"It [neurology] has all the fascination of a horror story--the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain."
— McGinn, Colin (b. 1950)
Author
Work Title
Date
March 24, 2011
Metaphor
"It [neurology] has all the fascination of a horror story--the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain."
Metaphor in Context
Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story--the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain's parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation manual links the two. There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the mind has been infiltrated by an alien life form. We are thus perpetually startled by our evident fusion with the brain; as a result, neurology is never boring. And this is true in spite of the fact that the science of the brain has not progressed much beyond the most elementary descriptive stages.
(p. 35)
(p. 35)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Colin McGinn, "Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?" New York Review of Books March 24, 2011. <Link to nybooks.com>
Date of Entry
03/08/2011
