Category: Favourites

  • The River of Consciousness

    Oliver Sacks

    The River of Consciousness is the final collection that Oliver Sacks oversaw, assembled just two weeks before his death in 2015. Ten essays across diverse subjects such as botany, chemistry, evolution, medicine, neuroscience, and even the arts. They are connected by the title – an exploration of how the river of consciousness has moved through evolution, and how it continues to manifest itself in ways beyond what we normally look at.

    While a large part of the book is objective, there are a few sections where the author’s own experiences and maladies become a trigger for investigations. I liked the former more, but the explorations across memory, time, creativity are all fascinating anyway.

    He opens the ‘river’ with “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers”, exploring Darwin’s relatively lesser-known botanical experiments, but showcasing his abundant curiosity – lying in grass pollinating flowers by hand, and celebrating plants as living entities imbued with purpose and beauty.

    Darwin intuitively hypothesised that the tip of the plant’s root – radicle – behaves like a brain for lower animals, receiving sensory impressions and directing several movements. Criticised at that point, it was proven right fifty years later, and plant hormones like auxins were discovered.

    The next essay, “Speed”, is about how our brains distort time, whether slowed by Parkinson’s or quickened by Tourette’s and drugs. He takes the example of how athletes require intense conscious effort and years of dedicated practice and training to learn nuances of techniques and timing.

    But at some point, the basic skills and their neural representations are so ingrained in the nervous system that they become second nature, and time works differently. I have heard how in cricket, how a batsman in form sees the cricket ball ‘as big as a football’ and is able to ‘suspend time’. Ditto for war pilots. An interesting point he brings up is how in Parkinson’s, dopamine is brought down to less than 15% of normal levels. (something I need to chew on)

    In “The Other Road: Freud as a Neurologist”, he reminds readers that Freud, in his original avatar/ road not taken, mapped jellyfish neurons. A callback to an era when neurology and psychiatry were joined at the hip. He eventually pivoted to psychoanalysis.

    This reclamation of early neuroscientific legacies is also brought up later in the final chapter – “Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science”, a lamentation on blind spots in scientific history. Two of the most fascinating ones there – Archimedes cracked calculus, two thousand years before Newton and Leibniz. Aristarchus had a helio-centric theory of the world in the third century BCE. It was Ptolemy who reversed it centuries later.

    Memory, and its frailty, is the subject of both “The Fallibility of Memory” and “Mishearings”. Both of them examine how our minds play tricks, mistaking imagination for fact and transforming misheard phrases into personal artefacts. I was fascinated by cryptomnesia – accidental plagiarism. It’s when a person cannot remember when a specific event occurred/ are unable to distinguish if an event was a dream or reality/ forgets the source of information – whether an idea originated from themselves or someone else. The book provides many examples of this. A great perspective on false memories, and how we construct flawed personal narratives.

    In “The Creative Self”, my favourite takeaway was the nuanced differences between mimicry, imitation, and mimesis, attributed to Merlin Donald. “Mimicry is literal, an attempt to render as exact a duplicate as possible. Thus, exact reproduction of a facial expression, or exact duplication of the sound of another bird by a parrot, would constitute mimicry. Imitation is not so literal as mimicry, the offspring copying its parent’s behaviour imitates, but does not mimic, the parent’s way of doing things. Mimesis adds a representational dimension to imitation. It usually incorporates both mimicry and imitation to a higher end, that of reenacting and representing an event or relationship. Mimicry occurs in many animals, imitation in monkeys and apes, mimesis only in humans” (all three can overlap in us, even in a single ‘performance’) I am seeing this as the meeting point of nature and culture.

    His penultimate title essay, “The River of Consciousness”, digs into the nature of subjective experience. Is consciousness discrete ‘frames’ or a seamless, flowing stream? This was theoretically interesting, but I couldn’t engage in it completely.

    The River of Consciousness is a delicate balance of meandering and narrative, but as I said, held together by the idea of consciousness, even as it flows across disciplines. In an era of super-specialisation, I don’t know how many people have the knowledge or intent to do that last bit anymore. This book is a great example of why that is a sad thing to happen for humanity.

    In my Bibliofiles 2025 longlist

    Notes and Quotes from The River of Consciousness


    1. Though Darwin is often held responsible for banishing ‘meaning’ (divine purpose), courtesy natural selection, it is more a redefinition of purpose – by knowing the granular evolutionary purpose, we are able to piece together a more coherent picture connecting the past, present, and potential future

    2. Hughlings Jackson proposed a hierarchic view of the nervous system, picturing how it might have evolved from the most primitive reflex levels, up through a series of higher levels, to those of consciousness and voluntary action. Freud continued that thought in what he described as stratification of the psychic mechanism, a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances. Further, for Edelman, this was every perception being a creation, and every memory a re-creation or recategorisation.This is where the paths of natural science and human meaning meet.

    3. “Nothing is more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory”

    The River of Consciousness

  • Freedom at Midnight

    Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

    It’s ironical that I picked up Freedom at Midnight thanks to the show, but this is how history needs to be written. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have created a meticulously researched account of the final year of British rule in India – starting with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of India and ending with the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.

    But it isn’t dry history, it is almost like a cinematic view of the events that led to the partition of India and its independence in 1947. The narrative is gripping, the prose is eloquent, and the descriptions vivid enough to make one actually feel it’s playing out in real time.

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  • The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

    Neha Dixit

    ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ is the kind of book that forces one to look at one’s privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.

    It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless – the people whose desperate toils to survive we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.

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  • When The Body Says No

    Gabor Maté

    At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“

    “No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”

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  • The Tao of Physics

    Fritjof Capra

    The Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, and I’d say that it’s even more relevant now in the context of science and the direction of human advancement in general. As the subtitle of the book states, the idea is to explore the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. 

    Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quieting the mind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen – had already reached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered. 

    The Tao of Physics is divided into three elegant sections – the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physics from the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes’ philosophy – the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking – a mechanistic world. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large. 

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