Oct 212015
The Radio Lab podcast was so fascinating that I shared it with half a dozen smart people and talked about it with 2 others.
One of the most compelling ideas in the podcast is that Ildefonso, the focus of the short documentary “A Man without Words”, says he can no longer remember how to ‘think’ the way he did for the first 27 years of his life. I imagine it might be comparable to the way I can’t remember even the most vivid dreams mere moments after awakening. How often are our ideologies and beliefs and memories replaced by new knowledge and experiences? What do we lose when we learn new things?
Curious about what Ildefonso looks like? See the A Man Without Words trailer from Zack Godshall on Vimeo.
What a fantastic illustration! It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that he could not find the language to describe his first 27 years of life. I’m so used to language being a tool through which we construct meaning and communicate that meaning to others that it is hard for me to believe that language would fail him. But your comparison of Ildefonso’s situation to waking up from a dream makes perfect sense. We’re all familiar with waking up from a dream (hopefully, it’s a good one) and scrambling to remember its pieces. We feverishly try to hold on to threads of that good dream as we slowly wake up to the world. We may end up with a vague feeling about the dream, but its content, its major features, are often lost as we gain consciousness (This happens to me constantly. I NEVER remember my dreams).
I feel like this dream metaphor can be applied to another story from the podcast, especially considering the question you pose about what we lose when we learn new things. Jill Bolte Taylor describes her experience of having a stroke and the recovery it required. She describes herself drifting in and out of “‘La La Land.” At one point, she had absolutely no language, no memories, and no sense of self. Interestingly, she views this state in a positive manner: “I just had joy. I had, I had this magnificent experience of I’m this collection of these beautiful cells. I am organic. I’m this, this organic entity.” La la land is her dream. And this dream is a pleasant one. She finds pleasure in the silence, in the lack of brain chatter. In finding her way back to language, she loses this beautiful inner peace. In other words, in (re)learning things, she loses access to this sensory state of being. Is this state of being preferable? Is the dream better than reality? Taylor seems to miss aspects of this worldless space. I, however, find the idea terrifying.