Stout, Sacks, O'Brien Expository Writing Final Paper

The Protective Mind Of all the human body parts, the mind is the one that serves multiple roles. It is the part that allows humans to turn their knowledge and intelligence into useful inventions. Indeed, it is what makes humans more superior than animals. The human mind is a miraculous tool; it can store memories, protect humans from their traumatic experiences, and allow imagination to roam freely. When a person encounters a traumatic experience, the mind can automatically pull tricks to help him cope with the trauma. If one wishes to escape, one can always rely on the human mind to provide ways to diminish the pain. In Martha Stout’s article, “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” she explains the dissociative state that all humans go through. However, for those who have experienced trauma and are suffering from those experiences, their minds can “pull” themselves out of their bodies for days. Similarly, in “The Mind’s Eye” written by Oliver Sacks, he discusses his understandings of the mind’s eye through the experiences of his own and the ones that have been shared with him by those whose senses are impaired. The concepts that are derived from Stout and Sacks’ articles can be connected to the soldiers’ experiences in “How to Tell A True War Story” by Tim O’Brien. He describes the unavoidable truth of war and methods the soldiers use to cope with the pain traumatic events bring them. The soldiers use their mind’s eye to dissociate by altering their perceptions of reality. By allowing their imagination to overtake their mind, the soldiers are able to dissociate from the horrors of war. A character from Sacks’ article, Tenberken, shares her inputs on visualizing the reality with her mind’s eye without the help of her eyesight. Her vision may be impaired, but that does not hinder her pictures of the world, rather she continues to see the world in overwhelmingly vivid imagery. Tenberken’s artistic imagery allows her to romanticize her own perceptions of reality, “Tenberken saw, in her mind’s eye, ‘a beach of crystallized salt shimmering like snow under an evening sun, at the edge of a vast body of turquoise water…’ But then it turns out that she has been facing in the wrong direction, not ‘looking’ at the lake at all, and that she has been ‘staring’ at rocks and a gray landscape” (Sacks 309). With the assistance of her gift of synesthesia, Tenberken is able form her own perceptions of reality through her mind’s eye. Along with the help of her other senses, including verbal description and her almost pictographic imagination, she creates an image that is flamboyant and perpetual in her mind’s eye. Through the imagination created in the mind’s eye, one makes up a scene to dissociate into. Stout writes about the dissociative state her patients undergo and the causes of such a state. One of her patients, Seth, describes his vision when he experiences the dissociative state, “But for the most of my life it was really no more frightening than the things that were on the beach, no more frightening than reality, I guess is what I’m saying. So floating in the middle of the ocean was really the best place, even though I guess that sounds strange (Stout 396). When the reality becomes a traumatic experience people wish to escape, they undergo a dissociative state where they may or may not be aware of. In this case, reality changes into the scenery in Seth’s mind; he describes the scenery as a place more comforting than the reality. The reality that Seth perceives changes and allows him to drift into the scenery in his own mind in order to protect himself from the trauma. With the help of his imagination in his mind’s eye, he is able to dissociate himself during the triggering of his trauma and escapes into the world that he created himself. Through his own mind’s eye, he develops a protective cover that allows him to stay away from the reality. The strong imagery that exists in the mind’s eye assists in creating a place for the soldiers to dissociate into. During the course of war, the soldiers lose one of their best mates, “When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot” (O’Brien 271). At the sight of an exploding body, especially one they are close with, the soldiers dissociate themselves to avoid facing the trauma. Even for only a few moments, the soldiers dissociate and use their mind’s eye to perceive their friend’s death differently. The narrator uses a beautiful description on Lemon who has just been blown off to attribute poetic meaning to this tragedy, which shows how the narrator and soldiers use their imagination to avoid facing the truth of death. The imagination of their mind’s eye allows them to perceive death in a more meaningful way and quickly allows the narrator and the soldiers to dissociate from the situation. Not only do the soldiers dissociate by allowing their imagination to alter the perceptions of reality, they also dissociate by creating their own reality. The soldiers escape the reality by creating another reality through the help of their mind’s eye. In Sacks’ article, he discusses the Torey and his ability to perform activities that seem impossible for a blind man. As a child, Torey reads scripts in his father’s studio, which has strengthened his imagination over the years. After losing his eyesight, he further develops his visual by using his mind’s eye, “…he had been extremely successful, developing a remarkable power of generating, holding, and manipulating images in his mind, so much so that he had been able to construct an imaged visual world that seemed almost as real and intense to him as the perpetual one he had lost- and, sometimes more real, a sort of controlled dream or hallucination” (Sacks 306). By creating his own reality in his mind’s eye, Torey is able to reconstruct the entire roof by himself. His ability to hold and manipulate images in his mind’s eye is due to the intensification of his visual imagery. Interestingly enough, when Torey is forming his own reality in his mind’s eye, it seems as though he has entered a state of dissociation like a “controlled dream” or “hallucination”. With the help of his mind’s eye, not only is Torey able to perform activities that seem impossible for a person with impaired vision, he is able to create his own different dimension of reality. Torey’s resilient imagination allows him to create perceptions that are more intense and real than the images a person with normal vision can see. When using his mind’s eye to develop a reality of his own, he escapes the reality and dissociate into his own world. Torey’s experience is of similarity to Julia’s who is a patient Stout writes about, except Julia creates another reality by shifting her focus on someone else’s life. The description for Julia’s first impression is as: “Her memory for detail is beyond exceptional, and she has the storyteller’s gift. When she is recounting information, or a story, her own intellectual fascination with it gives her voice the poised and expertly modulated quality of the narrator of a high-budget documentary” (Stout 385). As a filmmaker, Julia has a strong mind’s eye; she notices details easily, just like Torey, she also has a marvelous visual imagery. When her trauma is triggered, she automatically dissociates herself by focusing on her mind’s eye. She creates her own reality through filming and focusing on someone’s life without dealing with her reality. During a traumatic experience, the soldiers also use their mind’s eye to create another reality and dissociate themselves. At the killing of the water buffalo, the soldiers stand speechless for a while: “The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it” (O’Brien 275). After such a traumatic experience of watching a live animal shot to death, the soldiers dissociate themselves from the situation. By using their mind’s eye to justify for their actions, the soldiers are able to make up a reality for the situation. With the help of their mind’s eye, the soldiers are able to dissociate from reality by creating their own perceptions of reality. In this case, the soldiers use their mind’s eye to bring a moral into justifying the horrors of their actions, thus accepting that their actions are tolerable. The soldiers create their own realities and justification in order to avoid facing the disgusts of their actions. The brain-mind structure works in miraculous ways and has the capability to be reshaped or reshape a person. The mind’s eye, an important aspect for visual imagery, contributes mostly to our perceptions. As the most important body part, our mind assists us in many different ways. Not only does it store information, memories, and knowledge, it also allows creativity and imagination to be put to work hence, the forming of ideas. It is indeed an important tool that serves us to become successful in life. However, its functions are broader and more complex than one can imagine. The human mind helps to produce the good and at the same time, block out the bad. When one goes through traumatic experiences, the mind has the ability to shut down that part of the memory in order to protect oneself. This function may be good, but it has also brought troubles to the ones being dissociated. Dissociation happens daily, to everyone. However, for some people, dissociation can be uncontrollably long and dangerous. Some people even find themselves attempting to commit suicide during the course of dissociation. Often times, people are found dissociating themselves from reality when their perceptions of reality are not what they wish to perceive. When one’s consciousness is splitting into different things, and the symptom of a longer period of dissociation occurs, one’s sanity can plummet.