FAVOURITE BOOKS

This book is a collection of case studies from when the author was a practicing Psychologist. He had a fascination of the unusual as well as how the mind adapts from trauma, mental impairment, or change. I’m really happy I read this before studying the mind body problem in Philosophy class. It was a very useful reference. It’s a fascinating look into identity, mental illness, morality and even the soul (or that’s my takeaway from it).
In the book he mentions a number of cases, but my favourite includes a woman with poor mental illness and her relief when she’s in nature. There’s a few like this in the book, the case with the twins and(spoiler) their incredible math ability. These cases seem to explore the faults of measuring intelligence on our understanding of it. The way I see it is, say hypothetically, Prof. Stephen Hawking developed Lou Gehrig’s disease earlier in his life or at a time we didn’t have the medical and technological advances to allow him to communicate. To an outsider, the Professor could have been mistaken for some mentally deficient, yet in reality he is one of the greatest minds of his lifetime.
Personally, I can relate to this because I have found it really difficult to find anyone that understood me. I’m not a genius or even that intelligent, my test anxiety doesn’t help. I only found out I had that when I reached college. I know my spelling and grammar are below par but when it comes to things that require understanding (like Shakespeare, poetry, and language) I fall in love with them. In school I was the only one that could “translate” Shakespeare for a long while. Side not Shakespeare is filled with puns, dirty jokes and a very early, if not the first, I slept with your mom joke. Throw in some dad joke and wed have the same sense of humour haha.
Then finally, his case of the dementia patient playing the piano.
The patient was pretty far on with dementia, remembering very little of their lives and people around them, but put them in front of a piano and they could play it beautifully. This to me confirmed the existence of a soul.
You see when we play instruments, we can play the same piece and be taught by the same person but we each have an individual style and timing. Even if its subtle. In my IT course there was a guy that developed a locking system that would unlock his computer by playing a song on a guitar hero controller/Guitar. The way it worked was you would learn a tune and it recorded your mannerisms, techniques etc until you learned to play it without the need for the song. The system was hugely successful, but it wasn’t very practical so you’re probably not going to see it coming with your next laptop or anything.  
The patient didn’t have much of a functioning brain, but it made me realise the part of them, that self was still alive in there. They were still them, at least on some level. To be honest Dementia scares the heck out of me, it has inspired me to want to learn an instrument one day. Still haven’t picked one yet though haha.