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milandeep's review against another edition
3.0
The River of Consciousness has a bunch of posthumous essays by the neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. These essays were a mixed bag for me and the title was misleading. As a couple of other reviews have mentioned that it seems a ghost-writer was used to finish this book after the death of the author. "The Fallibility of Memory" was my favorite essay of the lot which tells how our memories keep changing with time and how sometimes other people memories become a part of our own memory. The essays on Darwin and Freud were also interesting. I was hoping to read more about the consciousness but was disappointed on that part. Nevertheless, Dr. Sacks draws his writings from the experiences with his patients, mixes them with science and history to provide thoughtful essays.
bigbookslilreads's review
3.0
A very interesting and eclectic collection of Sack's essays, dealing with physics, botany, neurology, ancient history, and others... He was definitely led by curiosity and a sense of awe, and that is present in these essays. I give it three stars only because I don't think I got much new out of them that I didn't get in his previous work, though there were new topics to me that were nice to see approached by him (e.g. Darwin's contribution to science).
gaybf's review against another edition
informative
4.5
oliver sacks u will always be famous
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- Helen Keller wrote, among other things, a story called "The Frost King," which she gave to a friend as a birthday gift. When the story found its way into print in a magazine, readers soon realized that it bore great similarities to "The Frost Fairies," a children's short story by Margaret Canby. Admiration for Keller turned into condemnation, and she was accused of plagiarism and deliberate falsehood, even though she had no recollection of reading Mrs. Canby's story. (She later realized that the story had been "read" to her, using finger spelling onto her hand.) The young Keller was subjected to a ruthless and outrageous inquisition, which left its mark on her for the rest of her life.
But she had defenders, too, including the plagiarized Margaret Canby, who was amazed that a story spelled into Keller's hand three years before could be remembered or reconstructed by her in such detail. "What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have!" Canby wrote. Alexander Graham Bell, too, came to her defense, saying, "Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions derived from others.' - --I felt the 1978 play to be grossly derivative, for it lifted, sometimes, whole sentences from my own book without transforming them in the least. It seemed to me less an original play than a plagiarism or a parody (yet there was no doubt the author's "obsession" or good faith).
I was not sure what to make of this. Was the author too lazy, or too lacking in talent or originality, to make the needed transformation of my work? Or was the problem essentially one of incubation, that he had not allowed himself enough time for the experience of reading Awakenings to sink in? Nor had he allowed himself, as Pinter did, time to forget it, to let it fall into his unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts.
...What is at issue is not the fact of "borrowing" or "imitating," of being "derivative," being "influenced," but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it onto oneself, compounds it with one's own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one's own. - Creativity--that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, with a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerging--seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think that if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.
At such times, when I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves in spontaneous succession and to clothe themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me, certainly the best part of me. - "Time," says Jorge Luis Borges, "is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river." Our movements, our actions, are extended in time, as are our perceptions, our thoughts, the contents of consciousness. We live in time, we organize time, we are time creatures through and through. But is the time we live in, or live by, continuous, like Borges's river? Or is it more comparable to a succession of discrete moments, like beads on a string?
- So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments--though these underlie everything else--but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being. Finally, then, we come around to Proust's image, itself slightly reminiscent of photography, that we consist entirely of a "collection of moments," even though these flow into one another like Borges's river.
- Can we draw any lessons from the examples I have been discussing? I believe we can. One might first invoke the concept of prematurity here and see the nineteenth-century observations of Herschel, Weir, Mitchell, Tourette, and Verrey as having come before their times, so that they could not be integrated into contemporary conceptions. Gunther Stent, considering "prematurity" in scientific discovery in 1972, wrote, "A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge."
- Darwin often remarked that no man could be a good observer unless he was an active theorizer as well. As Darwin's son Francis wrote, his father seemed "charged with theorizing power ready to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory, and thus the fact became magnified into importance." Theory, though, can be a great enemy of honest observation and thought, especially when it hardens into unstated, perhaps unconscious, dogma or assumption.
Undermining one's existing beliefs and theories can be a very painful, even terrifying, process--painful because our mental lives are sustained, consciously or unconsciously, by theories, sometimes invested with the force of ideology or delusion. - (Helmholtz, using mountain climb for metaphor to creating new theory): One cannot see advance, he wrote, how to climb a mountain; it can only be climbed by trail and error. The intellectual mountaineer makes false starts, turns in to blind alleys, finds himself in untenable positions and often has to backtrack, descent, and start again. Slowly and painfully, with innumerable errors and corrections, he makes his zigzag way up the mountain. It is only when he reaches the summit that he will see that there was, in fact, a direct route, a "royal road," to the top.
- The asteroid 84928 Oliversacks was named in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday in 2008.
sfletcher26's review against another edition
3.0
I've loved Sacks' writing ever since I first read 'Awakenings'. He is for me the benchmark by which all writers of narrative medicine are judged. So it's with a sense of sadness that I read this, the last book he wrote before his death in 2015.
Unlike many of his other books, which have a central theme which ties what are often disparate and wide ranging thoughts together, this book lacks that and suffers accordingly. The River of Consciousness is more a small collection of addenda to his other books. So here we get further thoughts on 'A Leg to Stand On', 'Migraine', 'The Island of the Colour Blind', 'Hallucinations' and of course 'Awakenings'. Each chapter is interesting in its own way, though a couple of them do drag on a little at times.
This will not go down as one of Sacks' best books but it's still a must read for anyone who's read any of his other books.
Unlike many of his other books, which have a central theme which ties what are often disparate and wide ranging thoughts together, this book lacks that and suffers accordingly. The River of Consciousness is more a small collection of addenda to his other books. So here we get further thoughts on 'A Leg to Stand On', 'Migraine', 'The Island of the Colour Blind', 'Hallucinations' and of course 'Awakenings'. Each chapter is interesting in its own way, though a couple of them do drag on a little at times.
This will not go down as one of Sacks' best books but it's still a must read for anyone who's read any of his other books.
israology's review against another edition
4.0
It was almost like he was writing my memoir a lil bit
paulataua's review against another edition
3.0
A fairly mixed bag of variable quality. Essays on Darwin, Time, Freud, and more. All were beautifully written and superficially interesting, but never really inspiring and rarely thought provoking. I read an essay, stopped momentarily, and then moved onto the next one. Yes, I did enjoy reading it, but I also sensed a lack of depth or coherence I didn’t associate with Sacks.