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Review of A Sense of Self: Memory, The Brain, And Who We Are, by Veronica O’Keane. W.W. Norton & Company. 268 pp.
Although he began to lose his hearing in his twenties, Ludwig van Beethoven composed great music until he died. He did it, Veronica O’Keane, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, indicates, because his disease was limited to the sensory nerves conducting sound from the outside world, leaving intact the auditory cortex of his brain, which had already memorized sounds, notes, and melodies. Beethoven was deaf, but he could hear.
In A Sense of Self, a multi-disciplinary tour de force, O’Keane draws on her own biographical memories, interactions with (psychotic and schizophrenic) patients, philosophy, fiction, fairy tales, and neuroscience to demonstrate that normal and abnormal feelings and the merging of knowledge and experience “are intrinsically wired in to the laying down of memory.” As sensory signals “come at us headlong, flaring the neurons like lights on a Christmas tree, flashing on and off and in all directions,” she writes, they are held at first “in the plastic hippocampus, the memory maker, and gradually integrated into the more consolidated cortex." Through memory, we become self-aware, understand that others are self-aware in the same way, and become conscious of ourselves looking at ourselves (characteristics described brilliantly by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass).
A Sense of Self makes a compelling case that Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish filmmaker, was right: “Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.”
Along the way, O’Keane provides a treasure trove of information and insights about how the human brain functions.
Human feelings are more than physiological sensations, she emphasizes. They are secondary feelings, involuntarily aroused, and interpreted by “a unique filter, our memory,” as, say, fear, love, or disgust. A hallucination is the experience of a sensation in the absence of a “matched external stimulus.” Memory without emotion “is an endless repertoire of experiences” without any meaning; emotion without memory “is a shallow flitting of one object of desire to the next.”
Unlike taste, touch, sight, and hearing, O’Keane reveals, smell neurons go from the nose directly to the amygdala/hippocampus before reaching the olfactory cortex, producing an emotion, recorded as a memory. We are wired to respond immediately to smell, evolutionary scientists speculate, because our ancestors needed to act “instinctively” when faced with danger. Place plays a similar role in the memory system; hunters and gatherers had to distinguish right away between places where food was plentiful and those inhabited by predators.
Time is integrated with place memory in a unified system in the hippocampus and then projected to prefrontal biographical stores, perhaps because we invariably meld them together (as in “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?”). What we “forget” is often an “incident” we didn’t establish firmly as a memory in the first place. And as event memories age, we have more certainty about place than about time. The past, O’Keane emphasizes, exists only in memory circuitry; memory provides the template for an imagined future. It is “more coherent conceptually,” she adds, to conclude that “the present” belongs to consciousness rather than time. Contemporary experience makes, filters, re-works, and changes the past in that present.
Genes sometimes trump the environment and sometimes vice versa, O’Keane points out. And the brain registers the impact of social exclusion, trauma, abuse, discrimination, and deprivation (in ways not unlike many individuals who suffer from severe psychological disorders) adjacent to that of physical pain: “the past is intruding, reverberating in the consciousness of the present.” Following the loss of a loved one, O’Keane asks, do we resist moving on because “it is unconscionable to put the memory to rest”? Since all of us live between a potentially (or actually) threatening outside world and “our sometimes-sensitized memories,” she thinks the best we can do is strive for a healthier equilibrium.
More easily said than done, of course. All the more so, because neuroscience and therapies are works in progress. Nonetheless, as A Sense of Self demonstrates, we are learning more and more every day about how brains determine behavior. More than enough for us to proclaim, with Pooh Bear, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.”
