Oliver Sacks on Humans and Myth-making
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Humans naturally create stories and narratives, says Oliver Sacks.
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Oliver Sacks:
Oliver Sacks is a psychiatrist and neurologist best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.
In 1966, Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film called Awakenings.
In July of 2007, Sacks was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university's first Columbia University Artist. Sacks Latest book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), was has been Revised and Expanded in a new edition that was released in September of 2008.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: Is the human brain predisposed to create myths?
Oliver Sacks: Yeah. First I would say that the human brain or the human mind is disposed to create stories or narratives. Children love stories, make up stories.
Jerome Bruner, a great psychologist, has spoken of two modes of thinking. One is to create narratives, one is to create paradigms or explanations or models. And of course some of these will come together because then you want to have a story which explains.
We all come into the world and human beings are evolved into a mysterious world and had to wonder where they came from, how the world came from, what are the stars doing.
And in the absence of better explanations, I think, supernatural explanations sort of come to mind. There must have been some great figure who created the universe and who perhaps is keeping an eye on us now.
And say before 1859 and before [Charles] Darwin, before The Origin of Species was published, there was no natural explanation of how different animals and plants had come into being, let alone human beings.
I think Freeman Dyson, a great physicist who once wrote, “I am a practicing Christian but not a believing one.”
So I think my parents were practicing Jews, but not believing ones. I don’t think that belief is a particularly strong thing in Judaism. But my mother was also botanically inclined. I grew up in a Darwinian world, and I was very startled when I came to the [United] States and found that millions, millions and millions of people didn’t believe in evolution. I still am profoundly perplexed.
To proclaim that one doesn’t believe in the evolution, I think, what would label one as an idiot in most of the civilized world; certainly, in Europe.
And again, growing up in Europe, it was our feeling the world would become more and more secular. And now, of course, as the world stands by mad, dangerous fundamentalism on all sides; who would have thought that the 21st Century would dissolve into religious conflict?
I’m a sort of quiet, old, Jewish atheist. I’m not a militant atheist. I don’t sort of argue about things like [Richard] Dawkins and [Daniel] Dennett and Sam Harris. I quite like their books, but I’m not militant by nature, and I’m not very argumentative by nature. And if people want to believe, well, then that’s their business.
What concerns me is when belief is used to influence and corrupt educational politics. And that seems to me monstrous that creationism, or so-called intelligent design, is thought next to evolution or instead of it. And I do think it is almost is a form of madness.
Question: Is all religion madness?
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