Altered Egos by Todd Feinberg, Oxford, £14.99, ISBN 019513625X
ONE way to understand something is to see what happens when it breaks. And
New York neurology professor Todd Feinberg certainly sees a lot of broken brains
in his line of work.
“Rosamond B” sits meek and grandmotherly in his office until he hands her a
mirror. The sight of her reflection throws her into a state of murderous fury.
She leaps up screaming: “That’s her, that’s her!” —the stranger, the old
hag, who is dogging her footsteps, persecuting her at every turn. Altered Egos
offers us a dazzling array of neurological syndromes to show how delicately
constructed is our sense of self. As well as patients who cannot recognise their
own reflections, there are people who have failed to realise they have gone
blind and who see ghostly replicas of themselves wandering the streets. The
shock of such tales is to see how distorted your mental realm can become without
you ever knowing the difference.
Advertisement
But this is a much more serious book than the parade of fascinating case
histories might suggest. After all, many neurologists use case histories to
discern the workings of the brain. But having shown that selfhood is an active
construction of the brain, Feinberg plunges into a deep philosophical discussion
of the problem of deriving mind from brain. Happily, his answers, which depend
on notions of emergence and hierarchies, are far more sophisticated than is
usual for such books on consciousness.
