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Zen Physics
Chapter 4. Remember Me?
p37 To be a person, one must have a memory -- a unique, accessible set of recollections -- because to be a person means to hold one’s life story and be actively, intimately involved with it. We must be able to see who we are now in terms of who we have been at different, successive stages along our journey from early childhood. We must hold the script to the inner drama that is ourselves, to know our own narrative. For if we cannot do this, we are without an identity or self.
...p38 ...In the case of people who recover fully after having been in a coma for several months there has been an almost complete replacement of their constituent atoms in the period during which they were unconscious. Yet, upon waking, they have no sensation of being any different or of any time having passed.
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p39 [Account of 20th century encephalitis lethargica epidemic] ...More than four decades had elapsed during which all the substance of their bodies and brains had been replaced many times over. But upon resuming relatively normal consciousness [after L-dopamine treatment], the patients were in no doubt as to who they were. It was for them as if there had been no vast temporal chasm. And for this very reason, they were confused, disoriented, by what they found -- or did not find -- in the new world into which they had been catapulted. One profoundly affected patient... knew it was 1969, because during her trance she had absorbed news of current events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of Kennedy, but she felt with overwhelming conviction that it was 1926.
In his remarkable account of such cases in his book Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks supports the argument, first expressed by Leibniz (“Quis non agit non existit”), that we must be active or we cease, in any ontological sense, to exist [“Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.” -Wiki Also, that Leibniz link is interesting if you read what I wrote about Ada Lovelace HERE.] -- that activity and actuality are one and the same... Most of us stiffen up if we remain in the same position for a couple hours. Six weeks with a broken leg in a cast and we need at least a few days to recoup the strength in our muscles and the flexibility in our joints. Yet some of the sleeping-sickness victims, having been virtually motionless for half a lifetime, were, within a few seconds of their “unfreezing,” jumping up, walking about with great energy, and chattering excitedly to anyone who would listen. The only satisfactory conclusion Sacks could draw was that during their trance there had been no subjective duration for the victims whatever. It was as if the “current of being” (Sacks’s phrase) had been abruptly turned off and, more than forty years later, turned back on again. In between, for the victims, time had stood still and memory remained intact. Nothing was added to it, but nothing was subtracted either.
I’ve only had a few experiences with unconsciousness (outside sleep) but it has been my experience that there was not, from the subjective point of view, any lapse at all. By which I mean that the interval between “conscious” states was filled with a confused, admittedly timeless, period of dreaming. “I” continued to be self-aware though in a dream state, just as I seem to pass my nights of sleep. Given that people on certain medications don’t recall their dreams, the ability to remember that state would seem to have a chemical component. Something like L-dopamine in our brains would seem to give us what we think of as a “normal” experience of time.
I can’t recall if Darling comes back to this later, but this would be one instance of what he argues is our brains limiting (by constraining us to linear time) the consciousness of our minds.
p40 ...most of us cannot remember anywhere near everything that has happened to us... those who actually possess... [an eidetic or photographic memory] know that it can be a blight and a handicap -- in fact... a crippling neurological disorder...
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...the eminent neurologist A.R. Luria documented an actual case of total recall in his astonishing book, The Mind of a Mnemonist. The subject was a Russian man, Sherashevsky, who could remember -- or, more to the point, could never forget -- any detail, however small, of the experiences of his life: every sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, every thought and impression, every way of looking at and analyzing a situation... he had no sense of discrimination. He could not focus on a specific problem or situation because as soon as he turned his attention to it, his mind was choked full of irrelevancies. Every trivial item spawned the recollection of a thousand others. He could not follow through a particular chain of reasoning, or make decisions, or take an interest in one topic over any other. In fact, he could not function normally at all and spent many of his days in abject depression and misery.
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p41 For survival reasons, a normal memory is selective and patchy, even if, to its owner, it doesn’t seem to be that way. The brain holds on to what it needs and quickly forgets what is irrelevant. Having organized itself, during childhood, around a particular worldview, the brain tends to consolidate mainly those memories that appear to fit in with and enhance this system of belief. Normal memory, then, is heavily biased towards a particular conception of reality. It is gappy, but good in parts, and may be exceptionally good with regard to some specific life episodes.
p42 [Descriptions of experiments by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1950s] ...Depending on exactly where on the cortex the mild pulsing current from the probe was allowed to flow, the patient would react in a highly specific, often comical way... if the probe made contact somewhere on the lateral side of the temporal lobe, it would often trigger in the patient a particular, vivid reliving of a past event, as if the play button of a tiny video recorder had been pressed. Touching one spot on the cortex might cause one patient to hear her mother and father singing Christmas carols around the piano as they did in her youth; stimulation of another point nearby might spark off the recollection of a winter walk through fresh-fallen snow, or of a childhood incident in the schoolyard, or of an encounter with a menacing stranger. Each episode would seem strikingly realistic and detailed (much more so than a normal recollection), and each could be played again from the start, exactly as before, by an identical touch of the probe.
The movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind clearly borrowed from the results of this experiment.
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p49 [Following an account of Sacks’s patient Jimmie who has been unable to create new memories since 1945 and of Alzheimer's] An erosion of memory is an erosion of selfhood. Thus, the victim of Korsakov’s syndrome (Jimmie) is still a person, but one whose evolution has come to an end -- a person robbed of a future, trapped in stasis, without the possibility of further development or change. An Alzheimer’s patient, on the other hand, is a person in rapid, irreversible decline, a person whose death [of self] is occurring bit by bit, to the distress of everyone concerned, during life.
The movie Memento played very cleverly with Korsakov’s syndrome or something very like it.
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Under equilibrium conditions -- the normal, everyday situation in which changes to our warehouse of memories are small and gradual -- the brain can easily sustain the illusion of self. So we who are this self are generally convinced of its permanence. But faced with a sudden or rapid depletion of its memory store, through accident or disease, the brain can no longer cope. It becomes deprived of the means by which to project a convincing feeling of selfhood, a feeling that by its very nature must be based upon security and stability... the fear experienced by the Korsakov’s victim or the Alzheimer’s patient who can no longer recognize her own face or surroundings is simply a heightened form of the same fear we all feel when we contemplate the prospect of death. It is the raw fear of losing our selves.
Death would lose its sting if we had no fear of it. But how can we overcome this fear when confronted with the almost incontrovertible evidence that we are merely the narratives running inside our brains? ... in death we all confront the ultimate form of amnesia -- total neurological destruction and, with it, the ending of everything we are...
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