Books

Over the New Year holiday I visited my daughter and her family in Natick, Mass.
Betsy and Brian gave me a book titled Wilderness Plots by Scott R. Sanders. This is a series of 50 short (two page) vignettes describing people and conditions involved in the settling of the Ohio Valley, beteen 1780 and 185o. They are all interesting
vignettes but the most meaningful is a piece titled Cutting Roads. It describes Ebenzer Zane and sevewn sons who cut trails by ax through the wilderness, including a bridle trail from the Ohio River through West Virginia into Kentucky. This allowed the mail to go through to Ohio.
When I learned that my son Michael and his wife Betsy are to be divorced and that Betsy would be renting a house behind us,separated by a patch of woods, I began a trail between the two houses so that Jack, their six year old, could visit easily.
Michael joined in with his chainsaw and soon the awesome and illegally cut trail was complete. I identified most strongly with old Ebenzer, who was granted 400 acres by the government for his efforts. My recognition, should the trail be found by the owners association, may be quite different.

I was also impressed by one of Brian's books--"Conversations with Neil's brain" by a neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist, whose names escape me at the moment but I have ordered the book from Amazon. The book describes the results of electrical stimulation of the brain to identify the locii of cognitive and perceptual function. Their inferences appear to go beyond their data and also beyond their areas of expertise as they speculate about consciousness, language, dreams and the like. Like other neuroiscientisrts that attributre dreams to meaningless, random noise in the nervous system and not worth the attention afforded to them by therpists. I take excepton to this in two books I have written about dreams ("Demystifying dreams" and "The brain and dreaming") because of my experience with dreams, both personally, and in my private practice. The authors also explain consciuous as the sum total of brain function and no more. In Book Two of Shrink I speculate that consciousness may be much more. Another of the Wilderness Plots vignettes, "Frostbite of the soul," descibes a precher who is also a cobbler. As he stitches his leather shoes he ponders his sermons. He reasons that just as the shoe is the vessel of the foot, so the body is the vessel of the soul. Somehow I identify with the preacher more than the scientists in this matter.