The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey

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Broks is, by profession, a neuroscientist. He is therefore able to tell us something of the biology of consciousness with illustrations relating his work and to some of his patients. Since his wife died he has considered the religious and philosophical nature of consciousness, the way it changes from conception to adulthood and whether, and in what ways, it might persist after death. But there are longer time scales to consider. How has consciousness in Man developed with the species? Is it related to language? What can Greek myth and legend tell us about the way our ancestors thought on the subject? I’m ignoring the fact that it matters when the suffering occurs – e.g., if all your suffering occurs at the end of your life, there’s no way it could retroactively make you enjoy your earlier times of pleasure more. It would probably be more realistic to say that whatever the ideal amount of suffering is in your life, you would want to sprinkle it evenly throughout life because your pleasures will be boosted most strongly if you’ve suffered at least a little bit recently.

In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There's science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are—and who we hope to be." Dostoevsky once wrote, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted, if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism-man is free, man is freedom. So am I mistaken about this? Is there something I missed? I have heard of recent discoveries that show that more neurons than we used to think do get replaced, but not all of them. I am aware that the mind is not a physical thing but a product of the brain. Consciousness is a process, but it seems to me that an underlying physical substrate, like neurons that last our entire lives, presents a pretty good theory for answering the question of the continuity of self. I’m not saying for certain that that is the answer, but it seems like a pretty compelling possibility to me and I don’t understand how Dr. Broks could possibly be unaware of this. If he is aware of it, he does a pretty good job of ignoring it. Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simon De Beauvoir. Since I was a young teenager, I started reading them and I never stopped. From Dostoevsky, I learned how characters are made or should be. How they move, what they think, their inner secrets, their contradictions and complications, and how strong and helpless they are. I am fascinated by most of his work, especially Brothers Karamazov...Those two writers affected me deeply. They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I'd say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened . . . . Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty. The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays. In old days, once a year at any rate a fool would recognise that he was a fool, but nowadays not a bit of it. And they have so muddled things up that there is no telling a fool from a wise man. They have done that on purpose. In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There’s science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are—and who we hope to be.” Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky [Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский] ( 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) [ edit ] Using primarily the translation of Constance Garnett (1900) - Full text at Wikisource I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since. Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all... They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. The actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language... How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. Attributed to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in self-help books and on social media. The words are from an untitled poem (dated 1878) by the 19th century Russian poet Apollon Maykov. The full quatrain goes: "Не говори, что нет спасенья, / Что ты в печалях изнемог: / Чем ночь темней, тем ярче звезды, / Чем глубже скорбь, тем ближе Бог." No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But being in love doesn't mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her. In her dying days, my wife said to me, matter-of-factly, You don’t know how precious life is. You think you do, but you don’t. We were sitting out on the patio in the late summer sunshine, drinking tea. A week later, I was sitting there alone, but her words were with me. They still are. The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is, in part, an effort to make sense of them. As the subtitle signals, it’s an odyssey of sorts, a journey through the strange territories of the brain-injured and psychotic, down into the underworld of dreams and imagination, through the porticoes of ancient philosophy. Along the way, there are encounters with gods and monsters and tussles with Fate, and we catch glimpses of what the superhuman future might hold, but ultimately we are contending with the stark realities of life and death in the here and now. We are born; stuff happens; we die. So, how best to live? How best to come to terms with the end of life, our own and others’?As quoted in "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity" by Dominic Livien in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 1999), pp. 180

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in. A] beautifully written investigation of grief ... As an exploration of love and loss, as a portrait of a person and of the nature of personhood, this book is about as true as any I have read' James McConnachie, Sunday Times The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant to this problem — Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal.Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've proved to you that a single droplet of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow human beings and consequently that all so-called virtues and duties are nothing but ravings and prejudices, then accept that too, because there's nothing to be done.