This is a collection of Sacks’ last essays, published posthumously. Some had been published in the New York Review of Books previously. Together they are united by focusing on some the very biggest themes in life and science. In one essay, Sacks recounts, “I wondered sometimes whether the speeds of animals and plants could be very different from what they were: how much they were constrained by internal limits, how much by external- the gravity of the earth, the amount of energy received from the sun, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on.” At the time he was playing in his garden as a twelve year-old. Sacks’ talent is to bring alive history’s greats like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James, mining their works for relatively minor details and expounding upon them with his own interpretations, as well as bringing into play relevant thoughts from contemporaries like Charles Koch or Daniel Dennett, combining all for a fresh look.
The first essay in Sacks’ collection was on the obsessive amount of time that Darwin experimented on plants and flowers and how this research transformed and clarified his theory of evolution. Darwin discovered that plants cross-fertilized, as opposed to self-fertilized. This was because he realized cross-fertilization was essential if any evolution were to happen at all, despite each plant already having its own male and female organs. “It was not just the evolution of plants but the coevolution of plants and insects that Darwin illuminated for the first time. Thus natural selection would ensure that the mouth parts of insects matched the structure of their preferred flowers.” While contemplating different abnormal mind states induced by diseases and drug use, Sacks relates, “dreams can take wing, move freely and swiftly, precisely because the activity of the cerebral cortex is not constrained by external perception or reality.” Sacks discusses Freud’s early career in neuroscience and how Freud blended this learning to psychoanalysis. Sacks states that “Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive…. Certain illusions of memory [are] based on intentionality…. Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory; nothing more guaranteed one’s continuity as an individual…. Memories are continually worked over and revised and…. their essence, indeed, is recategorization.”
In a following essay on memory, Sacks comes to the startlingly conclusion that “some of our most cherished memories may never have happened- or may have happened to someone else…. Many of my own enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, may have arisen from others’ suggestions that have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.” Sacks then ties memory in with the creative mind. “Creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives…. Our only truth in narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves- the stories we continually recategorize and refine.” This ever-changing process of shifting and combining memory is what leads to the creative disposition. “Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.”
In another essay, Sacks continues with the theme of the creative disposition, “it takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It a is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.” Above all, creativity requires time to marinate. The key for Sacks is “time to forget it, to let it fall into [the] unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts…. [The process consists of] the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self.”
In his penultimate essay, Sacks expounds on consciousness and goes back to his roots as a neuroscientist. Fascinatingly, he considers the experience of individual brain development within a lifetime. “A crucial innovation has been population thinking, thinking in terms that take account of the brain’s huge population of neurons and the power of experience to differentially alter the strengths of connections between them, and to promote the formation of functional groups or constellations of neurons throughout the brain- groups whose interactions serve to categorize experience…. experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.”
The first essay in Sacks’ collection was on the obsessive amount of time that Darwin experimented on plants and flowers and how this research transformed and clarified his theory of evolution. Darwin discovered that plants cross-fertilized, as opposed to self-fertilized. This was because he realized cross-fertilization was essential if any evolution were to happen at all, despite each plant already having its own male and female organs. “It was not just the evolution of plants but the coevolution of plants and insects that Darwin illuminated for the first time. Thus natural selection would ensure that the mouth parts of insects matched the structure of their preferred flowers.” While contemplating different abnormal mind states induced by diseases and drug use, Sacks relates, “dreams can take wing, move freely and swiftly, precisely because the activity of the cerebral cortex is not constrained by external perception or reality.” Sacks discusses Freud’s early career in neuroscience and how Freud blended this learning to psychoanalysis. Sacks states that “Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive…. Certain illusions of memory [are] based on intentionality…. Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory; nothing more guaranteed one’s continuity as an individual…. Memories are continually worked over and revised and…. their essence, indeed, is recategorization.”
In a following essay on memory, Sacks comes to the startlingly conclusion that “some of our most cherished memories may never have happened- or may have happened to someone else…. Many of my own enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, may have arisen from others’ suggestions that have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.” Sacks then ties memory in with the creative mind. “Creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives…. Our only truth in narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves- the stories we continually recategorize and refine.” This ever-changing process of shifting and combining memory is what leads to the creative disposition. “Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.”
In another essay, Sacks continues with the theme of the creative disposition, “it takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It a is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.” Above all, creativity requires time to marinate. The key for Sacks is “time to forget it, to let it fall into [the] unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts…. [The process consists of] the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self.”
In his penultimate essay, Sacks expounds on consciousness and goes back to his roots as a neuroscientist. Fascinatingly, he considers the experience of individual brain development within a lifetime. “A crucial innovation has been population thinking, thinking in terms that take account of the brain’s huge population of neurons and the power of experience to differentially alter the strengths of connections between them, and to promote the formation of functional groups or constellations of neurons throughout the brain- groups whose interactions serve to categorize experience…. experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.”
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