Monday, January 14, 2013

There is someone in my head, but it's not me

I picked up an interesting book 'Incognito' by David Eagleman.  It's about the human brain. Here is a little section I like to share:

'In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism.  On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that 'something within him' discovered the famous equations, not he.  He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him--they simply came to him.  William Blake related a similar experience,reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will."  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.
...As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know."  As Pink Floyd put it, "There is someone in my head, but it's not me'

This is how I feel sometime.  You?

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