Daydream Believer
DAYDREAM BELIEVER
The study of consciousness is hampered by the lack of another mental paradigm with which to contrast it. We could contrast consciousness with bicamerality, but our understanding of the bicameral mind is limited to the literary records left to us by men of the second millennium BC. We could contrast consciousness with schizophrenia, but schizophrenia is not another mental paradigm. It is fractured consciousness. The best contrast – the best backdrop from which to study consciousness – would be a different mental paradigm that is con-temporary and viable.
A. R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist is probably as close as we can get. Naturally Luria’s unusual subject is conscious, but his memory and perception are so radically different from ordinary consciousness that he suggests another possible mental paradigm. S., as Luria calls him, has a perfect photographic memory and experiences the world synesthetically.
I shall call S’s mental state viable since he gets along in his life as well as anyone else and indeed better than many, for his infallible memory brought him success as a professional mnemonist. Thus S. serves as an example of a different type of mental life, one that I believe is neither inferior nor superior to ordinary consciousness.
There are three extraordinary features of his mental life that I would like to consider: his dreamlike mental walks, his infant memories, and his ability to dissociate at will.
It is an essential fact of S’s mental life that images guide his thinking instead of language. His memory is visual. When he has to remember words he converts them into images. When he has to remember a lot for a performance, he takes a mental walk and distributes the images along a street he visualizes in his mind. The street is usually one from his childhood.
Even more remarkable, S’s memories go back to his infancy. Imagine such memories! Of all the astonishing things about S., this is the one that most blows my mind. Luria explains:
“It is no wonder that S.’s memories of early childhood were incomparably richer than ours. For his memory was never transformed into an apparatus for reshaping reminiscences into words, which is what happens to others of us at a fairly early age.”
Surely such an unusual development would have implications for S.’s sense of self.
And indeed, he could observe himself as if from outside. He could split himself into two selves, one self that gives orders and another self that carries out the orders. This resembles Jaynes’s description of bicameral man except that S. – a conscious man – splits himself intentionally.
Now there are advantages and disadvantages to S.’s type of mental life. S. has rich memories going back to infancy. He can visualize solutions to problems that are difficult to solve with calculations. He can observe himself from outside, a talent he uses to avoid pain in the dentist’s chair. However, he has difficulty reading because he gets overwhelmed by images. He has difficulty with abstract concepts because he cannot comprehend what he cannot see.
But this is a superficial contrast. The important question is: How does S. experience himself?
Luria describes a man whose life is like a lucid dream. For S., there is no clear distinction between imagination and reality. The images he conjures before his eyes are almost as real as real things. When he tries to think about anything at length, images of his childhood and his hometown tend to come to mind. When he is distracted, he sometimes dissociates unintentionally, his acting self acting on its own.
Moreover, his difficulty separating fantasy from reality caused him to believe in some fine thing that was going to happen in his future. Thus he treated everything in his life as merely temporary. He lived ever in anticipation of the fine thing.
Luria describes these features of S.’s personality with sympathy. But I prefer not to assume that S.’s unusual mental life is a misfortune.
Imagine being able to spontaneously recall every page of every book you ever read. S. can do that. However he has difficulty understanding what he reads. But consider the alternative. Is it any better to understand what you read, but have a dim recollection of it?
Which is preferable? Remembering everything, but understanding little or understanding everything, but remembering little. Doesn’t it depend on your values? The things that are difficult for S. are things that are valued in a civilization based on ordinary consciousness. But if S. was the norm, not the exception, if everyone were like him, civilization would no doubt have developed differently.
Our civilization has external aids to memory – written records to store information, filing systems to organize it, computers to retrieve it – compensation for our comparatively poor memories. A civilization of people like S. would likewise compensate. Perhaps with a pictographic language that had no practical limits on the number of pictograms there could be.
Imagine being able to revisit the past through memories so vivid they feel almost real. S. can do that. I wish I could. Who has tasted of nostalgia and not wished the same?
Luria says that S. treated everything in his life as temporary. That he lived ever in anticipation of some fine thing to come. But this hardly seems a sad fate in a world where millions of ordinary people flit through life aimlessly, accomplishing less than S. and being less content.
I may be romanticizing this mental state because I am disenchanted with consciousness. But since the problem of consciousness is as dire as ever, it only seems right to give a robust defense to alternatives. That people in all times and places have sought to alter their consciousness suggests that consciousness is not altogether satisfactory. I mean merely to point out that ordinary consciousness does not exhaust the possibilities of what the mind can be.