HALLUCINATIONS - OLIVER SACKS
Everyone has an interest in hallucinations, surely? And if not, then they probably should even if only in regard to where the boundary lies between hallucination, misperception and illusion. How can you ever possibly hope to know what the truth is about the world and anything in it if you don't know the difference between delusion and illusion?
To bring things up to speed a bit take Trump, his Administration and all those who support him and his policies, for example. Do they all really believe they are facing-off an armed insurrection from paid agitators? Do they really believe that Antifa is being directed by some communist-led central organisation? Are they deluded? Delusional? Are they gaslit or gaslighting? Are they hallucinating? Seeing something that isn't actually there?
Oliver Sacks was a professor of neurology and in popular culture is probably best known for being the author of the book 'Awakenings' which inspired the Oscar-nominated film of the same name. His most famous book is probably 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat' but there is also this one: Hallucinations.
Sacks once said something along the lines of why he writes is to help gather his thoughts in a bid to understand and make sense of them, and personally, I sympathise with this. I've been writing all my life and it's certainly not been in an attempt at entertaining anyone nor even really as a way to communicate with others. All the words I've ever written is essentially me communicating with myself. To collate, to coalesce thoughts into one connected whole. This is what Sacks is doing in Hallucinations and it must be said, he makes a very good job of it.
Every potential cause of a person hallucinating is considered and though Sacks sees everything through the lens of neurology and the workings of the brain, he doesn't attempt to neatly sum it all up in any way. Instead, Hallucinations is more like a 'natural history or anthology of hallucinations', as he puts it. So, everything is covered: auditory hallucinations, hallucinating smells, hallucinations through sensory deprivation, hallucinations through Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, through migraines, epilepsy, narcolepsy, drug intoxication, and so on and so forth.
Of all the chapters in the book, the one entitled 'Altered States' is of particular interest because Sacks personalises it. He tells us that whilst most people start their experimentation with drugs as teenagers, it wasn't until he was thirty and a neurology resident at University in California that he started his. From cannabis to amphetamines, chloral hydrate, morphine, morning glory seeds to - of course - LSD, Sacks was a veritable ethnobotanist's chemistry lab.
Also of interest is the chapter entitled 'Delirious' in which Sacks writes: 'Some people feel that the hallucinations and strange thoughts of delirium may provide, or seem to provide, moments of rich emotional truth, as with some dreams or psychedelic experiences. There may also be revelations or breakthroughs of deep intellectual truth.'
Which, for me, begs the question: are we living in an Age of Delirium?
Trump? Epstein? The rise of the Far Right? Illusion? Delusion? Misperception? Hallucination? If so, might this not be a double-edged sword? Are there not lessons to be had here?
As Antonio Gramsci put it: 'The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass'. Or to put it another way: 'The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.'
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks is if nothing else, thought-provoking.
John Serpico
