On the radio today, a neurologist identified
the most important capacity
of the human brain
as being its capacity to contemplate
a self beyond itself. Even the interviewer was not so sure
he understood what his guest just said
when he asked the specialist to explain it all again.
I was not sure how the man would make his point again
so with thousands, possibly tens of thousands
invisibly listening
along with me—we all leaned in, like silence itself
to the radio voice who then told us all about the brain’s
plasticity—he had doubted it himself, he said—
for many years, decades, really; he’d heard a colleague
assert the theory thirty years or so before. “A crank”
who he knew now had been a visionary all along
and led him to the realization
that he’d been wrong about all he’d known about
the brain. Being able to see beyond one’s earlier position, that
point of view, was the key that freed him
to reject each former hypothesis that he’d maintained.
This was the brain, at any age—making new connections.
And to abandon old neural connections for new
pathways seemed the very
hallmark of consciousness and our humanity.
But how many of us ever really see past a prior understanding?
And abandon it completely? This man
of science moved me most when he finally admitted
how wrong he’d been—in every other hypothesis
he’d made. Moving unknowingly from error
to error, without a sense of
progress, is what made him become himself—
even if all our work seems like nothing but the sum of all our errors—
it will have been good to share our work, nevertheless.
A life may fail to yield even one answer and still be well spent.