"He stumbled through an answer that had once been automatic: The brain was not a machine, not a car engine, not a computer."
— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
New York
Publisher
Picador
Date
2006
Metaphor
"He stumbled through an answer that had once been automatic: The brain was not a machine, not a car engine, not a computer."
Metaphor in Context
At a reading at Cody's in Berkeley, a member of the otherwise respectful audience asked how he responded to the press's suggestion that his personalized case histories violated professional ethics. The audience hissed at the question, but with a disguised thrill. He stumbled through an answer that had once been automatic: The brain was not a machine, not a car engine, not a computer. Purely functional descriptions hid as much as they revealed. You couldn't grasp any individual brain without addressing private history, circumstance, personality--the whole person, beyond the sum of mechanical modules and localized deficits
(p. 227)
(p. 227)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (New York: Picador, 2006).
Date of Entry
06/08/2015
