Neuroscience and literature collide in Stephen Rachman’s lecture at BYU's annual Humanities Center Symposium.
What do Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have to do with neuroscience? According to Michigan State University Associate Professor Stephen Rachman, these literary giants had similar beliefs about the development of the mind and nature of the brain as Oliver Sacks, a notable neurologist who published his findings over a century after Dickinson and Whitman published their writing. On October 13, 2023, Rachman presented at BYU’s annual Humanities Center Symposium in a lecture titled, “Wider than the Sky: Romantic Neurology from Emily Dickinson to Oliver Sacks,” where he demonstrated the unexpected resemblance between the philosophical ideas of the creatives and the scientific findings of the neuroscientist.
Rachman began by describing the work of Oliver Sacks, who practiced neurology from 1965 to 2015 and published numerous books on the subject. Along with studying various neurological disorders, Sacks was interested in the question of how our minds and bodies are connected. Unlike most of his peers and predecessors, he did not believe that mind and body are separate or dualistic in nature; instead, he saw them as different methods of describing an individual whole. Erasing the distinction between the physical and mental required, according to Sacks, “an adequate concept of the individual and of mind. A concept of how individual persons grow and become, and how their growing and becoming are correlated with their physical bodies.”
After delving into Sacks’ work and explaining some of his theories, Rachman turned to explaining how Sacks’ ideas connected to authors from the American Romantic period. Rachman called Sacks’ theories about human development and the individual “Romantic neurology” because many of his ideas can be found in the poetry and novels of writers like Dickinson and Whitman.
Rachman shared an example for each of these authors, beginning with Dickinson. He explained that in her poem 632, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” Dickinson uses imagery that reflects Sacks’ perspective of body and mind being the same. For example, instead of using the term mind, she uses the word brain, suggesting that the physical organ, or body, is indistinguishable from the mind. She also describes perception as having physical depth and weight and compares the brain to God, thus equating mental and spiritual capacity to things that can be physically and empirically measured. Dickinson’s deliberate word choice in the poem suggests that she had a similar perspective as Sacks—that mind and body were not separate, but actually the same entity.
Rachman also drew a connection between Walt Whitman’s poem, “There was a child went forth every day,” from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and Sacks’ notions on children’s neurological development. Sacks theorized that infants develop their sense of selfhood primarily through a combination of sensation, movement, and repetitive experience. In the poem, Whitman describes a variety of experiences a child has in their daily life, detailing the repetition and constant motion of childhood. He explains how the constants in a child’s life—their friends and family members, the changing seasons, and the movement of nature, among others—become part of the child’s identity. Whitman ultimately suggests that going through the motions of daily life evokes the emotions that guide a child’s development. Rachman said, “That sense of combining motion and emotion elicited from sensory experience, is precisely a kind of ‘Sacksian’ formation in advance, in a certain sense.”
Rachman’s interdisciplinary approach allowed him to recognize that these authors’ insights into the human mind exemplify the way imagination often precedes discovery and scientific evidence. While these authors may or may not have had an influence on Sacks’ work, they were nonetheless writing about the human brain and human development in terms that Sacks’ theories would reflect a century later. Sacks’ work has, in turn, become an influence in the humanities. His nonfiction books and articles inspired a variety of plays, the movie Awakening, and an opera based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Rachman’s lecture epitomized how making connections between the humanities and the sciences opens up new avenues for creativity and imagination.
To learn more about the annual Humanities Center Symposium click here.