275. The Disrupted Mind (1)
275. The Disrupted Mind: Noga Arikha on What Happens to Identity When the Brain Is Assaulted by Disease and Injury
1 (9s):
You're listening to the Michael Shermer show. Got Rica. Nice to see you. Congratulations on the book, the ceiling, outside the science and experience of the disrupted mind. Let me give you a proper introduction. Noga is a philosopher and historian of ideas. Her previous book is passions and tempers, a history of the humors she's associate fellow at the Warburg Institute and honorary fellow of the center for the politics of feelings in London and a research associate at the Institute. Jean Nico. I pronounce that right in Paris. She's based in Florence, Italy, where she is now. Welcome to the show. Hi, nice to see ya.
2 (49s):
Thank you so much, Michael. It's great to be here on the show.
1 (53s):
What's this we'll get into your book big time, but what's the previous book about, I haven't read that passions in tempers, a history of the humor's humor's
2 (1m 0s):
Yeah, well that's a book from what's so it was published his own seven. It's a, it's a, basically, it's a history of the whole, the humoral theory that prevailed for 2,500 years in the west from the Greeks to basically today tracing the continuum of one idea over a long time, despite big changes. And it was already a way of looking historically at the mind body issue, right? I mean, that's how the humorous being this kind of idea, this, this idea of the substance of the bond that conditions all psychology and all mental and physical health, it was already of the key way of why, why this idea? So I was already interested. I mean, as a philosopher, the mind body problem was what interested me mostly let's say.
2 (1m 45s):
And then I decided to go to the history of ideas about these things to get out of this tail biting exercises of conceptual, purely conceptual philosophy. And then I gradually, as many other people gradually became more and more interested in assess them in a certain way with the science, especially as it's developing now. So we'll go into that. We'll have time to talk about.
1 (2m 10s):
Yeah, for sure. Well, you mentioned in, in your new book, you were studying Descartes in high school because people in France has much better schools, public schools. And we haven't in the United States. I fear I study girls in sports in high school. And so I didn't even know there was such a thing as philosophy until I got to college. It was like, what is this again? Existential at? What is that? So, so give us a little bit of background. What's your story? Where are you from? Do you have siblings? What's the influence of your parents, particularly since you talk about your mom and your new home,
2 (2m 40s):
And do you talk about this because it's, it's obviously part of the very important part of what I'm trying to talk about is what happened to my mother as well, which is she's a, she developed dementia at the end of her life. And I realized so many people do, it was a responsibility to talk about. I was still, I was living in Paris until a year ago where I grown up, but my parents were not actually from there, but we spoke English at home. So it was a very Anglo-American kind of household and culture and intellectual culture. And it all my studies in London, I mean in England and I was in London for 13 years in New York for about nine, or I went after my doctorate.
2 (3m 21s):
I did my doctorate, my doctorate in London at the war big Institute, actually. And then it was in New York. And then where I wrote my first book did a whole bunch of things, had my kids, you know, one born in New York, the second born in Paris, where we went 10 years ago. Well now 11 years ago we spent 10 years. And now here I am in Italy, which has been a kind of constant in my life for other reasons. But that's not interesting for the, for what we have to talk about though, in a sense, yes, I'm deeply, deeply European. It's a deep, very European history. My father was a suit, you know, concentration camp survivor, there's this very Jewish European history with some American put in there.
2 (4m 3s):
So my Ana kind of mix. So I've always mixed things, mixed identities and also mixed disciplines. I think I've always wanted to do that. It's a kind of neurosis to want to mix things and never do want to be in one place, which I've now I suppose, turned into, try to turn into a furniture as most of us have to do at some points, turn our weaknesses into strengths, not weaknesses, so much complexities into something.
1 (4m 25s):
Well that being a scholar of the history of ideas allows you to bounce around in a lot of different topics and integrate them in ways that a more narrowly focused scholars can do, I think. And that comes out in your new book, which is very poetic. It's very literary the way it's written, but I'm glad you, you nudged me to, to look into the, the end notes. Cause I had just listened to the book on audio. Of course, the end notes aren't in the audio edition. But man, that, that the end note section is impressive. That's a lot of, I mean, I know that science pretty well, probably half the references I never heard of. So really important to, to look at that. I thought, so let's start there. You, you started this book, you were interested in the embodied mind.
1 (5m 7s):
You talked about Antonio Damasio who I've had on the show. He's super interesting guy. This is the, oh, you did. Oh, nice. Yeah. The brain serves the body rather than the body serving the brain. This kind of idea. So you start in writing about this and then all of a sudden your mom starts deteriorating. And so you have a, a different sort of thread for your book. So talk a little bit about that,
2 (5m 36s):
Right. So yes, exactly. So I am, I mean, in a sense it's true. I mean, I I'm interested in many, many different things, but the main, the most centrally has always been scent, always been most, really interested in consciousness, self embodied, self human, or animal as, as a matter of fact, really at this point and I wanted to get deeper into let's say, well, how, how the self or how consciousness so to speak can be disrupted really through neurology. I got first and I wanted to understand from close-up what was going on with near psychotic patients.
2 (6m 23s):
I got the opportunity, thanks to neurologists that on the hospital, to just sit in on these extraordinary sessions and these sessions where once a week, the classical clinical meeting weekly that the French call in good French live stuff, the staff meeting, and this is, was a unit which no longer exists of nearest psychiatrists. I mean, I've nearly got a meeting of neurologists and psychiatrists speaking to each other. There was a such thing as psych neuro psychiatry as a discipline officially anymore in France. So they really wanted to talk to each other because we, they needed each other. They realized, I tried diagnose these particular patients who presented with complex, not very clear difficulties.
2 (7m 11s):
And so I was able to sit in for 18 months, once a week, more or less, I was there and the sessions lasted about three to four hours in the morning and they may only two or three maximum, three patients were discussed, examined. And then, you know, at least some attempt at diagnosis was made. So it was an exceptional amount of time and exceptional focus of attention. That should be the paradigm for all health practice. And of course is not anywhere in the world. And as I said, this unit doesn't only exist anymore, but for reasons I'm not aware of really, but this was existed for a few years.
2 (7m 58s):
And I had the privilege of being able to, just to sit in as a fly on the wall. I never saw a patient more than that. One time I never recorded their names. So I invented all the names. I changed the life details, obviously to keep everything completely anonymous. They were just, just saw me as one of the people present. Other people present. There were very few where, you know, a few residents, a few students, sometimes some external people like me, the senior physicians, and that was that maybe 12 people in the room. It was very intimate. So I did this and then I, out of those many patients, I did see, I selected those that seem to be most to present with the most difficulties that were most significant for my question about the self, about the sense of self I excluded.
2 (8m 45s):
Those whose stories were really too horrible, because that would have been unnecessary, voyeuristic and wrong. And I then started writing about, and then in the meantime, I become extremely absorbed in the science of I'd written a piece for Aeon magazine as well on interoception this called the intraceptive turn, this extremely important shift in the cognitive sciences, the neurosciences and psychology to the sense that the brain cannot be looked at on its own. That is its constant conversation with the rest of the body. And that it serves the body that the notion of brain in the VAT is completely absurd.
2 (9m 31s):
That we are basically biologically biological through and ourselves aren't deeply embodied them there. You cannot think of the, the mind without the body. So I wrote about this. I did a little research on this become quite, you know, conversant. I mean, at this point, I, I, I follow the signs very closely. I'm friends with many of the scientists who are doing this. I think that doing very important work, which is it's true. As you mentioned before, revolutionizing the Cartesian paradigm that we so many people grew up with and still have that is this idea that mind and body are separate, which was what the gut had said.
2 (10m 13s):
That kind of found so-called foundation of modern philosophy that, you know, there was such a thing as, you know, as an immortal soul, right? That a lot of people want to believe that sort of thing. And in fact, well, it's really hard to, you know, to accept that it's not true for some people, but I think it's hard to accept that it could be. So it sounds surprising speaking to the skeptic. And so they got the, you know, was, you know, in a sense people, this was the mind body dualism, which I, I say the book and it's something that is true.
2 (10m 53s):
I be gave way later to what's when cools or the mind, the brain, body dualism. So accepted that the mind is in the, of the brain, but we forgot the body, which is why they're not yet all these philosophical thought experiments of the brain and the VAT. What happens if you transfer the brain to another body, which is a fun idea to play with, but it's absolutely impossible to, it's really just a game. And so I was this or that, that science really fed deeply into my analysis of what was going on with these patients, knowing that in the clinic, there really was very little of that science present.
