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from the funding-for-rehabilitation-of-naive-realists dept. Among these recollections of Crick's later-life ventures into the biological basis of consciousness, Oliver Sacks writes: During 1986, encouraged by the questions Crick had fired at me, I spent a good deal of time with my colorblind patient, Mr. I., and in January of 1987, I wrote to Crick. "I have now written up a longish report on my patient.... Only in the actual writing did I come to see how color might indeed be a (cerebro-mental) construct." I had now started to wonder, I added, whether all perceptual qualities, including the perception of motion, were similarly constructed by the brain. I had spent most of my professional life wedded to notions of "naive realism," regarding visual perceptions, for example, as mere transcriptions of retinal images—this was very much the epistemological atmosphere at the time. But now, as I worked with Mr. I., this was giving way to a very different vision of the brain-mind, a vision of it as essentially constructive or creative. I got a letter back a few days later -- Crick was the promptest of correspondents -- in which he sought more detail about the difference between my migraine patients and a remarkable motion-blind patient described by the German neuropsychologist Josef Zihl. My migraine patients experienced "stills" in rapid succession, whereas in Zihl's patient (who had acquired motion blindness following a stroke), the stills apparently lasted much longer, perhaps several seconds each. In particular, Crick wanted to know whether, in my patients, successive stills occurred within the interval between successive eye movements, or only between such intervals. "I would very much like to discuss these topics with you," he wrote, "including your remarks about color as a cerebro-mental construct." < | >
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Remembering Francis Crick
