"The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system."
— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)
Author
Date
November 22, 1990
Metaphor
"The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system."
Metaphor in Context
Darwin provided a picture of the evolution of species; Edelman has provided a picture of the evolution of the individual nervous system, as it reflects the life experience of each individual human being. The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system. The result is that one's brain is one's own. One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream -- that stream is me.
(p. 49)
(p. 49)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. p. 21.
Citation
Sacks, Oliver. "Neurology and the Soul." The New York Review of Books. 22 November 1990. <Link to NYRB>
Date of Entry
04/01/2009
