Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind’s I - Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

Clinical marvels such as Eve and Sybil, then, ought to be studied under laboratory conditions before we embark on serious efforts to accommodate our theories to them, but in general that has not proven to be in the best interests of the patients. There was, however, at least one striking study of Eve’s dissociated personality, a partially “blind” study of her—their?—verbal associations, by a method that revealed three very different “semantic differentials” for Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane (the apparently fused person at the close of therapy). This is reported in C.E. Osgood, G.J. Suci, and P.H. Tannenbaum’s The Measurement of Meaning (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1957). A recent report of a newly discovered apparent case of multiple personality is Deborah Winer’s “Anger and Dissociation: A Case Study of Multiple Personality,” in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (vol. 87, (3), 1978, pp. 368–372).

The famous split-brain subjectsare another matter, for they have been investigated intensively and rigorously in laboratory settings for years. In certain forms of epilepsy a suggested treatment is a commissurotomy, an operation that almost cuts the brain in half—producing a left brain and a right brain that are almost independent. Amazing phenomena result—often strongly suggestive of the interpretation that commissurotomy splits the person or self in two. The huge literature that has sprung up in recent years about the split-brain subjects and the implications of their cases is lucidly and carefully discussed in Michael Gazzaniga’s The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); in Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph Ledoux’s The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum, 1978); and by a well-informed philosopher, Charles Marks, in Commissurotomy, Consciousness and the Unity of Mind (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1979). Thomas Nagel has written one of the most provocative articles on the topic, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” which first appeared in Synthese (1971) and is reprinted in his Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) along with “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and many other compelling essays, including several on topics raised by The Mind’s I.

Another well-documented case that has recently interested philosophers and psychologists is that of a man who, due to brain damage, is blind in a portion of his visual field. He claims (not surprisingly) that he cannot see or experience anything in that portion of his visual field but (surprisingly) he can “guess” with excellent reliability the shape and orientation of certain symbols placed in his (rather large) “blind” area. This has come to be called “ blind sight,” and it is reported in L. Weiskrantz, E.K. Warrington, M.D. Saunders, and J. Marshall, “Visual Capacity in the Hemianopic Field Following a Restricted Occipital Ablation,” in Brain (vol. 97, 1974, pp. 709–728).

Howard Gardner’s The Shattered Mind: The Patient After Brain Damage, (New York: Knopf, 1974) is a highly readable and carefully researched survey of other remarkable phenomena, and contains an excellent bibliography.

Classical accounts of particular individuals who should be familiar to anyone seriously embarking on an attempt to theorize about consciousness and the self are to be found in two books by the great Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria: The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York: Basic Books, 1968), the story of a man with an abnormally vivid and compendious memory, and The Man with a Shattered World (New York: Basic Books, 1972), a harrowing and fascinating account of a man who suffered extensive brain damage in World War II, but who struggled heroically for years to put his mind back together and even managed to write an autobiographical account of what it was like to be him—probably as strange as anything a literate bat could tell us.

Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing when she was less than two years old, wrote several books that not only are moving documents but are full of fascinating observations for the theorist. The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, 1903, reprinted in 1954 with an introductory essay by Ralph Barton Perry) and The World I Live In (Century, 1908) give her version of what it was like to be her.

In Awakenings (New York: Doubleday, 1974) Oliver Sacks describes the histories of some real twentieth-century Rip Van Winkles or Sleeping Beauties, who in 1919 fell into profound sleeplike states as a result of an encephalitis epidemic and who in the mid-1960s were “awakened” by the administration of the new drug L-Dopa—with both wonderful and terrible results.

Another strange case is to be found in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: Knopf, 1964) by Milton Rokeach, which tells the true story of three inmates in a mental institution in Ypsilanti, Michigan, each of whom proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ. They were introduced to each other, with interesting results.

This list of books and articles would be obsolete before anyone could read them all, and following up all the citations would soon turn into a life of scholarship in cognitive science and related fields. This is then a gateway into a garden of forking paths where you are free, happily, to choose your own trajectory, looping back when necessary, and even forward in time into the literature on these topics that is still to be written.

D.C.D.

D.R.H.

Cover: Magritte, René, The False Mirror. (1928). Oil on canvas, 21 × 31⅞". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Pages 35, 37, and 40 illustrations by Victor Juhasz. Page 45 illustration reprinted from The Many Worlds of Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, edited by Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 156. Page 48 illustration by Rick Granger. Pages 148, 157, and 175 lithographs and woodcuts of M.C. Escher are reproduced by permission of the Escher Foundation, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; copyright © the Escher Foundation, 1981; reproduction rights arranged courtesy of the Vorpal Galleries: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Laguna Beach. Page 189 illustration courtesy of C.W. Rettenmeyer. Pages 278 and 279 illustrations from Vicious Circles and Infinity: A Panoply of Paradoxes, by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht (New York: Doubleday, 1975). Page 349 illustration by John Tenniel from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946), copyright © by Grosset & Dunlap. Page 405 illustration by Jim Hull.

In addition to the credit line appearing on the first page of each selection, the following publishers are also acknowledged for having given permission to reprint selections in Britain and the British Commonwealth countries: selections 6, 18, and 19 are reprinted courtesy of Martin Secker & Warburg Limited; selections 7 and 8 are reprinted courtesy of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

Excerpt from “Why Can’t He Be You” by Hank Cochran is reprinted courtesy of Tree Publishers, Inc.

For additional information on the authors and the works cited in the text, consult “Further Reading” beginning on p. 465.

“Borges and I,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Copyright © 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions, New York.