Posted on 08/13/2018 4:15:31 PM PDT by ETL
To understand the human brain, take note of the rare, the strange and the downright spooky. That’s the premise of two new books, Unthinkable by science writer Helen Thomson and The Disordered Mind by neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel.
Both books describe people with minds that don’t work the same way as everyone else’s. These are people who are convinced that they are dead, for instance; people whose mental illnesses lead to incredible art; people whose memories have been stolen by dementia; people who don’t forget anything. By scrutinizing these cases, the stories offer extreme examples of how the brain creates our realities.
In the tradition of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks (SN: 10/14/17, p. 28), Thomson explores the experiences of nine people with unusual minds. She travels around the world to interview her subjects with compassion and curiosity.
In England, she meets a man who, following a bathtub electrocution, became convinced that he was dead. (Every so often, he still feels “a little bit dead,” he tells Thomson.)
In Los Angeles, she spends time with a 64-year-old man who can remember almost every day of his life in extreme detail.
And in a frightening encounter in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates, she interviews a man with schizophrenia who transmogrifies into a growling tiger.
By visiting them in their element, Thomson presents these people not as parlor tricks, but as fully rendered human beings. ..."
By connecting these strange brains to everyday mental processes, both books make clear how much we all have in common, and more than that, how all our brains are a little bit unusual.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
“the tendency to think differently is absolutely okay.“
While differences are fine—even beneficial—the bell curve still holds true. Those outer quartiles go beyond different.
The gulf between “different” and abnormal or aberrant is vast. Most people are blessedly unaware of mankind’s capacity for depravity. To say evil men think differently is to say cancer cells share many attributes with stem cells.
Mister Cellophane.
Where nobody knows my name.
That's strange. My brain remembered it as "people" not "faces."
Thank you.
Sorry, couldn't help myself. That was one of my favorite SNL bits, back in the early days when the cast and writers had talent.
That made me buy The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
And Musicophilia
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