by Oliver Sacks
He stated a truth, and did it in such a pleasant way…that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterwards called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn’t anything mean about me; so we got along right from the start.
The question of Coleridge’s plagiarisms, paraphrases, cryptomnesias, or borrowings has intrigued scholars and biographers for nearly two centuries and is of special interest in view of his prodigious powers of memory, his imaginative genius, and his complex, multiform, sometimes tormented sense of identity. No one has described this more beautifully than Richard Holmes in his two-volume biography.
Coleridge was a voracious, omnivorous reader, who seemed to retain all that he read. There are descriptions of him as a student reading The Times in a casual fashion, then being able to reproduce the entire paper, including its advertisements, verbatim. “In the youthful Coleridge,” writes Holmes, “this is really part of his gift: an enormous reading capacity, a retentive memory, a talker’s talent for conjuring and orchestrating other people’s ideas, and the natural instincts of a lecturer and preacher to harvest materials wherever he found them.”
Literary borrowing was commonplace in the seventeenth century; Shakespeare borrowed freely from many of his contemporaries, as did Milton. Friendly borrowing remained common in the eighteenth century, and Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey all borrowed from each other, sometimes even, according to Holmes, publishing work under each other’s names.
But what was common, natural, and playful in Coleridge’s youth gradually took on a more disquieting form, especially in relation to the German philosophers (Friedrich Schelling above all) whom he discovered, venerated, and translated into English. Whole pages of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria consist of unacknowledged, verbatim passages from Schelling. While this unconcealed and damaging behavior has been readily (and reductively) categorized as “literary kleptomania,” what actually went on is complex and mysterious, as Holmes explores in the second volume of his biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge’s plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and was more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, “his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak.”
Earlier, as Holmes describes, Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, with the German writer Jean Paul Richter—an affinity which led him to translate Richter’s writings and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way, conversing and communing in his notebooks with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from each other.
In 1996, I read a review of a new play, Molly Sweeney, by the eminent playwright Brian Friel. His lead character, Molly, I read, had been born blind but has her sight restored in middle age. She can see clearly after her operation, yet she can recognize nothing: she has visual agnosia because her brain has never learned to see. She finds this frightening and bizarre and is relieved when she returns to her original state of blindness. I was startled by this, because I had published an exceedingly similar story in The New Yorker only three years earlier.*3 Indeed, when I read Friel’s play, I was surprised to find, over and above the thematic similarities, a great many phrases and sentences from my own case history. When I contacted Friel to ask him about this, he denied even knowing about my essay—but then, after I sent him a detailed comparison of the two, he realized that he must have read my piece but forgotten doing so. He was confounded: he had read many of the same original sources I mentioned in my article, and believed that the themes and language of Molly Sweeney were entirely original. Somehow, he concluded, he had unconsciously absorbed much of my own language, thinking it was his own. (He agreed to add an acknowledgment of this to the play.)
Freud was fascinated by the slippages and errors of memory that occur in the course of daily life and their relation to emotion, especially unconscious emotion. But he was also forced to consider the much grosser distortions of memory that some of his patients showed, especially when they gave him accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood. At first he took all these accounts literally, but eventually, when there seemed little evidence or plausibility in several cases, he started to wonder whether such recollections had been distorted by fantasy and whether some, indeed, might be total fabulations, constructed unconsciously, but so convincingly that the patients themselves believed in them absolutely. The stories that patients told, and had told to themselves, even if they were false, could have a very powerful effect on their lives, and it seemed to Freud that their psychological reality might be the same whether they came from actual experience or from fantasy.
In a 1995 memoir, Fragments, Binjamin Wilkomirski described how, as a Polish Jew, he had spent several years of his childhood surviving the horrors and dangers of a concentration camp. The book was hailed as a masterpiece. A few years later, it was discovered that Wilkomirski had been born not in Poland but in Switzerland, was not Jewish, and had never been in a concentration camp. The entire book was an extended fabulation. (Elena Lappin described this in a 1999 essay in Granta.)
While there were outraged accusations of fraud, it seemed, on further exploration, that Wilkomirski had not intended to deceive his readers (nor, indeed, had he originally wanted the book to be published). He had, for many years, been engaged in an enterprise of his own—basically the romantic reinvention of his own childhood, apparently in reaction to his abandonment by his mother at the age of seven.
Apparently, Wilkomirski’s primary intention was to deceive himself. When he was confronted with the actual historical reality, his reaction was one of bewilderment and confusion. He was totally lost, by this point, in his own fiction.
Much is made of so-called recovered memories—memories of experiences so traumatic as to be defensively repressed and then, with therapy, released from repression. Particularly dark and fantastic forms of this include descriptions of satanic rituals of one sort or another, accompanied often by coercive sexual practices. Lives, and families, have been ruined by such accusations. But it has been shown that such descriptions, in at least some cases, can be insinuated or planted by others. The frequent combination of a suggestible witness (often a child) with an authority figure (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker, or an investigator) can be particularly powerful.
From the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials to the Soviet trials of the 1930s and Abu Ghraib, varieties of “extreme interrogation,” or outright physical and mental torture, have been used to extract religious or political “confessions.” While such interrogation may be designed to extract information in the first place, its deeper intentions may be to brainwash, to effect a genuine change of mind, to fill it with implanted, self-inculpatory memories—and in this it may be frighteningly successful. (There is no parable more relevant here than Orwell’s 1984, where Winston, at the end, under unbearable pressure, is finally broken, betrays Julia, betrays himself and all his ideals, betrays his memory and judgment, too, and ends up loving Big Brother.)
But it may not take massive or coercive suggestion to affect a person’s memories. The testimony of eyewitnesses is notoriously subject to suggestion and to error, frequently with dire results for the wrongfully accused. With DNA testing, it is now possible to find, in many cases, an objective corroboration or refutation of such testimony, and Schacter has noted that “a recent analysis of forty cases in which DNA evidence established the innocence of wrongly imprisoned individuals revealed that thirty-six of them (90 percent) involved mistaken eyewitness identification.”*4
If the last few decades have seen a surge or resurgence of ambiguous memory and identity syndromes, they have also led to importa
nt research—forensic, theoretical, and experimental—on the malleability of memory. Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist and memory researcher, has documented a disquieting success in implanting false memories by simply suggesting to a subject that he has experienced a fictitious event. Such pseudo-events, invented by psychologists, may vary from comic incidents to mildly upsetting ones (for example, that one was lost in a shopping mall as a child) to more serious incidents (that one was the victim of an animal attack or an assault by another child). After initial skepticism (“I was never lost in a shopping mall”) and then uncertainty, the subject may move to a conviction so profound that he will continue to insist on the truth of the implanted memory even after the experimenter confesses that it never happened in the first place.
What is clear in all these cases—whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we all have based on misattribution or source confusion—is that in the absence of outside confirmation there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what Donald Spence calls “historical truth” and “narrative truth.”
Even if the underlying mechanism of a false memory is exposed, as I was able to do, with my brother’s help, in the incendiary bomb incident (or as Loftus would do when she confessed to her subjects that their memories were implanted), this may not alter the sense of actual lived experience or “reality” which such memories have. Nor, for that matter, may the obvious contradictions or absurdity of certain memories alter the sense of conviction or belief. For the most part, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are not lying when they speak of their experiences, any more than they are conscious of having invented a story—they truly believe that this is what happened. (In Hallucinations, I describe how hallucinations, whether caused by sensory deprivation, exhaustion, or various medical conditions, can be taken as reality partly because they involve the same sensory pathways in the brain that “real” perceptions do.)
Once such a story or memory is constructed, accompanied by vivid sensory imagery and strong emotion, there may be no inner, psychological way of distinguishing true from false, nor any outer, neurological way. The physiological correlates of such memories can be examined using functional brain imaging, and these images show that vivid memories produce widespread activation in the brain involving sensory areas, emotional (limbic) areas, and executive (frontal lobe) areas—a pattern that is virtually identical whether the “memory” is based on experience or not.
There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the brains we have. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare and that for the most part our memories are so solid and reliable.
We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
* * *
*1 On further reflection, I am struck by the way in which I could visualize the garden scene from different angles, whereas the street scene is always “seen” through the eyes of the frightened seven-year-old I was in 1940.
*2 This episode is related in great and sympathetic detail by Dorothy Herrmann in her biography of Keller.
*3 This essay, “To See and Not See,” was subsequently published in my book An Anthropologist on Mars.
*4 Hitchcock’s film The Wrong Man (the only nonfiction film he ever made) documents the terrifying consequences of a mistaken identification based on eyewitness testimony (“leading” the witnesses, as well as accidental resemblances, plays a major part here).
Mishearings
A few weeks ago, when I heard my friend Kate say to me, “I am going to choir practice,” I was surprised. I have never, in the thirty years we have known each other, heard her express the slightest interest in singing. But I thought, who knows? Perhaps this is a part of herself she has kept quiet about; perhaps it is a new interest; perhaps her son is in a choir; perhaps…
I was fertile with hypotheses, but I did not consider for a moment that I had misheard her. It was only on her return that I found she had been to the chiropractor.
A few days later, Kate jokingly said, “I’m off to choir practice.” Again I was baffled: Firecrackers? Why was she talking about firecrackers?
As my deafness increases, I am more and more prone to mishearing what people say, though this is quite unpredictable; it may happen twenty times, or not at all, in the course of a day. I carefully record these in a little red notebook labeled PARACUSES—alterations in hearing, especially mishearings. I enter what I hear (in red) on one page, what was actually said (in green) on the opposite page, and (in purple) people’s reactions to my mishearings and the often far-fetched hypotheses I may consider in an attempt to make sense of what is often essentially nonsensical.
After the publication of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, such mishearings, along with a range of misreadings, misspeakings, misdoings, and slips of the tongue, were seen as “Freudian,” an expression of deeply repressed feelings and conflicts. But although there are occasional, unprintable mishearings that make me blush, a vast majority do not admit any simple Freudian interpretation. In almost all of my mishearings, however, there is a similar overall sound, a similar acoustic gestalt, linking what is said and what is heard. Syntax is always preserved, but this does not help; mishearings are likely to capsize meaning, to overwhelm it with phonologically similar but meaningless or absurd sound forms, even though the general form of a sentence is preserved.
Lack of clear enunciation, unusual accents, or poor transmission can all serve to mislead one’s own perceptions. Most mishearings substitute one real word for another, however absurd or out of context, but sometimes the brain comes up with a neologism. When a friend told me on the phone that her child was sick, I misheard “tonsillitis” as “pontillitis,” and I was puzzled. Was this some unusual clinical syndrome, an inflammation I had never heard of? It did not occur to me that I had invented a nonexistent word—indeed, a nonexistent condition.
Every mishearing is a novel concoction. The hundredth mishearing is as fresh and as surprising as the first. I am often strangely slow to realize that I have misheard, and I may entertain the most elaborate ideas to explain my mishearings, when it would seem that I should spot them straightaway. If a mishearing seems plausible, one may not think one has misheard; it is only if the mishearing is sufficiently implausible, or entirely out of context, that one thinks, “This can’t be right,” and (perhaps with some embarrassm
ent) asks the speaker to repeat himself, as I often do, or even to spell out misheard words or phrases.
When Kate spoke of going to choir practice, I accepted this: she could have been going to choir practice. But when a friend spoke one day about “a big-time cuttlefish diagnosed with ALS,” I felt I must be mishearing. Cephalopods have elaborate nervous systems, it is true, and perhaps, I thought for a split second, a cuttlefish could have ALS. But the idea of a “big-time” cuttlefish was ridiculous. (It turned out to be “a big-time publicist.”)
While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception—the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.
Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality—it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of an error or deception is always present. Indeed, it is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.
One’s surroundings, one’s wishes and expectations, conscious and unconscious, can certainly be co-determinants in mishearing, but the real mischief lies at lower levels, in those parts of the brain involved in phonological analysis and decoding. Doing what they can with distorted or deficient signals from our ears, these parts of the brain manage to construct real words or phrases, even if they are absurd.
