“Why do most of us feel that we are something more than molecules?”, asks Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in his engaging introduction to this compelling collection drawn from literature, science, philosophy and art ranging back 500 years and tackling the thorny question of what consciousness actually is. “We are made of the same raw materials as bacteria, as earth, as rock, as the great dark nebulae of dust that swim between the stars, as the stars themselves”, writes Haddon, introducing extracts that explore how the sense of being made of something immaterial, too, has long haunted humans.
This book focuses on “disrupted and liminal states of consciousness”, explains Haddon, on “what happens when consciousness fails or falters, what happens at the outer limits of consciousness – out-of-body experiences and teleportation, multiple personality, sleep and dreams, the slips of language and memory, anaesthesia and death”. At times conflicting views from physicians and psychiatrists, hypnotists and historians, are interwoven with individual cases, such as someone who remained awake during an operation, and a man who was acquitted of murdering his mistress after his counsel presented “an extraordinary plea of somnambulism”. Creating a richly textured feel is the interspersing of work from poets, artists and novelists (“writers of fiction, who spend their days arranging words to make readers forget themselves and enter, for a brief time, into the consciousness of characters who don’t exist, might have something important to contribute”).
What do we mean by the soul? This question is energetically tackled in the first section, from the ancient Egyptians’ “sophisticated model of a five-part soul attached to an earthly body” to Kandinsky and Alan Turing. The section “Sleep / Awake” has some discombobulating extracts from thinkers including Darwin and Dostoyevsky, while “Language / Memory” explores what it means to be human through perspectives ranging from an Emily Dickinson poem to a physician’s account of memory and trauma. “Being / Not Being” visits the border between life and death in some unsettling accounts including Dead Men Working in a Cane Field (1929) about the dehumanising effects of exploitation.
“What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans”, laments the “monster” in an extract from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, capturing an awareness of self that both delights and pains him. This question is also probed throughout States of Mind; although not definitively answered, this fascinating if not comprehensive collection cuts to the heart of existence.
States of Mind is published by Wellcome Collection, £9.99. Click here to buy a copy for £7.99
An exhibition, States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness, runs at Wellcome Collection, London from 4 Feb-16 Oct
