دانلود کتاب A new view of insanity. The duality of the mind proved by the structure, functions, and diseases of the brain, and by the phenomena of mental derangement, and shewn to be essential to moral responsibility.

The question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin has long since ceased to exercise our finest scholars. Yet if one wanted a contemporary analogue the following might suffice: how many minds may a man (or woman) manifest? “One”, said Rene Descartes; “Two”, said Arthur Wigan and Roger Sperry; “Fortytwo”, said Franz-Joseph Gall.
The answer “Two” was sanctified by the award of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to Sperry for the work that he and his colleagues had undertaken on commissurotomized patients. Some 20 years earlier, the eminent Los Angeles neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen had succeeded in reducing the incidence of major convulsive seizures in a small group of severely epileptic patients by sectioning the main cortical fibre tracts (commissures) that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. Sperry’s intensive testing of the cognitive functions of these patients’ now-disconnected cortices sparked a veritable explosion of interest in the differential psychological capacities of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. On one account of the results, Bogen’s operation did not create two minds within a single body but rather revealed that we are all dual creatures, deluded in our belief that each of us is an indivisible self.
Bogen’s (or Bogens’) own interest in these issues has extended beyond the investigation and interpretation of his “splitbrain” patients to include the history of neurological speculation about cerebral duality. One fruit of his delving into the past is this splendidly handsome reprint of Arthur Wigan’s Victorian epic of 1844, the scope and character of which is best shown by its full title: A New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind Proved by the Structure, Functions, and Diseases of the Brain and by the Phenomena of Mental Derangement, and Shown to be Essential to Moral Responsibility. Indeed, Wigan’s version of the “two-brain” theory is sufficiently close to some modern accounts for Bogen to name his own position “neowiganism”.
Who might want to read the book today? To begin with, anyone who is concerned with the relationship between the neurosciences and society will he fascinated to see Wigan struggling to resolve the tension between biological determinism, educability and moral choice. Wigan’s phraseology, and the certainty of his Victorian belief in scientific and ethical progress, may seem quaint to our more cynical ears:
The only limit to our researches on the nature of the mind, will ultimately be the boundary fixed by the Almighty to the powers of the human intellect - a point from which we are yet immeasurably distant. When we shall have cultivated all the faculties which He has bestowed upon us, to their full extent and perfection, then indeed will come the Millennium – an issue towards which we are steadily and rapidly advancing .... ;
yet his discussion of the potential conflicts between humanistic and scientific approaches to psychiatry and neurology is a good deal more honest and open than many current positions.
Second, the book should be read by all students of neuropsychology. Wigan is a pre-modern in that his work pre-dates the discovery of complementary hemispheric specialization that became (and remains) the central dogma of human neuro-psychology. Thus the notion that the left hemisphere is primarily implicated in language functions and the right in visuospatial functions is quite alien to Wigan’s time. For Wigan, the hemispheres are full duplicates with respect to their intrinsic cognitive capacities; it is solely “slight inequalities” of “form, energy, and function” that suffice “to produce all the varieties of character which are to be found in the world”. Accordingly, many of the case reports that Wigan describes are directed towards showing that “One cerebrum may be destroyed, yet the mind remain entire”. The contemporary student would benefit greatly from the exercise of contemplating whether Wigan’s conclusion derives merely from inadequate testing of non-verbal skills or rather contains an important truth that has been buried under our own obsession with complementary specialization.