Mr James' Best Friend

In the Sunday Times Culture Section a couple of weeks back, there was a review of Oliver Sacks’ latest   book “Hallucinations”. Oliver Sacks is the physician and neurologist who famously wrote “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat”.

The reviewer, James McConnachie, summarises the various categories of hallucinations to which Sacks refers, as well as the possible causes. Throughout the book Sacks stresses that the “phantoms are born in our brains” and refers to sensory deprivation, drugs, migraines and stimulation of different parts of the brain as being among the causes.

This is all fascinating and I would personally go out and buy the book, except it would be a bit like buying a book on how a car engine works when one is much more interested in who made the car, who drives the car, and how and why.  What does it mean that there are cars with engines that function the way they do?

According to the review, one of Sacks’ blind patients ‘sees’ “children in bright eastern costumes, walking endlessly up and down stairs. Fascinatingly, her eyes dart here and there, as if she is watching a real event; people who merely imagine visual scenes do not do this.” “One migraineur described seeing writing on a wall that was too far away to read; yet on walking up to the wall he was able to read the text aloud.”

I have absolutely no doubt that one can bring about the sense of a “shadow-person” by electrically stimulating the left temporoparietal junction in the brain as Sacks reports but, as the reviewer notes at the end of his article, it does not consider whether all these ‘causes’ are “simply creating conditions in which we are able to see beyond our accustomed reality.” 

In other words, much as opening our eyes enables us to see, stimulating certain brain junctions enables us to sense presences that we cannot when they are  unstimulated.

I think it would be unfair to hold this against Mr. Sacks. He is only interested in the mechanics of hallucinations. The consideration of why our senses are ordinarily restricted, and what it is exactly that we perceive when some of those restrictions are lifted, is rather a different book.

And maybe some people are born with irregularities in their brains that enable them to see and hear things (and/or smell, taste and feel them)which most of us can't. 

The great early psychologist, William James, made a pact with his best friend that the first of them to die would come back and tell the other about the afterlife. The best friend died first, and James waited in vain for a visit. Are we to conclude from this that the afterlife does not exist?  

Personally, I conclude nothing of the sort but, in my imagination, I envisage James’ best friend, disembodied, jumping up and down in front of him and desperately trying to let James know he was there. But for 

"those who have eyes to see, let them see.” Because not everybody has the ‘equipment’ working to see such things (and think how distracting it would be if we all could) it does not mean such things do not exist.

(For those who have not read my earlier posts about how the mind brings about the brain, rather than the other way around, see my post ‘A Spiritual Cosmology’ at http://seekerinthfoothills.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/i-intend-to-be-little-bolder-and.html.

For a brief account of an attempt to increase my own capacity to see things most people don't, see my post 'Psychic Phemomena' at http://seekerinthfoothills.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/psychic-phenomena.html.)