Now out in paperback: The strange history of auditory hallucination throughout the ages, and its power to shed light on the mysterious inner source of pure faith and unadulterated inspiration.
From Booklist: Daniel B. Smith's father and grandfather both heard voices, and thereby hangs the tale Smith tells at the outset, and also his interest in the phenomenon of hearing people speak when no one else can and without otherwise sensing them. Research indicates that hearing voices isn't all that rare; that many cope well with it, belying its association with madness; and that so many parts of the brain are involved in audition that finding those responsible for hearing voices may be impossible. Smith proceeds from present-day science to the nineteenth-century labeling of hearing voices as hallucinatory, and then to famous cases of it, most of them preceding but one during its pathologization. Socrates (Smith posits that the voices the philosopher heard affected his sentencing to death), Joan of Arc, and a German jurist who largely recovered from schizophrenic voice hearing are the three figures about whom Smith writes so intelligently and absorbingly that one wishes he had covered others he notes, especially William Blake, as fully. One also wants to read more of him, on any subject he chooses.
Watch his Colbert interview from last year. Consider this in light of The New Autism, in the latest Wired: Traditional science holds that people with severe autism are prisoners in their own minds, severely disabled, and probably mentally retarded. Don't tell that to Amanda Baggs, an autistic woman who achieved viral fame with her YouTube video "In My Language," which has so far received more than 350,000 hits. Wired contributor David Wolman gets inside the life that Baggs has created for herself, which includes blogging, hanging out in Second Life, corresponding with her friends, and a "constant conversation" with the world around her. Wolman's conclusion: Much of past research about autism and intelligence is catastrophically flawed.
From the NYT review of "Muses": Smith sets (but does not explore) a provocative challenge: Had antipsychotic medication been available, would Moses have dismissed Yahweh’s demands at the burning bush “as his dopamine system playing tricks on him?”
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity |
