The strange, familiar, and forgotten : an anatomy of consciousness
For more than a century, neurology and psychology have been dominated by the idea that the brain's Principal activities are unconscious and unknown to us, that consciousness is but a small factor in mental function. Israel Rosenfield's bold new argument in The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten is that consciousness is in fact the major business of the brain. And he shows for the first time how memories, language, and the thoughts and drives responsible for our everyday sense of life make up the protean and fragile structure of consciousness. Reconsidering famous neurological cases--as well as new evidence from cognitive science--Rosenfield outlines an "anatomy of consciousness" which suggests fascinating new ways to think about mental functions, bodily processes, and human knowledge. The intriguing, often bizarre case histories he recounts--from a patient who cannot accept a paralyzed limb as her own except when she sees it in a mirror, to another who can distinguish colors and yet claims that naming them red, blue, or yellow is "false," to a man who recalls nothing that happened to him in the last eighteen years yet says he saw his mistress "last Saturday," to the woman with contrasting multiple personalities whom William James wrote about--all have in common a breakdown of the neurological mechanisms that create consciousness, that determine how each person perceives and makes sense of the world. For while in ordinary life we take the familiar for granted and can readily forget or remember it, brain damage may transform the once familiar into something strange, alien, or false, and make a once-accessible memory completely disappear. Though the doctors who first studied them did not believe it, the now-classic clinical cases show that memories are an integral part of the structure of consciousness.
1939Israel Rosenfield23 cm
