The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind

by Noga Arikha

As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the  unbreakable links  between  our bodies and our sense of self.  
 
A diabetic woman awakens from a coma having forgotten the last ten years of her life. A Haitian immigrant has nightmares that begin bleeding into his waking hours. A retired teacher loses the use of her right hand due to pain of no known origin. 
 
Noga Arikha began studying these patients and their confounding symptoms in order to explore how our physical experiences inform our identities. Soon after she initiated her work, the question took on unexpected urgency, as Arikha’s own mother began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. 
 
Weaving together stories of her subjects’ troubles and her mother’s decline, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she has set out to study. The result is an unforgettable journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and each other. 

Genres: Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Mental Illness, Memoir

304 pages, Hardcover

Published May 3, 2022

About the author

Noga Arikha grew up in Paris and studied in London. She received a doctorate in history at London's Warburg Institute, was a Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, and has taught at Bard College and at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. She lives in New York and London.

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Noga Arikha is no Oliver Sacks and although she tries to style this book after his writings, it is unfortunately dry and dull.

It was painful going through the entire book due to the writing style. For some reason, the author loves long, convoluted sentences utilizing dashes. I have never seen so many dashes used in a book before! I hold the editor responsible as much as her for letting this through.

Here is an example:

“Yet as I have been learning during these days of decline in my mother’s life, the pathology is not the whole story of that person – not unless and until it reaches the last, gruesomely vegetative stage. It determines the logistics of a life, but the core self does remain, even as the autobiographical self disperses progressively – to adopt the distinction formulated by Antonio Damasio, who also describes how Alzheimer’s disease erodes ‘the bedrock of autobiographical memory’, how he saw neurons in areas key to its functioning ‘turned into tombstones’. So much is lost – neurons dying as time ticks and even as I type – but for now my mother’s hand feels the same on my hand or face as it did when I was a child.”

Here is another example:

“An increasingly detailed picture is also emerging of the relation of cerebral activity to our other vital organs – in particular the heart and the gut – and of the mechanisms of ‘interoception’, that is, the experience of our body from within, and the perception of bodily sensations whether we attend to them or not. The biologically real, relational, feeling body that is embedded in the world has re-entered the mind, informing how we understand the self as an inherently social entity, and also how it can diverge from the body’s reality – that is, how, in illness, we do not always feel ourselves to be what we are.”

I would have saved a lot of time just reading the book summary at https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/...

[Raquel Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took multiple efforts to keep picking up this book to finish it. While the author obviously researched an immense amount of information, I felt there was a failure to truly connect the observations she made with the philosophical conclusions. Of consideration, maybe impossible at the time, partly obscured due to the diagnosis of her own mother. The book seemed more of an exploratory journal - of the journey of her acceptance of her mother’s demise. Along with the author, I’m also fascinated with how our brain works (or doesn’t). While the author attributes thinking and discoveries appropriately, like references to the work of Oliver Sacks and others, the explorations left me without any solid conclusions. Perhaps, that’s the point. We are interesting creatures. I wish the book was presented either as a scientific inquiry or a memoir. Because I know a little French, the multiple inferences were appropriate, adding a flowery air to the ‘art’ of her efforts. So, while I appreciate what feels like a mix of all the author is and knows, it seemed ‘off mark’ somehow which was disappointing. I can relate to trying to piece things together. My father-in-law is also experiencing Alzheimer’s - it’s a mystery, it’s a discovery, and it’s devastating and beautiful at the same time.

[Susan Belperio · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book examines many examples of the Disrupted Mind, about which I have read extensively before tackling this one. Yet I found it extremely hard going to the point that I struggled to finish it. Some claims are simply not valid, for example the association that is claimed between her Mother's TGA episode (transient global amnesia) and her Mum's subsequent development of dementia. There is simply no scientific association proven to date in the literature between these two conditions.

[Rae Simpson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Minuteman. Skimmed. Examples of neurological problems that affect behavior, woven with reflections on mother's alzheimer's. Philosophical, not compellingly written. Could pull out examples for discussion of physical causes of "mental" illness if needed.

[Shana Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Stefanie Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn’t get into. Maybe for more poetic souls but a book I much preferred on the subject is “the man who mistook his wife for a hat” by Oliver Sacks

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting material, but overwritten and repetitive/

[D R · Rating 3 out of 5]

listened to audiobook to write a review for library journal.

i will link to a review there.

[Joanna Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this exploration of questions of how we create ourselves from our memories and the projection of those memories into the elusive present.

[Cindy.Sherban · Rating 3 out of 5]

did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would I think it is mostly a matter of inaccurate expectations

[Florent Diverchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex yet very interesting book about tough medical cases of the mind and what they tell us about the building of our selves. Puzzling.