Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Neurology and the Soul [from the New York Review of Books]

November 22, 1990

"I do not feel alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me."

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)

Liquid::Stream

Reading Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. p. 21.

Sacks, Oliver. "Neurology and the Soul." The New York Review of Books. 22 November 1990. <Link to NYRB>

Stream of Consciousness

04/01/2009