Reflecting on my latest read here, by Oliver Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For Hat.”
Sacks, a neurologist working in Beth Abraham’s chronic care facility the Bronx, presents brief case studies of patients with various types of brain damage or maldevelopment. His descriptions included the titular character, who could remember individual facial elements (like ears and beards and glasses) but not synthesize faces into individuals. But also the woman who had to turn 360 degrees to the right in order to see the left side of her dinner plate, and the man who lived perpetually in span of 20 or 30 seconds of his life…and a host of others whom he describes with unbelievable empathy and kindness.
Occasionally, far too seldom for me, he makes allusions to his patients as having lost their soul, despite their continuing to breathe and metabolize and appear (at least superficially) to be human. I have to agree. The fundamental question is “What does it mean to be human?”
I think the concept of humanity demands far more attention than we generally give it. And I think the line between “human” and “animal” is far thinner than we like to admit. If there is a God, it is the ineffable entity who drew the line between a human being an an automaton.
I am a daily caretaker for a 92-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s dementia. She is by turns anxious, depressed and angry in the face of her slow incomprehensible disintegration. I have known her 45 years and must say that she was the finest woman I have known in my 73 years. She is now a mere fragment of her once hugely capable and vibrant self. She mastered the hardest chord patterns I devised for myself and played them in contests for 25 years with her fiddler husband and me. She was invariably cheerful, witty and friendly, a wonderful cook and homemaker. And now she is a frail and withered husk of that once splendid woman.Her mother died in 1998 aged 98, but Joan harbors wishes to return to Wisconsin to live with her mother. Her husband died in 2014 but Joan asks me where he went after he abandoned her in the assisted living facility where she now resides. She actually chose to reside there when the task of living alone in her house became too burdensome at age 89. She was still driving all around west Houston at 88 but in February 2019 she could not find her way back home and got lost twice more that spring. You cannot explain this now widespread phenomenon on the hypothesis of an immaterial soul. But you can explain it in terms of a brain disease that afflicts mostly very old human primates. In fact, the idea of an immaterial spirit dwelling in the body is a grotesque anachronism in the modern world. Neuroscience had already moved light years beyond such ideas in the 19th century. There is nothing too mysterious about what human beings are: we are the product of many hundreds of millions if not billions of years of organic evolution with our infant bodies expelled from a warm mammalian mother’s womb into a community of human primates which imposes upon us innumerable lessons, skills, allowances and inhibitions, that community itself being the product of organic and social evolution.