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Sensing The World
When I read Ken Wilber’s book ‘A Brief History of Everything’ — it struck me as a very male thing to do — to try and come up with an overarching theory of everything… But I like it more when he talks about his love for his wife who died. And that is where it seems to me the anima or the soul is more moved by the mystery of its passionate attachments and entanglements and love (and there isn’t any overarching theory for that).
— Jon Wilson
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Although the monkey was not awake, the cells in its superior colliculus were firing anyway, their activation registering as a series of crackles issuing from a loudspeaker. Humphrey seemed to be listening to the brain cells “seeing.” This suggested a startling possibility: some type of vision might be possible without any conscious sensation.
A few months later, Humphrey approached the cage of a monkey named Helen. Her visual cortex had been removed by his supervisor, but her superior colliculus was still intact. He sat beside her, waving and trying to interest her. Within a few hours, she began grasping chunks of apple from his hand…he took her for walks on a leash in the village of Madingley, near Cambridge. At first, she collided with objects, and with Humphrey; several times, she fell into a pond. But soon she learned to navigate her surroundings. On walks, Helen would move directly across a…
