ABSTRACT
In his book Proust was a Neuroscientist, which links the recent findings of brain researchers to the way artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recorded the phenomena of consciousness, the journalist Jonah Lehrer (2008) quotes the early stream of consciousness novelist Virginia Woolf’s description of her own mind. It was, she said, “very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun.” Lehrer adds that “At any given moment she seemed to be scattered in a million little pieces” (p. 169) and tells us that:
Woolf’s art searched for whatever held us together. What she found was the self, “the essential thing.” Although the brain is just a loom of electric neurons, Woolf realized that the self makes us whole. It is the fragile source of our identity, the author of our consciousness. If the self didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t exist. “One must have a whole in one’s mind,” Woolf said, “fragments are unendurable.”
(Woolf, 1989, p. 110, cited in Lehrer, 2008, p. 169)