Book: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Quotes of Book: An Anthropologist on Mars:
Tourette's syndrome is seen in every race, every culture, every stratum of society; it can be recognized at a glance once one is attuned to it; and cases of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming, were recorded by Aretaeus of Cappadocia almost two thousand years ago. Yet it was not clinically delineated until 1885, when Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist-a pupil of Charcot's and a friend of Freud's-put together these historical accounts with observations of some of his own patients. The syndrome as he described it was characterized, above all, by convulsive tics, book-quoteTemple started to become excited. 'I want to get this out before you get to the airport,' she said, with a sort of urgency. She had been brought up an Episcopalian, she told me, but had rather early 'given up orthodox belief' – belief in any personal deity or intention – in favour of a more 'scientific' notion of God. 'I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe – not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there's no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe. . . . Most people can pass on genes – I can pass on thoughts or what I write. 'This is what I get very upset at. . . .' Temple, who was driving, suddenly faltered and wept. 'I've read that libraries are where immortality lies. . . . I don't want my thoughts to die with me. . . . I want to have done something. . . . I'm not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution – know that my life has meaning. Right now, I'm talking about things at the very core of my existence. book-quoteThough the tendency to tic is innate in Tourette's, the particular form of tics often has a personal or historical origin. Thus a name, a sound, a visual image, a gesture, perhaps seen years before and forgotten, may first be unconsciously echoed or imitated and then preserved in the stereotypic form of a tic. Such tics are like hieroglyphic, petrified residues of the past and may indeed, with the passage of time, become so hieroglyphic, so abbreviated, as to become unintelligible {as 'God be with you' was condensed, collapsed, after centuries, to the phonetically similar but meaningless 'goodbye'}. book-quoteSome sense of ongoing, of "next," is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless moment. And whereas for the rest of us the present is given its meaning and depth by the past {hence it becomes the "remembered present," in Gerald Edelman's term}, as well as being given potential and tension by the future, for Greg it was flat and {in its meager way} complete. This living-in-the-moment, which was so manifestly pathological, had been perceived in the temple as an achievement of higher consciousness. G book-quoteThis, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience-and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his theory of neuronal group selection, or "neural Darwinism. book-quote
