Reviews and Comments

It is a very short read (183 pages all told), and summarises her severe stroke and eight year recovery. It’s a fairly fluffy account of stroke but the science is interesting. Jill is a very enthusiastic individual, with a unique perception of the brain. I can relate to this, but I am not as enthusiastic as her about life in general or spiritual matters. In fact, I found some of the overwhelming positivity to be counterintuitive to my own circumstances. I also believe that life is like a battery and requires both positive and negative to provide a life force energy. However, the fact that I didn’t feel a rapport with the writer didn’t prevent me from taking away some good ideas from her experience. I also am one who thinks that negative feelings and emotions are not only useful but for some are unavoidable due to circumstance, pain, and chemical imbalances in the brain. Literature, performance, music, art are driven by people who have empathy and sympathy with negative emotions. I know many stroke survivors who can't just shift gears from the negative to positive due to their life circumstance, their social surroundings, their environment, their background, and afflictions that may cause them stress and pain. Jill's book doesn't address these issues, but then again, this is her story and I respect that.

An interesting aside she mentioned, was that some people with aphasia from left-side brain damage actually have success in singing their sentences due to using the right-side brain instead.

She also spelled out the crucial importance of lots of daily physiotherapy, not just a few hours a day with a few attempts but thousands of attempts until a small amount of progress is made. She advocates stepping stones in recovery, mastering one small thing and then moving on to the next phase.

She also recommends working on each problem area at a time until progress is made. I think this is important because just relying on one’s daily life to correct a brain injury just slows down the process, and once other things in life compound recovery time, it makes it extremely difficult for the brain to establish connections as it is so busy with other stimuli.

Observing and and working with the brain throughout recovery was one of the most interesting and empathetic aspects of Jill’s story. Being a neuroanatomist, she presents her condition in a very inclusive way, by that I mean, she invests time to investigate what is happening and in understanding that, she is able to isolate issues and focus on reconnecting pathways in order to heal her brain and move forward with life. She doesn’t just resume, she actually blossoms as an “improved” individual. I very much have the same principle at heart.

I was bit bewildered by her recovery timeline, but I let it go in order to cherry pick parts of her story that spoke to me. I found four months after stroke giving a twenty-minute public lecture quite astounding when many stroke survivors I know have trouble showering or even just having a brief phone conversation. However, each brain is different and each stroke survivor has a different experience of post-stroke. I think this was her intention with writing the book, as there is an air of perfectibility in her writing that sometimes crosses over into a kind of self-help trope, but perfectibility is very much a social American concept. I have read many books on stroke and found that most paint an overtly positive picture of recovery, I understand why, and I know that is essential to encourage positivity to be infectious, but I don't think life is like that for most people, and it is hard to empathise and work through the darker moments of recovery when everything one reads is sugar coated.

On the whole, I found Merlin's book an okay read. I have listened to him talk on various podcasts, and it was interesting to visit the source of his thoughts. I feel it is a confession of a mycophilic, heavily spun from reference material, doctoral studies, and associates in the field. It was more like a thesis than a text on field research. But, and there is a big but, I can't fault Sheldrake's bringing all this material together in one text, peppered by his boyish enthusiasm. It is lovely to indulge in someone's own passion, regardless of how they present it.

Sometimes, I felt the adulation for psilocybin to be laboured and at times pontifical. I think if one is going to dip into social science, there might the other side of the coin mentioned when psilocybin has caused psychosis, or done nothing at all in the way of expanding a sense of universal awareness. However, this thought only crossed my mind because the reference to McKenna and the psychedelic properties of fungi were considerable. I think bringing McKenna to the table of mycelium research these days is like reading aloud Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at a nursing home. I just think, most know, most have been there, read that. Let's carry on.

There was a lot in this book I had already known about, hence Sheldrake's bibliography is extensive (about forty pages long), and much has been espoused in some way or another. I would have liked Merlin to have chosen less broadcast or published concepts concerning mycelium to examine. His notes are a good read though, and should have been included in the main body of the text. To be fair, he exerts his own twist on referenced material which I enjoyed.

I think it is a good read however, as an introduction to the fascinating connection life has with fungi, and through Sheldrake's experience, can only be unique. I really look forward to his further writing on the subject. Personally, his ponderous, linguistic thoughts on the concept of mycelium and fungi tickled me, and I enjoyed his turn of phrase. He is a good writer, but green. I am sure that future work will be more focussed and comprehensive, and have deepened views on particular aspects of his research. At the end of the day, he is vocalising in an understandable tongue what others may not be able to do due to using a more formal or technical language.

This book is a pep talk on fungi. It can only assist in achieving wider enthusiasm for the field of research and understanding of the subject.

Rather, The Problems of Philosophy, a more apt title might be, The Problems of Philosophers. In an attempt to not get tied up in a Gordian knot, Russell provides a brief, sequential study into the conundrum of perspective and truth, and how philosophical ideologies have tried to deal with it. The book was written in 1911, and Russell states in an afterword written in 1924, that some of his views had changed since the first writing but has kept the book as it is, as a progression of thought. Throughout, he mostly ignores language, which is a shame, but he does set aside some attention to it in the chapter, How A Priori Knowledge Is Possible. Some passages seem to spring straight out of a Dr Seuss book, such as, "Thus, when we are acquainted with an object which is the so-and-so, we know that the so-and-so exists; but we may know that the so-and-so exists when we are not acquainted with any object which we know to be the so-and-so, and even when we are not acquainted with any object which, in fact, is the so-and-so."

Much of the book feels like Russell, working stuff out on the spot, applies in his knowledge of Kant, Plato, Hegel, Leibniz &c, to elucidate his examples. For me, his logic, at times, backed me into a corner, and the examples of the theory, in my view, were not the best thought out. However, it's a thought provoking read, which is the point of the book. So worth a read if you don't have time to wade through the works referenced within.

These essays by Francis Bacon came across to me, more so, as preliminary sermons than essays. I have no issue with reading puritanical, fundamentalist doctrine but what I struggled with throughout these musings was the lack of any kind of wit or introspection that might allude to a paradox in the writer's ideas. I found the text more didactic than dry, but the range of topics were quite interesting, and so I approached each one with a fresh hope. If there was amusement to be found, for me, it was the two essays on buildings and gardens. With these, Francis begins objectively, only to follow on with what he himself would need in a garden or building, and then moves onto what you should do with his garden or building as if instructing a client, and all this seemed as if he was suddenly swept away by personal whim and fancy. His desire for a, wholly, clean garden also provided some amusement, but I feel there was no tongue to be found in his cheek while writing it. He's so adamant on this point that he makes clear gardens ought to be free of wildlife as much as possible, right down to the moss. His view of an aviary drives this point home when he states that it should contain as much foliage as possible to prevent the birds from leaving their droppings on the ground. To use a phrase from his essay on counsel, I found the whole body of work "grave & orderly". Some essays stood out such as innovations, friendship, revenge, anger, and fortune. The rest were written with such an austere temperament that I found myself mourning the loss of my literary appetite, and wanting watch a comedy on television just to lighten my mood.

I found The Brain that Changes itself to be a decent entry level reference to brain plasticity. Norman writes with clarity and accessibility on a topic that could have been crowded with complicated medical jargon, on the flip side, I found his narrative to be sometimes dangerously close to hyperbolic, but I think it is important to read between the lines of pragmatic research and selling the reader the idea through case studies. Why I say this, is because he doesn't question the findings of others but runs with it wholeheartedly. This might be what he refers to as "perfectibility", and something he unconsciously is doing himself.

He does write briefly about the contrary nature of neurological plasticity (the plastic paradox), and revisits that notion in the last chapter. I wanted more from the other side of the argument and why the contradictions don't stand up, so I could balance an objective view.

I found some of the descriptive asides of the neurological scientists to be a little sycophantic in the sense of an unnecessary embellishment on scientific prose. Norman's tone does change, however, when he touches on the science of his own background, psychology and psychiatry. I felt the chapter on "Acquiring Tastes and Loves" should have been omitted from this case study, as it could fill a book of its own, and I found some of Norman's lines of reasoning to be arguable.

There certainly is some fascinating stuff to be found in this book, and I found it gave me a better understanding to how a brain copes under the stress of injury or malformation. I would recommend it to anyone wanting an overview of neurological plasticity, and a little knowledge of its history, and where it is going. I commend Norman for penning the book, and I certainly found it interesting. On the whole it isn't a pseudo-scientific study, nor intended for self-help, but it is an eye opener, and the general principles are incredibly valuable for those of us challenged by brain injury.

This thesis by Charles Darwin is a curio for me. It begins quite casually observing emotions relating to humans and animals, especially dogs, cats, horses, and monkeys. It then focusses on humankind as the premise for the rest of the observation. Darwin references heavily on other works and adds smatterings of his own family experiences, as well as accounts from friends in distant places. At one point it seems Charles is quite fascinated with the brow (corrugator) to a point where his bemusement is ticklish and later on with his chapter on blushing seems particularly keen on reporting incidents of women baring their bosoms. "This case is interesting, as the blush did not thus extend downwards until it became intense by her attention being drawn to this part of her person."

It's written more from a kind of early David Attenborough style, blending the personal with the scientific but not backed up with much experiential scientific theory. It is extensive in its approach and he covers a great deal of emotions, the detail of describing these is certainly comprehensive, and well worth the read from a purely cursory anthropological point of view.

Darwin is no psychologist but he does attempt to reason such actions and expressions to the best of his knowledge and ability at the time. There are a few amusing anecdotes, one I particularly enjoyed was the image of Darwin retching while attempting to clean skeletons which were not sufficiently macerated.

Another wonderful anecdote relates to one of his children which he fed a ripe cherry ... “When a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth. This was shown by the lips and whole mouth assuming a shape which allowed the contents to run or fall quickly out; the tongue being likewise protruded. These movements were accompanied by a little shudder. It was all the more comical ..." I have done this to all my sons when they were infants, but with a slice of lemon and the effect is extremely comical.

The book is of its time, so if you are sensitive to archaic lexicon used to describe peoples, you may have to put that sensitivity aside. "In Tierra de Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty."

As mentioned in the beginning of my review, this book remains for me a curio of science rather than a compendium of sound knowledge.