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This is a crude translation of a scientific treatise by a German scientist, Otfrid Klause, ostensibly based on research into soldiers with cranial wounds from the Austro-Prussian War (1866). He notes that the introduction of a new rifle round has greatly changed the nature of injury, because the new round has the ability to penetrate through both sides of the skull, resulting in some 38 soldiers who survived with wounds passing in straight lines through their cranium. Based on this, the author develops theories of brain function. At first, he notes that injuries to the left side of the brain influence language -- while injury to the right brain does not. He also distinguishes between frontal lobes and rear. It records description of the change of personalities of the soldiers after their head injuries. It contains a number of mental exercises developed to help the soldiers recover functioning, including many left-right asymmetric stimulations. A large chapter is devoted in particular to a patient who was badly injured, losing the use of his left eye and arm and who had a skull injury exactly through the center. Dr. Klause reported the peculiar ability that in his sleep, his crippled left arm was still functioning, and could respond to questions by gesture and clumbsy writing. The author develops the theory that there are separate personalities at work within a single brain -- which invisibly influence the construction of memory. He frames it as a struggle between the smothering, irrational animal intellect -- a superstitious and suggestible "mother figure" which holds back the scientific "overmind". He outlines techniques that allow the overmind to be accessed independently. These include including hidden messages within text, patterns of letters that can only be picked up by the overmind -- as well as a form of automatic writing. A careful study of the book, however, reveals that the data does not come from the set of soldiers that the author initially describes. The number of samples is much greater than the 38 described, and there are veiled references to difference between adult and child brain function, male and female, as well as between Semitic, African, and European. Most of these seem to have been deliberately inflicted brain trauma -- and what he initially says is a single patient with a split left-right brain appears to be a fictional combination of a dozen or more patients with deliberately inflicted separation. Particularly towards the end of the book, the author expresses many extreme views on the problems of the irrational parts of the mind -- associating them with female social dominance, "irrational" religion and Judaism in particular, and witchcraft. |