Our New Normal

Where does our human soul reside? In our own consciousness of being (present, through sensation, the physical world, interaction with others), in our memory of being (past, fragments of memory, whole recitations, a library of experiences tucked away but seldom retrieved), or in our creative being (imagining what our sensate selves have not encountered, extrapolating from the “seen” and leaping into the “could be”)? For most people, it’s not necessary to contemplate a splitting of any of these selves. We grow, naturally, from infancy to adulthood, the multiple parts of our brains weaving together a consciousness that takes in the enormous amount of data from the world and turns it into judgment, narrative, and art. I’ve been re-reading Oliver Sacks. If you’ve never read his works, they are science and soul, side by side. As each patient case comes to him “presenting” with symptoms, he proceeds with the neurological evaluation, but also reveals the deeper ways in which each indi...

W here do you turn to for answers, advice, solace, laughter, when you've been coping with a serious illness in the family? Each other, of course, is in many ways the true answer. But there are many moments when you're alone at night, and the person you might normally turn to is the one who is in the hospital. So at those times I turned to my childhood best companion, a good book. I've mentioned before that Jill Bolte Taylor's first-person account, "My Stroke of Insight," is a wonderful way of understanding stroke and stroke recovery. Her description of what it was like to re-learn brain function, and the crucial role her mother played in her recovery, was an eye opener. All through her 8-year healing process, she emphasizes how important it was that the people around her believed and expected her to regain the functions she was working so hard to achieve. There was no room for doubters, or negative treatment, or as she called them, "energy vampir...