The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars
A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £6.99
-
- £6.99
Publisher Description
A man's wife dies. What next? The next day is next, and the next, and so on. He smothers his sorrow and gets on with the days. He's a Stoic. Tranquillity is the goal, but his brain won't rest. As a neuropsychologist he has spent a career trying to fathom the human brain but now, he comes to realize, his brain is struggling to make sense of him - probing, doubting, reconstructing.
Combining neurological case stories and memoir, and with excursions into speculative fiction and mythology, this is an audaciously original, deeply personal meditation on grief, time and selfhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Broks (Into the Silent Land) reflects on the idea of death and what it means to be human in this collection of musings centered loosely on his personal struggle to cope with his wife's cancer diagnosis and her death some years later. He mingles memories, dreams, and his deepest thoughts with teaching experiences and clinical observations drawn from a career as a neuropsychologist. More than a compilation of case studies, Broks's book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness. He mixes pub banter, philosophy, Greek myths, the "deathbed" music of Estonian composer Arvo P rt, Paolo Faraldo's theory of neuronal relativity, Antonio Damasio's neurobiological search for the self, and many other topics in an attempt to broaden the perspective on neuroscience's most central question: "how and why physical states of the brain produce mental experiences." Or, as the author states the question, "How does the insentient, physical stuff of the brain... the 1,200 cubic centimeters of gloop that fills our skulls how does that stuff create awareness?" Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through.
