alexandra mnuskin's blog

The scientific community has long considered the study of feelings to be taboo, a subject too elusive and mysterious to be researched or truly understood. In his book, Looking for Spinoza, Antonio Damasio is able to finally shed some light on what feelings are and why we have them. In the first chapter, Damasio writes that main purpose of his work “is to present a progress report on the nature of and human significance of feelings and related phenomena, as I see them now, as neurologist, neuroscientist and regular user”(Demasio 6.) With this purpose in mind, Demasio proceeds to elucidate the very nature of emotions and feelings, cleverly interweaving his solid scientific research as well as his personal interpretation of Spinoza’s somewhat radical philosophy. Demasio never looses track of the ultimate goal, to connect his scientific knowledge with ideas of great human significance. Thus Spinoza’s spirit is present throughout the book, even in the scientifically descriptive passages. His revolutionary ideas, so far ahead of his time, truly foreshadow what we have now come to understand about our feelings, our minds and ourselves.

Most people at some time in their lives have experienced the rather curious sensation of déjà vu, the feeling that you are reliving a certain moment of your life. It is a phenomenon that has fascinated the world for centuries. Novelists have written about it, movies and television shows have described it and psychologists and neuroscientists have endeavored to explain it from a scientific perspective. This web paper will endeavor to explain how and why we experience the sensation of familiarity known as déjà vu as well as its connection to one of the most mysterious functions of the human brain: memory. By studying déjà vu we may gain insight into the complex relationship between the unconscious part of the nervous system that processes experiences and the neo-cortex that turns them into the stories we call memories.

      In his autobiography, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov describes a rather curious experience: “I present a fine case of colored hearing” he writes. “Perhaps ‘hearing’ is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline” [1] (Nabokov, 381) The  synesthetic experience described by the famed novelist, although unusual, is by no means unique. The phenomena was once thought to be quite rare and was often brushed aside by the scientific community who attributed it to hallucinations and drug use. Recently however, synesthesia has become the subject of much research among neurobiologists. Recent studies have shown that far from being a freak occurrence,  approximately one in twenty people have experienced one of the many different kinds of synesthesia [2][5] .

Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear
William Shakespeare
Midsummer Nights Dream, Act II, scene 2

Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven't yet figured out how to ask.
Fox Mulder, The X-Files

For centuries human beings have experienced the impossible through dreams. In particular, the murky boundary between sleep and waking known as sleep paralysis has allowed us to create in our minds the stuff of fairy tales. Drifting off to sleep one often experiences curious dreams of a nightmarish quality as well as highly unusual bodily sensations. Both during hypnagogia, the period of time just before sleep, and hypnopompia, a similar state just before waking, our minds create hideous hags and ghouls, terrible enitities, the experience of alien abductions, sensations of non-existent pain and the incomparable feeling of flight [1].