, she already does have the sense of wrongness, but is unable to translate this into specific events in the past; I for one think this is as accurate a portrayal of amnesia as a non-neurologist could write, and Livesey's intent, as with Skloot, isn't to get to the scientific nuts and bolts of the case but rather to explore the human cost of the brain machinery going awry.
Hazel lacks the ability to reconstruct her "missing world" from the inside, but Charlotte and some discovered papers remind her of what Jonathan has done to her -- destroyed her choice of career to keep her with him -- and allows her the perspective to see that he is attempting to do it again. It's very difficult to imagine that what he feels for her is love, despite his constant insistences -- he is a controlling, sociopathic man who is attempting to keep her trapped in the broken pieces of her mind when she is finally beginning to have the ability to move beyond it, and he rapes her in an absolutely chilling scene, completely convinced that what he's doing is for "love." The end of The Missing World provides a glimpse to the answer of the question if Hazel will ever reach Skloot's plateau of functionality and love -- it seems as if Freddie's (healthy) attraction to her could function as Beverly did for Skloot. She transitions from being the Lillian of the piece to the Floyd, and all we can hope for her at the close of the book is that she finds a way to patch together the cracks as he did, and live -- if not a completely functional life, then at least one that is full despite its flaws.
Is Bunuel (quoted in LeDoux) correct when he says that your memory is everything? Would having a vague, implicit self-knowledge help, if experiences grooved too deeply into your brain to be completely destroyed somehow managed to surface? What if you are lost in time, such as the Korsakoff syndrome sufferers -- or, like Skloot's mother, you are completely in the moment, a blank slate, forgetting events as soon as they occur? Can anything cumulative begin to regroup in your brain, or you Sacks' Lost Mariner all over again, sailing a complex sea of life and events without the steadying map that your organizing brain provides? Would it be possible to learn from your mistakes, organize experiences, and form deep personal connections if you did not have a wealth of backlogged information to draw on? Compare it to a blank book (or Word document, whichever you wish). Having nothing there will give you nothing to "read." While memory is faulty in the normal course of operations, and can add paragraphs, delete letters, and mix sentences up into syntactic gibberish, amnesia aggressively culls the pertinent information into confusing snippets that you can't "read" at all.
With this disease, your mental books are left scribbled and defaced. Is it possible to edit them back into any sort of coherency? This week's readings focus on how to reassemble the shattered pieces of the mind, and make some progress in how to cope with amnesia. Skloot, for example, has provided himself something of a stabilizing groundwork by re-learning to read and write. Since he was a writer previously, this allows him to tap into an old passion and fluently and elegantly file dispatches from within a permanently fractured psyche. It seems impossible, reading In the Shadow of Memory and A World of Light, that this man can be brain-damaged; he writes with a grace and poise that those of us with our neural circuits intact can only envy. Even more astonishing is his ability to seemingly remember what he is forgetting; he chronicles his struggles to find a missing bookbag or car key, for example, all the while conveying to us that he knows what the object of his search was; but could not consciously recollect it then.
The two figures who seem to bear the most comparison in this week's reading are Lillian Rosen, Skloot's mother, and Hazel from The Missing World. Both are women caught in a position of vulnerability due to their memory shortcomings, and both have a vague sense that something is wrong with where they are. They are moving in opposite directions in regards to their conditions, however; this is clearly exemplified to a much greater degree in Lillian, who has a memory span equal to Dory's and has no way to scratch out a deeper understanding of her situation. She is unsettled when told that her son has been married for nine years and comes to see her every week, because she can no longer process the idea of time. However, within seconds she has forgotten it, and approaches the world with a ready cheer never seen when she was still mentally capable.
Skloot desperately yearns to have a proper mother-son interaction with her, something he was denied earlier in life, but although he visits her faithfully every week, he is running in place. She never remembers him or his visits, and although she is now more mellow and tractable than she has ever been, this is nothing that can be improved or built upon. She lacks the mental volumns to remember who and what he signifies to her, aside from a transient pleasure at seeing his face ("Oh, Floyd! This is the happiest day of my life!") Clearly some of her implicit memories remain; she is not yet completely groundless, as she knows that he is her son and some of the very basic facts of her life, but she has been disconnected completely from her past with little hope of retrieving it. She doesn't remember that she lived in New York for all of her life until last year, she doesn't remember who or what she was then, and exists as a continually self-renewing entity; she is like Clyde, who thinks that each moment heralds a new awakening. Conversely, it is her amnesiac son who is charged with the thankless and hopeless task of trying to keep her oriented in the present. Skloot mentions how much he dreads his time with her, since he sees so many shades of his own future in her untenable situation. Will he, already quite significantly damaged, be consigned to the looming specter of The Home in a few years, left to while out his own decline into darkness, not even recognizing the faces of those closest to him?
In contrast, Hazel is still a relatively young woman who has most of her mental functions intact with the exception of the blanket amnesia carpeting her past few years. She's aware that something is wrong with her, and she is relatively operational. She has the ability to create and store new explicit memories, and has the mental wherewithal to question her situation and to be (rightly) suspicious that a great part of it is being kept from her. It may be a problem of the fictional narrative, but a complaint was mentioned in class last week that the period of the amnesia is too clean-cut and that she should at least regain some vague memory by triggering events. However, she already does have the sense of wrongness, but is unable to translate this into specific events in the past; I for one think this is as accurate a portrayal of amnesia as a non-neurologist could write, and Livesey's intent, as with Skloot, isn't to get to the scientific nuts and bolts of the case but rather to explore the human cost of the brain machinery going awry.
Hazel lacks the ability to reconstruct her "missing world" from the inside, but Charlotte and some discovered papers remind her of what Jonathan has done to her -- destroyed her choice of career to keep her with him -- and allows her the perspective to see that he is attempting to do it again. It's very difficult to imagine that what he feels for her is love, despite his constant insistences -- he is a controlling, sociopathic man who is attempting to keep her trapped in the broken pieces of her mind when she is finally beginning to have the ability to move beyond it, and he rapes her in an absolutely chilling scene, completely convinced that what he's doing is for "love." The end of The Missing World provides a glimpse to the answer of the question if Hazel will ever reach Skloot's plateau of functionality and love -- it seems as if Freddie's (healthy) attraction to her could function as Beverly did for Skloot. She transitions from being the Lillian of the piece to the Floyd, and all we can hope for her at the close of the book is that she finds a way to patch together the cracks as he did, and live -- if not a completely functional life, then at least one that is full despite its flaws.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Holding On
Human relationships are a curious thing. We find ourselves caught up in a web of interactions, sometimes with no idea of how we came to be there. Our convictions are strong, but sometimes for no logically justifiable reason. The decisions we finally make are products of an innumerable confluence of forces that we call the mind. The only thing that allows a brain within a body to become a true person is memory.
It is easy to see, then, why any damage to the fragile structure of memory is immediately recognizable to a family member or a loved one as an upheaval. When someone you love loses their memory, or a part of it, so suddenly, there is no longer any rational way to view the world. There are only coping mechanisms.
Jonathan, in The Missing World, feels that somehow the erasure of Hazel’s most recent three years will mean a fresh start. Jonathan wants to time-travel in a very literal sense, but he is only ever traveling with himself and Hazel. And, as Hazel put it before her accident, “There are things you can’t apologise for. They change who you are, and you can’t change back.”
After reading the fifth chapter of LeDoux’s synaptic self, I’m inclined to agree with her. So much of who we become is subconscious, a result of implicit functions. There are so many subtle facets to memory that change people in ways they aren’t even aware of. We are always aware of declarative memory, by its very nature. But nondeclarative memory gives us our smile, our laugh, and our mannerisms. Neither Jonathan, nor even Hazel, can become the same person they were three years ago. Life moves on and there are no fresh starts.
Still there is a pull toward clinging to the familiar. I sensed a great deal of this in Floyd Skloot’s writing. He seems relatively comfortable with the man he has become today—thinking of his math as “having an accent”—but his reflections of his first experiences immediately following his contraction of the virus are much more desperate. For instance, he wants to relearn as much as he can about history as quickly as he can. He tells us that, for him, “Gaps exist in the historical record. Surrounding myself with reference books helps to fill them, and so does reading, but I am apt to forget what I have learned that way.”
But Skloot finds in Beverly a companion with whom he can share his rebirth. She says that she loves who he is now even better than who he was before. This is a very healthy way of viewing things, much in contrast to Jonathan’s attitude. But we all try to find ways to adapt that will make sense in our shaky construct of a world, and surely this is understandable. For were we to completely let go of all that we know, we might lose ourselves just as much as Skloot or Hazel.
It is easy to see, then, why any damage to the fragile structure of memory is immediately recognizable to a family member or a loved one as an upheaval. When someone you love loses their memory, or a part of it, so suddenly, there is no longer any rational way to view the world. There are only coping mechanisms.
Jonathan, in The Missing World, feels that somehow the erasure of Hazel’s most recent three years will mean a fresh start. Jonathan wants to time-travel in a very literal sense, but he is only ever traveling with himself and Hazel. And, as Hazel put it before her accident, “There are things you can’t apologise for. They change who you are, and you can’t change back.”
After reading the fifth chapter of LeDoux’s synaptic self, I’m inclined to agree with her. So much of who we become is subconscious, a result of implicit functions. There are so many subtle facets to memory that change people in ways they aren’t even aware of. We are always aware of declarative memory, by its very nature. But nondeclarative memory gives us our smile, our laugh, and our mannerisms. Neither Jonathan, nor even Hazel, can become the same person they were three years ago. Life moves on and there are no fresh starts.
Still there is a pull toward clinging to the familiar. I sensed a great deal of this in Floyd Skloot’s writing. He seems relatively comfortable with the man he has become today—thinking of his math as “having an accent”—but his reflections of his first experiences immediately following his contraction of the virus are much more desperate. For instance, he wants to relearn as much as he can about history as quickly as he can. He tells us that, for him, “Gaps exist in the historical record. Surrounding myself with reference books helps to fill them, and so does reading, but I am apt to forget what I have learned that way.”
But Skloot finds in Beverly a companion with whom he can share his rebirth. She says that she loves who he is now even better than who he was before. This is a very healthy way of viewing things, much in contrast to Jonathan’s attitude. But we all try to find ways to adapt that will make sense in our shaky construct of a world, and surely this is understandable. For were we to completely let go of all that we know, we might lose ourselves just as much as Skloot or Hazel.
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