Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 17 views

    My Father's Brain - Franzen - Zebra

    Uploaded by

    River Rodriguez

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content

    You might also like

    My Father's Brain - Franzen - Zebra

    Uploaded by

    River Rodriguez
    17 views17 pages

    Original Title

    My Father's Brain_Franzen_zebra

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Report this Document

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as pdf
    17 views17 pages

    My Father's Brain - Franzen - Zebra

    Uploaded by

    River Rodriguez

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as pdf
    of 17
    — — ment away from an angry and fighened isolation toward i aeeptancesven a clebrtion—of bung a eader and the 4 writer Nor thae there’ not still plenty to be mad and scared about. Our national thirst for petroleum, which hes a already produced two Bush presidencies and an ugly Gulf : War, snow threatening to lead us into an open-ended long- 7 term conflict in Cental Asia. Although you wouldn't have o* though it possible, Americans seem to be asking even fewer mi ‘questions about their government today than in 199, and a the major media sound even more monolthically jingois- ¢ tie. While Congress yet again vores against applying easily achievable fuel-ffcieney standards to SUVs, che president of Ford Motor Company can be seen patriotclly defend. ing these vehicles in a TV ad, avowing that Americans mast never accept "boundaries of any kind.” a With so much fresh ovtrageousness being manufactured 4 dsily, Eve chosen to do only minimal tinkering with the other essays in this book. “First City” reads a lide differ. «ently without the World Trade Center; “Imperial Bedroom” was written before John Asheroft came to power with his seeming indifference to personal liberties; anthrax has lene farther poignancy to the woes of the United Seates Postal 1 Service, as deseribed in “Lost in the Mail"; and Oprah Winfrey’ disinvitation of me from her Book Club makes the descriptive word “lit” fuoresce in the several esays where it appeats. But the local particulars of content mater les to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complex. ity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of hhow to be alone. 003} © sowarnan Frawzew fry 1996 rected in the mal on my moter, in St Loui a Venn’ paclageconaning ve pik romani grecting cad evo foor-oune Mi. Goodbar on hollow red fligres ert on bop of thread, and one op of 4 neuropatlogi eer on my fers ran aap remember he big gray wine ight tha morning. ear ing hein haa hoe my living roo, eng te aopey report ino my bedroom, I Sg nn ond te Te bn beg) oid ‘ass gmand sowed poral apy ith lel iden remember tarlting gra ino pounds and pounds nto the flr svinkewrapped equals ina supermartet Imeat ase Trees pring th eprt ack nos eve lope without reading ay he. Some year before he did, my father had paripated He: A atestony. On an overcast morning in Febra- in study of memory and aging sponsored by Washing- ton University, and one of the perks for participants was 4 postmortem brain autopsy, free of charge. I suspect that the study offered other perks of monitoring and treatment ‘which had led my mother, who loved freebies of all kinds to insist chat my father volunteer fori, Thrift was also prob- ably her only conscious motive for including the autopsy report in my Valentine’ package. She was saving thirty-1wo cents postage. My clearest memories ofthat Febewary morning ae visual and spatial: the yellow Mr. Goodbar, my shift from living room to bedroom, the late-morning light ofa season as fir fiom the winter solstice as from spring I'm aware, however, that even these memories aren’ to be trusted. According to the latest theories, which are based on a wealth of neuro= logical and psychological research in the last few decades, the brain is not an album in which memories are stored dis cretely like unchanging photographs. A memo in the phrase of the psychologist Daniel L. temporary constellation” of ativity—a necessarily approni- instead, chachter, 3 rte ects of nena ict that hind story image and seme dain the momentary ensaon of remenbered whole These images and date seldom the ‘ache propery of oe parulat memory. Idee een my espeiene on tat Valetnes moming wis wid ing my Bsn was relying on pre-evting capris of ed” and “hear and "Me, Gore gray ky ny indo ss ail fom a shown other Wier moet ad atcay had milion of neurone devoted to pictre of my ‘mother—her stinginess with postage, her romantic atach- ‘ments to her children, her lingering anger towaed my father, hher weird lack of tact, and so on. What my memory ofthat 1 sawaran reanzen morning therefore consists of, according tothe latest models, isa set of hardwired neuronal connections among the perti> rent regions of the bra, and a predisposition for the entire constellation ta light up—chemially,elecrically—when any ‘one part of the circuit is stimulated. Speak the words “Mr. Goodbar” and ask me to freeassociate, and if I don’t say “Diane Keaton” Iwill surely say “brain autops ‘My Valentine’ memory would work this way even if were dredging it up now for the frst time ever. But the fact is that I've re-remembered that February morning countless times since then, Pve told the story to my brothers. I've of- {ered it as an Outrageous Mother Incident to friends of mine ‘who enjoy that kind of thing, Ive even, shameful ro report, told people I hardly know at all. Fach succeeding recollec= tion and retelling reinforces the constellation of images and knowledge that constitute the memory. Ac the cellular level, according to neuroscientists, I'm burning the memory in a little deeper each time, strengthening the dendritic connec tions among its components, further encouraging the firing of that specific set of synapses. One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains, the feature chat makes our gray matter so much smarter than any machine yer devised (my laptop's cluttered hard drive or a World Wide Web that insists on recalling, in pellucid detail, Beverly Hill 0210 fan site last updated on 11/20/98), is our ability to forget almost every- thing that has ever happened to us I retain general, largely categorical memories of the past year spent in Spain; vai- ‘us visits to Indian restaurants on Fast Sixth Sereet) but relax tively few specific episodic memories, Those memories that {do retain I tend to revisit and, thereby, strengthen. They cleetrochemically—part become literally morphological of the architecture of my bran ty FATHER'S 6 ‘This model of memory, which T've presented here in a father loose layperson’ summary, excites the amateur sien. tise in me. Te fels true tothe twinned fuzziness and richness of my own memories, and i inspires awe with its image of neural networks effortlessly self-coordinating, in a massively Parallel way, to create my ghostly consciousness and my. remarkably sturdy sense of self, It seems to me lovely and Postmodern. The human brain is a web of a hundred bil- Hion neurons, maybe as many as two hundred billion, with willions of axons and dendrites exchanging quadrillions of ‘messages by way of at ease fifty different chemical ransmit- ters. The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe iby a comfortable margin, the most complex ‘object we know of in that universe And yer its also a fump of meat, At some point, maybe later on that same Valentines Day, I forced myself to read the entire pathology report. It included a "Microscopic De- seription” of my father’ brain Sections ofthe fmt, parietal, occipital, and temporal cersbrlcordces showed numecous senile pages, promi nentydifise type, with minimal aumbers of nevrofbi lary tangles. Cortical Lewy bodies were easily detected in HE stained matesal. The amypilala demonsuaned plagues, occasional angles and mild neuron lx. In the notice that we had run in local newspapers nine ‘months earlier, my mother insisted that we say my father had died “afer lng illes” She iked the phrase’ formalcy snd reticence, but it was hard not to hear her grievance init 235 well, her emphasis on ng. The pathologist's identifica, ‘ion of senile plaques in my father’ brain served to confirm, 10 sonnrwan Franzen | 2s only an autopsy could, the fact with which she'd struggled daly for many years: like millions of other Americans, my father had had Alcheimer’ disease. This was his disease. It was also, you could argue, his story. But you have to let me tell it sLznenten’s 18 4 Disease of classically “insidious onset.” Since even healthy people become more forgetfal as they age, there no way to pinpoint the first memory to fall vie- ‘im 10 it. The problem was especialy vexed inthe case of my father, who not only was depressive and reserved and slighty deaf but also was taking strong medicines for other ailments. Fora long time it was possible to chalk up his non sequiturs to his hearing impairment, his forgetfulness to his depres. sion, his hallucinations to his medicines; and chalk them up we did My memories of the yeats of my father’ intial decline ae vividly about things other than hit, Indeed, Lm some- what appalled by how large T loom in my own memories, hhow peripheral my parents are, But I was living far from ‘home in those years. My information came mainly from my ‘mother’ complains about my father, and these complaints 1d been complaining to me T took with a grain of salt sh preaty much all my lite, My parents’ marriage was, its safe to say ess than happy. ‘They stayed together forthe sake oftheir childeen and for ‘want of hope tha divorce would make them any happier. As long as my father was working, they enjoyed autonomy in their respective fiefdoms of home and workplace, but afcr he retired, in 198r, at the age of sixty-six, they commenced 1e

    You might also like