Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****