Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

I am a clinical neurologist and a professor of neurology. Most people have little idea what that means, but among other things it means that I am an authority on what the brain does right and does wrong: language, sensation, and emotion; walking, falling, weakness, tremors, and coordination; memory, mental incapacity, delays in development; anxiety, pain, stress, even death. The practice of my craft, the clinical part of it, is the systematic, logical, deductive method that was in the past applicable to all branches of medicine, but now resides mainly in neurology. The paradoxical part of it, the unique challenge, is that my primary sources of information—my patients’ brains—are quite often altered, sometimes bizarrely, as a result of disease. This creates an incredible and self-referential conundrum. How do you begin to understand a sick brain? The only viable answer, as this book will show, is that you do it by engaging the person inside, and you do it on a case-by-case basis.

Psychosis is a special type of confusion with its own reality, an internal reality that is consistent only with itself.

Memory works both forward and backward. Forward, or anterograde memory, is the ability to form memories going forward. Backward, or retrograde memory, is the ability to retain memories of the past. The two are inextricably linked: when you lose one, you lose the other.