Leave Your Brain Alone

I just finished reading the excellent On the Sea of Memory : A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering by Jonathan Cott. It is a touching and thought provoking review of memory and loss. Mr. Cott had 36 electroshock treatments and lost fifteen years of memory.

And then last night, on the way home, I heard this on NPR, 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey. It is simply the most stunning thing I've ever heard on the radio.

I can barely speak of it. Both the lobotomy and electroshock are such crude and cruel treatments. How primitive. How misused.

The mind is something the brain does. Please, don't equate the brain with Heath Kit radios and Christmas chemistry sets. We have such a short time as conscience, thinking beings. Could stirring the brain with an ice pick ever be thought of as a good idea?

npr, memory, brain, mind