Yes, it's me again and once more I'd like to show you something about our mind. Both previous parts were about diseases that were obvoious in some sense. Each of them were a lack or excess of something, but this part is about something that may be seen as a spiritual, supernatural or more like a case for a psychoanalyst. These aren't problems considered by many people as neurological or medical. Let's get to the stories, because that's what is really interesting.

Miss O'C lived in home for elderly and was hard of hearing. One night she was awaken by very loud Irish music. Beside her, no one was awake. She started to look for a radio that might had been responsible for those sounds, but every one was off. After that, she realized that her dental filling might acted like an antenna. It turned out that it wasn't the reason. After she visited some doctors, she came to doctor Sacks. All the time she was listening that Irish music and it made doing anything impossible. As silly as it may sound, she had problems with communication with others because of that. After some talk, it turned out that these songs were memories from miss O'C's childhood. After some more days of tests, music started to become more and more silent and in course of few weeks, music disappered.

When describing this case, Book's author tells a story of other similar cases. There are hundreds of people with problems alike the mentioned one. Some of them were worse, because they didn't disappear just like that. Everyone described there, could have recalled those songs as being part of his past like for Miss O'C. The sad part of this disesase is that there were some people that had parts of their brains removed to get rid of the neverending stream of music. It was just physical removal of memories. The interesting part is that it seems that brain can keep or keeps memories and can show them as if they were happening at that very moment.

Other thing is that some people can forget something like Donald did. He took phencyclidine and killed his wife after that. Another day he didn't remember anything. He was hypnotised and tested in many other ways that prooved with high certainity that really didn't remember what has happened to his wife. He was imprisoned and after many years there, he was freed. Not longer after that, he had an accident which harmed his brain. In hospital he had nightmares of him killing his wife and it turned out that these were the real memories of what he did in the past. It's really amazing that brain really remembers everything but it seems that we just can't find it there. For me it seems that brain is a mystery that we know little about.

I recommend you to watch Oliver Sacks talk about hallucination from TED conference:


Do you know any interesting medical cases involving brain?
Do you have deja-vu sometimes? Do you think it's like a flashback in some way similar to above-mentioned stories?
What do you think of science of the brain? Can it lead to our full knowledge of what brain is, how it works and where our soul is there?