The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey Through Consciousness

by Paul Broks Narrated by Simon Bubb

Overview

When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks's wife died of cancer, it sparked a journey of grief and reflection that traced a lifelong attempt to understand how the brain gives rise to the soul. The result of that journey is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on fate, death, consciousness, and what it means to be human.
*
The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars weaves a scientist's understanding of the mind - its logic, its nuance, how we think about what makes a person - with a poet's approach to humanity, that crucial and ever-elusive why. It's a story that unfolds through the centuries, along the path of humankind's constant quest to discover what makes us human, and the answers that consistently slip out of our grasp. It's modern medicine and psychology and ancient tales; history and myth combined; fiction and the stranger truth.
*
But, most importantly, it's Broks' story, grounded in his own most fascinating cases as a clinician-patients with brain injuries that revealed something fundamental about the link between the raw stuff of our bodies and brains and the ineffable selves we take for who we are.*Tracing a loose arc of loss, acceptance, and renewal, he unfolds striking, imaginative stories of everything from Schopenhauer to the Greek philosophers to jazz guitarist Pat Martino in order to sketch a multifaceted view of humanness that is as heartbreaking at it is affirming.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/23/2018
Broks (Into the Silent Land) reflects on the idea of death and what it means to be human in this collection of musings centered loosely on his personal struggle to cope with his wife’s cancer diagnosis and her death some years later. He mingles memories, dreams, and his deepest thoughts with teaching experiences and clinical observations drawn from a career as a neuropsychologist. More than a compilation of case studies, Broks’s book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness. He mixes pub banter, philosophy, Greek myths, the “deathbed” music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Paolo Faraldo’s theory of neuronal relativity, Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological search for the self, and many other topics in an attempt to broaden the perspective on neuroscience’s most central question: “how and why physical states of the brain produce mental experiences.” Or, as the author states the question, “How does the insentient, physical stuff of the brain... the 1,200 cubic centimeters of gloop that fills our skulls—how does that stuff create awareness?” Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through. (July)

From the Publisher

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is a work of extraordinary insight and imagination. Broks is a 21st century Dante of the human psyche, guiding us on a journey full of surprise, erudition, and wit.”
—DAVID GEORGE HASKELL, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees
 
"In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There's science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are—and who we hope to be."
—DEBORAH BLUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook
 
“Broks weaves many threads—memoir, neuroscience, and metaphysics—into a rich fabric of reflection, speculation and deep feeling. This is a work that defies categorization, fusing non-fiction and imagination into a single instrument of piercing insight and emotional honesty.”
—CHARLES YU, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"The problem for those who followed Alexander Luria and Oliver Sacks was that it was impossible not to walk in their footsteps, but equally impossible to fill their shoes. The clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks is one of the few who has managed to rise to the challenge... [Broks has] his own distinctive voice, marked by an unusual combination of analytic thought and poetic lyricism... It is easy enough to understand, as Broks does, that there is no permanent self; that we are always in flux and internally divided. The difficult task is to know how to live in the light of this knowledge. For this you need the kind of insight that comes from close attention to whole human beings, not from analysis of their brain scans. Broks has this kind of insight in spades. Despite, or rather because of, his willingness to stare reality in the face, Broks's book is ultimately uplifting. Without naming it, he seems to capture the spirit of the Japanese concept mono no aware—the bitter-sweet pathos of things."
—PROSPECT MAGAZINE

“In a style sometimes reminiscent of The Last Lecture, Broks blends wonder with pessimistic hope. He adumbrates that there is something unbelievable, perhaps even magical, in the 'absurdity' of consciousness and related phenomena, and he thrills to the precarious individuality of our imaginings. [The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is] a unique addition to the realm of popular brain science.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“In this meditative investigation into the nature and history of consciousness, Broks is an engaging Virgil to the reader’s Dante as we tour the Jungian labyrinth of the mind, successfully blending Greek mythology, philosophy, allegory, memoir, case studies, and thought experiments… Broks plants seeds that flower pages later as he explains that our mental landscape seems to extend far beyond the confines of our skull-sized kingdoms, or as Hamlet keenly observed, ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.’”
—BOOKLIST

“More than a compilation of case studies, Broks’s book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness… Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"This is a wonderful, strange, and genre-defying book... [The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars] powerfully evokes the beauty and absurdity, the sadness and the mystery, the beating pulse of life."
—STANDPOINT

Kirkus Reviews

2018-04-30
A neuropsychologist's grief memoir embedded within a series of eclectic musings on consciousness.Broks (Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, 2003) lost his wife after a long battle with cancer. The days and months leading up to and away from her death—she chose palliative end-of-life care over aggressive but unpromising chemotherapy—opened newly personal dimensions to the questions of existence he had long been investigating as a researcher. The resulting assemblage follows no recognizable schema: The author invites readers to wander at will through this "ramshackle house of a book," a loose collage of memories, dreams, brain science, quotations, philosophies of mind, journal entries, and earnest pencil sketches, with the story of his grief and recovery turning up from time to time amid the bric-a-brac. Alongside the brain candy of unusual case histories—e.g., people caught in the nightmarish hallucinations of sleep paralysis or who suddenly stop recognizing their own body parts as belonging to them or who suffer from Cotard's syndrome, in which they believe they are dead—Broks weaves in entry-level overviews of anatomy, philosophy, myth, and literature, with a predilection for the Greeks and the Stoics. This boldly casual exploration, in which a grieving brain scientist wrestles with his own experience of the mystery of awareness and the perennial problem of mind, is less about epiphany than apophany, the moment when perception goes off the rails into delusion. Some chapters delve into theoretical territory that might leave general readers disturbed or mystified, such as the author's support for a colleague's claim that up to 10 percent of people are "philosophical zombies," engaging in normal-seeming behaviors despite an observable lack of sentience in their brain imaging. In a style sometimes reminiscent of The Last Lecture, Broks blends wonder with pessimistic hope. He adumbrates that there is something unbelievable, perhaps even magical, in the "absurdity" of consciousness and related phenomena, and he thrills to the precarious individuality of our imaginings.A unique addition to the realm of popular brain science.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169441673
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

            Boofff…

            The oxygen machine exhales. It goes all through the day, all through the night. My wife exhales, like a sign of resignation. It’s six in the evening and she hasn’t opened her eyes today, or spoken a word. This day, between her birthday and our wedding anniversary, is the day she dies. Yesterday the boys and I dabbed green tea on her lips and she smiled, but not today. Another long sigh. Her final breath? Not yet. There’s another, and another. And then no more. The last is like the wash of a wave fading into sand. The oxygen machine is still breathing. I remove the wedding ring from my wife’s dead finger, and box it in my fist. The machine exhales. I exhale. It scarcely missed a breath, this ring. I turn off the oxygen machine. Kate lies bathed in evening sunlight, the flesh of her arms already beginning to bruise with draining blood.

            It was the autumnal equinox, September 23rd. The sun had crossed the celestial equator and our last summer was behind us. Perfect timing. She couldn’t face another winter, she’d said. There was a full moon that night. I stood in the backyard. I took a slug of whiskey and I thought: What next? We had discussed what next a good deal that summer, knowing her death was imminent. “You’ll be fine,” she’d say, “I’m not worried about you.” I had a lot going for me. It would be a release.

            “And it won’t be long now.” “Oh, that’s all right then.”

            “But, I’ll tell you something. You don’t know how precious life is. You think you do, but you don’t.”

            I couldn’t argue with her. She was dying. What did I know? I look back on it now as a good summer, despite everything: painful, penetratingly sad, but without despair, and shot through with extraordinary moments of joy. It vindicated our decision. Precisely one hundred days before she died we were sitting in another sunlit room at the hospital. A doctor was telling us that the cancer had spread beyond all hope of containment. “How long?” Kate asked, and ventured her own estimate: “Six months?” But there was a pause before the doctor answered, “Perhaps.” The best he could offer, the last resort, was another course of chemotherapy, which, if it worked, would extend her life by a couple of months at best. It would be the kind of chemotherapy that made your hair and fingernails fall out, and made you sick to your bones. We knew all about chemotherapy. And the chances of it working? “One in five.” We didn’t have to decide right there and then, the doctor said, the following week would do, but the disease was moving fast and treatment, if that was the choice, could not be delayed much longer.

            We agreed, on the drive home, that it was not a decision to take on impulse. We would discuss it with Tom and Nat, our sons; we would weigh the pros and cons and do our best to make sense of the uncertainties. And in the days that followed we did those things. There was no agenda. Discussion came piecemeal over lunch on the patio, or watching the sunset up on the seafront, or in the quiet of the early hours, and we assembled the fragments forensically. It’s your decision, the boys said. We’ll support you in whatever you do.

            My first thoughts, back there in the consulting room, had lined up pretty smartly against the idea of further treatment. Even as the doctor spoke, I was doing the existential equations. I factored in the probabilities alongside the pain and indignities, and I could see no good reason to intensify and prolong the suffering, which was already considerable. The end was inevitable and close now, treatment or not. Better to take what we could from the last days, not lose them to the ordeal of chemotherapy. If the treatment didn’t work, which was likely, then it would just be adding insult to injury.

            I kept those thoughts to myself at the time. If Kate was forming a different view, and I got the impression she was, then it was not for me to interfere. It was her life. And before long I began to see other sides to the argument. She had responded well to aggressive forms of chemotherapy in the past. Why not now? And why was the doctor being so conservative, so pessimistic, about the outcome? Oncology is not an exact science. They get these things badly wrong sometimes. I was given six months to live, you hear people saying, and here I am, five years on, fighting fit! So, I made the case for treatment. I said perhaps it was worth a shot. “I don’t want to die with no hair,” she said. Rational deliberation had little to do with it in the end. It came down to a feeling of rightness.

            There are practical matters to deal with in the minutes and hours following a death. I called a doctor to conduct the certification, and a soft-spoken Ghanaian man showed up. I asked him if he could recommend an undertaker because, bizarrely in retrospect, I hadn’t given the matter any thought. The doctor went on his way and I called the Co-operative Funeral Service and, while we were waiting for the undertaker, the boys and I took turns to say goodbye. I stroked her hair. When the body was removed, we—Tom, Nat and I, and Nat’s wife, Rosie—ate some pasta and drank some wine. We talked about Kate. Her death felt, unexpectedly, like an accomplishment. It was a peaceful end, we agreed, a dignified one, and the suffering was over. I could not face spending the night in our, now just my, bedroom, so I laid a mattress on the floor in Tom’s. I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic for a while before settling to sleep, and I slept well. The next day, our anniversary, I took Kate’s wedding ring to a jeweler for resizing. I’d promised her I would wear it for the rest of my life.

            In the days that followed there was the funeral to arrange, and details to gather for the Registrar of Births and Deaths, who, when I got to see him, told me he was sorry for my loss, a phrase that must pass his lips fifty times a week, and then he gave me an oldfashioned fountain pen to sign some forms. Then there’s the funeral, and that’s it. A life concluded; a death documented.

            Then the memories started pushing through. Doors opened into unexpected rooms. Through this window, a crisp winter morning, through that, a summer’s afternoon. Fragments of childhood swirled up like leaves in a flurry. Schooldays. Work. The early years with Kate. I opened the back door and there we were, standing in a downpour. The scent of hard rain on dry earth. Soaked to the skin. Alive. The images were involuntary and spasmodic, as if my brain were trying to gather threads of meaning without much involving “me,” churning the memories, poking and probing. Reconstructing. Who are you? What next?

            What next? No idea. I was wandering through a mist, not knowing what to expect when the sun burns through. When I’m gone, just get on and do whatever you must. But what? Sell the house, she said. Pack in the job. Move to another town. Find another woman. Anything. I’ll be just a memory.

            I decided to follow Kate’s advice and retire from work at the earliest opportunity. You’re getting stale. I was. You’ve no appetite. True. Let go. She had it all figured out. I could use her life insurance money to pay off the mortgage, and, within a couple of years, I’d be eligible to apply for an early retirement package, which would give me a small pension to live on. So I found myself entering a branch of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society, briskly signing a check for ninety-six thousand, four hundred and eighty- eight pounds, forty-three pence, and going back out into the street with a tear running down my cheek. You get those stabs of absence to the gut when you least expect them. Eighteen months later I resigned my university post and got on with the things I’d much rather be getting on with. Walking the moors. Country pubs. Football. Reading. Loafing.

           Believe me, I’m a good loafer, but my brain wouldn’t rest.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Paul Broks.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Videos