"Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength..."

"... if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information," writes Oliver Sacks in an essay about memory.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

"I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late..."

"... and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, 'I want to see indigo now.' And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall. Again it had this luminous, numinous quality; I leaped toward it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, 'This is the color of heaven.' ... I thought maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the Earth, or maybe it used to exist or no longer exists. All this went through my mind in 4 or 5 seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness, and I was haunted a little bit when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world."

Oliver Sacks, in his new book "Hallucinations," discussed in a nice interview on NPR today.

"What a narrow ridge of normality we all inhabit, with the abysses of mania and depression yawning to either side."

Oliver Sacks on mania.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

"Yawning'' is boredom.

Ha ha. Makes me think of Seinfeld:

George: I dunno, Jerry something's missing. There's a void, Jerry, there's a void...

Jerry: A deep, yawning chasm...

Why dyslexics become entrepreneurs.

Fascinating!

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought.

The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.

“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”

Mentioned in the article is Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko's:

“I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator,” [Orfalea] said. “I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D.”

He attributes his success to his difficulty with reading and writing because it forced him to master verbal communication.

“I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence as a kid,” he said. “And that is for the good. If you have a healthy dose of rejection in your life, you are going to have to figure out how to do it your way.”...

“I told myself I would never be a lawyer or a doctor,” he said. “But I wanted to make a lot of money. And I knew business was the only way I was going to do it.”

I wrote about Orfalea back in May:

I adore Orfalea, who wrote a memoir called "Copy This! How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinko's." He got me through the loneliest segment of that 1235 mile drive from Austin to Madison last month as I clicked the satellite radio over to C-Span and heard him giving a talk based on that memoir. What a wonderful, inspiring guy!

I love these stories of how people find special powers in their mental deficiencies. (Oliver Sacks is a master at presenting material of this kind.)

Bonus topic: What are the mental deficiencies that prevail in the world of blogging?

"I like everything about you. Your illness is part of you. It's like part of your character."

Nicoletta Mantovani quotes her husband, the late Luciano Pavarotti. This is what she says he said on learning that she had multiple sclerosis. (It sounds ungenerous to say "she says," but she is involved in a dispute over Pavarotti's will.)

What do you think about this notion of illness as part of one's character? Normally, we see illness as an alien invader to be fought off or, if that is not possible, endured. Before reading Mantovani's quote this morning, I'd been thinking of the idea of illness or disability as an integrated part of the afflicted person because I've been reading the new Oliver Sacks book "Musicophilia," which contains frequent observations of this kind, as do his earlier books "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" and "An Anthropologist On Mars."

Sacks writes so beautifully and tells such interesting stories that it's hard to resist his point of view. He is thoroughly excited and fascinated by the brain abnormalities of the individuals he studies, and he expresses this emotion through the romanticization of disease and the perception of the disease as part of the integrated whole of the person. As I reader, I catch his excitement, but I worry sometimes that it's wrong to look at other people this way.

If you had a disease — or if you have a disease — would you want people to see the disease as part of your character, something that deepens you and makes you more fascinating?

A new TV arrives, DVDs are deployed to test its quality, and, a propos of Kerry's new tan, the subject of disease perceived as health is discussed.

As noted a while back, my old television gave up on the color red, and I ordered a Sony HDTV. Waiting for it to be delivered, I kept watching my old TV, where everything was green and yellow and blue and gray and black. When I wrote about Kerry's new orange spray-on tan yesterday, an emailer reminded me that I wouldn't be seeing it on my TV. That would have been true, except that my new TV arrived today, via Sony's free premium delivery service, which entailed two nice young men taking the set out of the box outside, bringing just the set in, and putting it in its place in the big room. They did a great job delivering the TV, even introducing themselves and shaking my hand after I answered the door. They didn't have to, but they did take out my big old broken TV, which became a topic of conversation:

Does it work?



It just doesn't have any red. It might be good for someone who only likes very old things, things in black and white.



Or colorblind. My uncle is colorblind.



I think the TV could help noncolorblind people see what it's like to be colorblind.



I can test that on my uncle -- if he's the right kind of colorblind.

Assuming there is a form of colorblindness where you just can't see red, my TV would let a normally sighted person see what that was like. And I assume for that colorblind person, my TV would be the same as a color TV. But it's hard to think what kind of an impression my bad TV would have on someone with the more common sort of red-green colorblindness, where red and green look the same. I think if I were partially colorblind, I might prefer to turn the color off altogether and watch in black and white. Yet I did not do that with my bad TV. For some strange reason I preferred the wrong color, even though a black and white picture was more aesthetic.



When I got all the stray cords hooked up into reasonable places in the back of the new TV--ignoring for now the weird new things like card slots--I wanted to test the picture with a DVD. I picked "Apocalypse Now" and got all mesmerized. Chris took over and tested the TV with DVDs of:

"The Birds"

"8 1/2"

"Moulin Rouge"

"Titanic"

"Ghost World"

"The Two Towers"

"Mulholland Drive"

"Tori Amos: Welcome to Sunny Florida"

"The Sopranos"

"Labyrinth"

"The Cranes Are Flying"

"Spirited Away"

"Blue Velvet"

The picture was pronounced spectacular. The built-in sound--carefully checked in the engine room scene in "Titanic," right after the iceberg is hit--was declared superior to the separate speakers we used with the old TV.



So--in short--I will be monitoring the debate tomorrow night in thoroughly beautiful color and excellent sound.



And on that subject of Kerry's getting overtanned for debate purposes: Kerry, like Gore before him, seems to think it's good to be tan for a debate, a belief can be traced to Kennedy's appearance in the 1960 debate. But we know now that Kennedy's tan appearance was in fact a symptom of his Addison's Disease.



The subject of disease perceived as health is an interesting one. Here are three other examples:



1. I remember reading an essay some years ago written by a woman who had been suffering from cancer, who heard many people tell her how great she looked. They were only seeing that she had lost a lot of weight. (Send a link to this essay if you know it.)



2. There is a terrific essay by Oliver Sacks in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (one of my favorite books), about a 90-year-old woman with syphillis, which she called Cupid's Disease, who enjoyed the lively, tipsy way it made her feel and did not want to be cured: "I know it's an illness but it's made me feel well."



3. In the Tennessee Williams play "The Glass Menagerie," the character Amanda makes having malaria sound fun: "I had malaria fever all that Spring ... just enough to make me restless and giddy."