Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology
by Paul Broks.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
Review by Rob Hardy
Everything we know or think or feel is somehow processed within the contents of our craniums. Thoughts happen without our thinking about making them occur or about the incalculably complex neuronal interactions that would make them happen. How can it possibly happen that intracranial meat makes mentation? Check with an expert, like Paul Broks, who is a British lecturer and consultant in neuropsychology, the study of brain processes that produce thought and behavior. In "Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology" (Atlantic Monthly Press), he will bring you up short: "My area of supposed expertise, neuropsychology, is the subject about which I feel the most profound ignorance... I can give no satisfactory account of how the brain generates conscious awareness. Worse still, I find myself edging towards a doubt that it means anything at all to say that the brain generates consciousness." He reflects that this is something like finding out that your airplane pilot knows nothing of lift, drag, and so on. And yet, the patients he describes in his book, and his own introspection, and his fictional thought experiments are so strange that readers will be amazed that they could have ever taken themselves (or theirselves) for granted.
The people Broks sees in his clinic are those with damaged brains of some sort, "thought experiments made flesh." This is the territory previously explored for us by Oliver Sacks, whom Broks names as an influence on his own thinking and writing. One woman is no longer able to feel any fear, even in dangerous situations, but reacts violently to such situations she sees on television. Another woman asked to list four legged animals replies, "For some reason I can only think of three-legged animals." A man has lost his control center, suffering from a "dysexecutive syndrome": when meeting Broks, he wishes to shake hands, but gets distracted by the idea of picking up a delivered milk bottle, and oscillates between doing one action and the other, accomplishing neither. A boy who had suffered a fall has a head that looks like "the shell of a hard-boiled egg cracked with a spoon". He cannot speak properly, only growling and grunting, but he can swear like a sailor. A woman has a brain inflammation that results in her unshakable opinion that she not only lost her personality, but that she is already dead. A puncture to a man's brain makes him get sexually excited whenever he cuts meat for dinner. Where are the persons within these brains? How is it that they are so vastly different from the way they used to be, sometimes only because a patch of neurons is no longer functioning?
Especially illustrative are the split brain patients, those who have had the cables cut from right brain to left, usually to try to short circuit seizures. It is possible to get a sedative to one side of such brains and then to the other, so that clinicians can interview only one half-brain at a time. In such a patient, Naomi, Broks finds, "Ms Left-brain was talkative and cheerful. Ms Right-brain was unsettled, mute, morose." But Ms Left-brain afterwards was responsible for describing the entire session, and had no memory of Ms Right-brain's difficulties. This is the usual sort of sharing, and not just in patients with split brains. The left hemisphere not only is the spokesman for both, but also is "the brain's spin doctor," making odd events (such as the transient communicative ability of the right brain) comprehensible and acceptable. The left brain, quite simply, lies to make a palatable reality. We are all split up like this. Different wrinkles in the brain handle language, thoughts, memories, feelings. Broks worries: "There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul." Unity is an illusion. The brain is pretty well mapped, via MRI slices, and we have good ideas about what large parts of it do, but even if you look around a living brain, "... you will search in vain for any semblance of a self within the structures of the brain: there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact." But take heart; even if we exist in some mysterious emptiness between neurological components, this is itself a "... beautiful, liberating thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by comparison."
This is a fine introduction to the famously paradoxical "mind-body problem." We may well feel that there are two natural components to ourselves, material and immaterial, or that besides a brain, our skulls hold some "irreducible mental core, the origin of thoughts and actions." A mind, perhaps, or a soul. We may have evolved to accept such a belief in souls to understand ourselves and our fellows so that we could simply interact. But no such souls are to be found by objective search, although we all act as if we have them. Broks knows plenty about the objective biological operation of brains, and it is clear from his often poetic writing that he can convey subjective experiences. But he invites us to think deeply on the paradox. Maybe it is just one of those that is never going to be cleared up adequately and that people will contemplate forever. Maybe, according to one school of thought called the "Mysterians," our brains are simply not smart enough to understand how our brains work.
Though serious, Broks's book has a lot of fun with the paradoxes of consciousness. It is often a set of arguments for different sides of questions, with no firm answers. It is not just case studies, but includes reflections on the fate of Einstein's brain, and on the status of the "Little People" in Robert Louis Stevenson's dreams that gave the author his best work. Broks has written some whimsical stories to bring points home. Memorable is a sci-fi parable which summarizes many of the puzzling ideas Broks presents. It involves a teleporter, something like the famous one in Star Trek. For a trip to Mars, the machine scans every atom of the traveler, reduces the information to digital format, sends the data to Mars, where every atom is reconstructed. The rules of teleportation, however, decree that the sender has to be annihilated; this avoids duplication. But what happens when the machine malfunctions, sending the data for proper reconstruction, but doesn't do the vaporization of the original sender? Where is the person? How can one mind be in two places? How long before they become two different persons by having different experiences? Which one should the authorities, belatedly, vaporize? The witty story is titled "To Be Two or Not to Be". It climaxes an enigmatic and enlightening book that will give much contemplation to anyone with a brain.
Reviewer Rob Hardy is a psychiatrist from Columbus, Mississippi who has written book reviews for The Times of Acadiana in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the Columbus Commercial Dispatch.
