The Disease of the Mind

Writing in The New Yorker recently, Oliver Sacks ("Awakenings," "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat") described aphasia. "Aphasia" means, literally, a loss of speech, but it is not speech as such which is lost but language itself - its expression, or its comprehension, in whole or in part. In very severe forms, a person may be all but mute, able to utter only isolated, emotional outbursts ("telegraphic speech") such as "Damn!" or "Fine!" John Hughlings Jackson, a pioneer explorer of aphasia in the 1860s and -70s, considered that such patients lacked "propositional" speech, and he thought that they could not speak or "propositionize" even to themselves. He felt, therefore, that the power of abstract thought was lost in aphasia, and on occasion he compared aphasics to dogs.

Werner Herzog's 1974 film "The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser" concerned a similar character who, although not aphasic, had never been taught to speak and had never heard human speech. The film is based upon the true story of a man who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg one morning in 1828, shackled like an animal and unable to speak or walk, and bearing a strange note explaining that he had been held captive in a dungeon for his entire life, and had never had any human contact. This extremely beautiful and moving motion picture explores what "language" really means, as Herzog uses Kaspar to explore the absurdity behind our daily rituals and our ideas on religion, love and life in general, and whether civilization and language frees or hinders the human spirit. Kaspar, free from the shackles of patriarchal assumptions implicit in western language, questions our most basic beliefs in an incisive and disarmingly humorous way.

Sacks notes that aphasics, lacking the brain's basic language skills, develop remarkable compensatory heightenings of other, non-linguistic powers and skills, especially the ability to "read" others' intentions and meanings from facial expressions, vocal inflections and tone of voice, as well as all the gestures, postures, and minute movements that normally accompany speech. Such compensation may give surprising powers to aphasics - in particular, an enhanced ability to see through histrionic artifice, equivocation or lying.

Ever since we started using our neocortex and its associated language-based functions, we have carried on chatter within ourselves. The nature of the internal chatter is to proliferate itself in ever more complex ways. Degrees of sanity or insanity, as well as attention and inattention, depend on the volume and intensity of the internal chatter, especially when chattering about "what I like" or "what I don't like." The internal chatter creates a feedback loop in which ego-reinforcement feeds upon itself and creates an ever-more complex proliferation, like a virus infecting all parts of the system.

Aphasics, or the mysterious Kasper Hauser, have had the feedback loop interrupted, and although unfortunate, the change in their perceptions and abilities is startling and unusual.

Zen meditation techniques have developed ways of transcending the internal chatter and clarifying those aspects of mind/wisdom that have not been infected by the disease of internal chatter. When we transcend the internal chatter we enter "silence," and the heart-mind becomes illuminated by the inherent wisdom of the mind itself. As the author Mu Soeng points out, this silent wisdom does not make distinctions, does not dwell in the dualities of this or that, for or against, and yet is aware of itself as a purified state. The awareness is not subject-object relational, or verbal, or ideological, for any verbalization or conceptualization is part of the internal chatter and, eventually, self defeating.

"To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind." - Jianzhi Sengcan (d. 606)