The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness is a non-fiction essay collection by British neurologist and naturalist Oliver Sacks, published posthumously in 2017. "The poet laureate of contemporary medicine" according to The New York Times, Sacks is most famous for his treatment of immobile encephalitis lethargica patients, which formed the basis of the 1990 Robert De Niro film Awakenings. The essays included here cover a range of topics from psychiatry to human evolution to photography.

In the first essay, "Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers," Sacks recalls a conversation with his mother when he was a boy. She explains that the magnolia flowers in their garden are pollinated by beetles, not bees, because over a hundred million years ago, bees did not yet exist. This revelation filled Sacks with wonder, igniting a lifelong enthusiasm for the natural world. He writes, "Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings—and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe." Later, when Sacks began reading the works of Charles Darwin, the ideas spoke to him in a way that religious notions of divine design never could. While the greatest amount of attention has been paid to Darwin's observations about animal life on the island of Galapagos, Sacks identifies botany as Darwin's earliest endeavor. He writes, "Botany, indeed, was the first evolutionary science, and Darwin’s botanical work was to lead the way to all the other evolutionary sciences."

In "Speed," Sacks writes of his boyhood obsession with speed, which in turn led to an interest in photography. Through photography, he could speed up or slow down motion accordingly. He utilized photography technology to both ends, speeding up motion to view the days-long process of a fern unfolding in a matter of seconds, or slowing it down to capture the wing movements of a bumblebee.



Sacks probes the degree to which earthworms, jellyfish, and insectivorous plants are capable of perception in "Sentience: The Mental Lives of Plants and Worms." In describing the hunting habits of the box jellyfish and the sundew plant, Sacks wonders whether the separation between plant and animal as wildly different types of species is appropriate.

"The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist," examines the legendary psychoanalyst's earlier work as a neurologist and anatomist. Before focusing his research on the human brain, Freud studied the nervous systems of lampreys and crayfish. He sought to dispel the then-common notion of the brain as "a sort of ingenious but idiotic machine." Contrary to the idea of a one-to-one correlation between its parts and functions, Freud was among the first to theorize that the brain is organized in a way that is far more complex.

In "The Fallibility of Memory," Sacks is concerned when he realizes his boyhood memory of a bomb falling in his backyard during the London Blitz of World War II was a false one. This did happen, but according to his older brother, Sacks was not present for it. Instead, he created the memory in his head from what others had told him about the incident.



"Mishearing" explores Sacks's hearing degradation but also the everyday incidents of mishearing experienced by people with healthy ears. While Freud believed that hearing mishaps were related to deeply repressed emotions, Sacks believes that mishearing incidents are more indicative of a person's conscious worldview.

Sacks considers the question of how an artist moves forward from mere mimicry into the realm of innovation in "The Creative Self." In an attempt to distinguish mimicry and innovation, Sacks looks to various neurological disorders such as autism, which often manifests a strong talent for mimicry in patients diagnosed with it.

In "A General Feeling of Disorder," Sacks defines homeostasis as "the maintenance of a constant internal environment." An overall feeling of wellness, he writes, is indicative of a patient who is in a state of or near-perfect homeostasis. In an effort to apply this to therapeutic methods, Sacks interviews people who report "a general feeling of disorder" before the onset of a migraine.



Sacks addresses the question of how the human brain perceives the passage of time in "The River of Consciousness." It is no coincidence, Sacks argues, that before the invention of moving pictures, many philosophers and scientists thought humans perceived time as separate moments, strung together by beads. At the advent of film cameras and zoetropes, experts began increasingly to think of consciousness as a river.

Sacks observes in "Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science" that the history of science is not a string of discoveries but rather a continuum. Antoine Lavoisier is considered the father of modern chemistry, even though the forgotten John Mayow "all but discovered" oxygen a century earlier. Sacks himself was hailed as a pioneer for his studies of migraines, even though he later found evidence of migraine research from the Victorian era that had been lost and forgotten.

In its review of The River of Consciousness, The New York Times writes, " On page after page in this collection, drawing on the rich history of ideas he absorbed over a lifetime, Sacks illustrates how it is done."