Burton 1

Madison Burton

9 September 2023

English 120

“The Last Hippie”

Something that surprised me about this reading is how Greg could remember songs and people

from the 1960s and, as the reading worded it, was “unable to move on.” He was unable to register new

information and was stuck in the present- not concerned with the past or the future with a damaged

identity. Additionally, he was not aware of the fact that he was blind and would refer to “watching the TV”

where he would “invent visual scenes” to accompany situations and thought that it was something that all

of us do.

I learned that there is a condition that accompanies many orbitofrontal syndromes called

witzelsucht, where a patient may be inclined to tell jokes or make puns in a way that was not

characteristic of them prior to their condition. Greg seemed to never be in a bad mood and all the anger

and stress that caused the difficulty that his parents experienced with him in the time pre-Krishna,

seemed to have disappeared. I also learned that he maintained the ability to associate emotions with

places and people because Greg no longer wanted to visit his home and felt that he had lost something

(to the point of wandering around his room for hours looking for an unnamed item) following the news of

his father's passing, despite not being able to recall the news itself.

Greg existed in a half-dreamlike state where the “boundary between waking and sleep seemed to

break down” yet the sound of someone's voice or music would “awaken him” and he would seem to be a

different person entirely. This is something that has been observed in many cases- how music can unlock

memories or awaken someone from various states. Greg’s case reminds me of this film I watched in

senior year of high school where all these individuals with dementia could begin remembering things they

had forgotten while listening to certain songs. Sacks wrote in 1979 that “games, songs, verses, converse,

etc. hold him together completely... because they have an organic rhythm and stream, a flowing of being,

which carries and holds him.” Greg maintained an outstanding memory of the songs he experienced in

the sixties, but, despite his difficulty registering new information, was able to learn new songs easily.
 Burton 2

I have grown up being surrounded by music and learning about it as this universal language we

all share- even then, it was astonishing to learn more about how powerful it is and continues to be

something that highly interests me.