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.
(more…)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.
(more…)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.
(more…)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.“
(more…)“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.”
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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