The mistake collector

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, neurology, errors, consciousness

Oliver Sack's fifteenth, and last, book is The River of Consciousness. He died just two weeks after completing the design of the book, composed of his essays in various medical and popular publications. I first came across his books three years ago; this is the third of his that I've read and reviewed in that time. He may be best known to the public for The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I have yet to read…but it is on my short list.

As any good clinical "brain worker", he collected mistakes. Freud with his "slips" may be the one we know the best for elucidating the shortcuts our mind and brain use, from certain mistakes that we make. I find Dr. Sacks to be the best at explaining the usefulness of the categories of our errors to us.

Not all the chapters in the book are explicitly about "useful errors". The chapter "Speed", for example, attacks questions such as, "Just how fast can we think?" and "What is it like to think a hundred times faster, or slower?" We all have heard of phenomena such as having one's life flash by in a moment during severe emergencies, or of becoming so absorbed in minutiae that hours can pass with hardly a ripple on our thoughts. Sundry drugs can affect our time sense: I once began to take a prescription drug for systemic fungus, and on the fourth day managed to work up enough ambition to phone my doctor to say, "I just realized that the wallpaper texture in my office is so interesting that I've been looking at it for four hours." He recommended that I stop taking it, and dropping by for a different prescription!

The chapter "The Creative Self" dwells much on the apparently unconscious problem-solving abilities we have (you can call it "right brain" but it is more involved than that). For much of my career as a systems programmer, I relied on it: Near the end of a work day I would often set up a structure in my mind, of the current algorithmic problem I faced, and sort of give it a mental push. I could usually expect to awaken at 3:00 AM with a flowchart "sitting there," ready for me to spool out into working code. From the dancing flames that Kekulé was watching when the structure of Benzene suddenly sprang to mind, to the introduction to Das Rheingold that Wagner had been struggling with, and which erupted into his consciousness while he took a hike to take a break, creative "flashes", while not too common, are well enough known to us all. They do not really denote lightning inspiration, but rather, they culminate a long and laborious fitting and re-fitting of ideas that goes on in the background; it seems almost independent of our conscious problem-solving, and usually quite linear, processes.

I was also quite taken with the chapter "Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science." The author digs into the lore of "ideas born before their time." It is usually the case that such ideas enter an arena that is already full of competing theories, and in particular, they usually incite the ire of numerous and powerful figures whose work is threatened thereby. My father used to say, "Really good ideas often have to take Moses's way: 40 years in the wilderness for a generation to die off." Sometimes it is more like a century or two! The most extreme example is that Archimedes seems to have invented calculus nearly 19 centuries before Liebnitz and Newton (re)formulated it.

Rather than comment on every chapter, I'll leave it to the reader to enjoy the book.