Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 4821972), a harrowing and fascinating account of a man who suffered extensive braindamage in World War II, but who struggled heroically for years to put his mind backtogether and even managed to write an autobiographical account of what it was like to behim-probably as strange as anything a literate bat could tell us.Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing when she was less than two years old, wroteseveral books that not only are moving documents but are full of fascinating observationsfor the theorist. The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, 1903, reprinted in 1954with an introductory essay by Ralph Barton Perry) and The World I Live In (Century,1908) give her version of what it was like to be her.In Awakenings (New York: Doubleday, 1974) Oliver Sacks describes the histories ofsome real twentieth-century Rip Van Winkles or Sleeping Beauties, who in 1919 fell intoprofound sleeplike states as a result of an encephalitis epidemic and who in the mid-1960s were "awakened" by the administration of the new drug L-Dopa-with bothwonderful and terrible results.Another strange case is to be found in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: Knopf,1964) by Milton Rokeach, which tells the true story of three inmates in a mentalinstitution in Ypsilanti, Michigan, each of whom proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ.They were introduced to each other, with interesting results.This list of books and articles would be obsolete before anyone could read them all, andfollowing up all the citations would soon turn into a life of scholarship in cognitivescience and related fields. This is then a gateway into a garden of forking paths whereyou are free, happily, to choose your own trajectory, looping back when necessary, andeven forward in time into the literature on these topics that is still to be written.D.C.D. D.R.H.