Our Brains Have Evolved to Defeat Us: "The Echo Maker"

In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers turns his extraordinary intellect to focus both on neurology, particularly the neurology of consciousness, and environmental peril.

Mark Schluter, a man in his 20s, develops Capgras syndrome after a horrific car accident that nearly kills him. Sufferers from Capgras are convinced that people they are close to have been replaced by doubles; I think of it as “Body Snatchers syndrome” after the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Mark can’t recognize his sister Karin despite the fact that she looks identical to his sibling, and he explains this phenomenon with a delusional conspiracy theory in which the government has switched his sister with a trained double for unknown but evil purposes. Karin abandons her job in another city to care for Mark, a thankless and heartbreaking job.

Mark’s disaster happens during an environmental struggle to preserve the wetlands essential to the survival of the Sandhill cranes, a magnificent species, who stop at the Platte River (in Nebraska) to feed as part of their migration route.

Sandhill cranes

Source: Gary Leavens/Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Developers want to build in this area, which will destroy the environment for these creatures. Ironically, they want to expand the already flourishing tourism aimed at seeing the birds, but, ultimately, they will be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak. Connecting the stories, Karin’s partner works for an environmental agency, and her lover is a developer. But the true lynchpin is Gerald Weber, a neurologist based loosely on Oliver Sacks, who travels to meet with Mark and study his condition.

When Weber meets Mark, his latest book has just been published. It meets with a backlash from his previous splendid successes; negative reviews charge him with being a voyeuristic predator who exploits the weakness of his subjects to create his sensational and popular accounts. But they—and he—are popular no longer. The assault on his ego forces Weber to think about ego more generally—and literally. He becomes viscerally aware of what he has always known: The ego, the self, the “I” that organizes our view of the world, is fragile and illusory, a trick of neural circuitry that is easily destroyed, as Weber’s chronicles of neurological disorders have made abundantly clear. And this ego has proved to be brilliant, creative, and, unfortunately, destructive. Weber has told his stories without any true feeling or regard for his subjects.

On a larger scale, selfishly assuming that our needs and perceptions matter more than those of any other creature, humankind is assaulting the environment, destroying that which gave rise to us. Within the depths of this sophisticated mind-brain that has produced the most destructive animal on earth, older personas lurk, emerging in moments of neurological or psychological vulnerability. This is not always a bad thing. Weber discovers his kinship with other beings only when his identity, brilliant writer and clinician, is assailed.

Weber realizes that we are all afflicted with Capgras insofar as we create the realities we inhabit, just as Capgras sufferers do, because we have no unmediated access to the outer world; that world is only available to us through neural processing.

But the novel suggests a more subtle connection between Mark and those who are neurologically intact. One theory about Capgras is that neurological damage has cut some of the crucial links between emotional and cognitive areas of the brain. For that reason, when Mark sees Karin and doesn’t experience the emotions he usually associates with her, he believes she is an imposter. (Emotion is to a great extent a function of the right hemisphere, and the left confabulates to explain perceptions of the right it fails to understand, as Michael Gazzaniga has famously demonstrated.)

We suffer from a disconnection of this kind; many of us fail to experience an emotional connection with the natural world, which feels like a backdrop, stage-set scenery (such as trees) and props (nonhuman animals), rather than a living entity, Gaia, the earth, which contains "endless forms most beautiful and wonderful," as Darwin said. One of the astounding chapters of The Echo Maker recounts one season of migration from the point of view of a crane family (they are monogamous and raise offspring together). Powers jolts us out of that bounded, limited, and very human point of view.

Our disconnection from the natural world has hurt us, not only by sending us hurtling toward the destruction of our species along with countless others but also by depriving us of a resource we evolved to use, before we abjured it through our amazing and horrifying ability to defy evolution (we fly, we communicate over vast distances, we travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours, things we were never meant to do with respect to our neurology and physiology). We live in a deadened world. And it is not good for us. Research has shown that spending time in nature can improve our mental health and sharpen cognition. Living near greenery lowers the risk for depression. Immersion in nature has healing properties for those suffering from mental disorders, particularly anxiety and depression.

The Echo Maker involves a mystery: Why did Mark, an experienced driver, drive his truck off the road? Who are the others who were at the scene of the accident, as indicated by tire tracks? Did someone want him dead? A letter is found by his bedside from an unknown stranger who claims to have saved him so that he could save someone else. Like all good mysteries, we find out what happened at the end. But this is the least of discoveries for several of the characters, including Karin and Weber, who find other, more humble and clear-sighted identities to the ones they have been living. Like Capgras victims who respond well to a medication only recently discovered, like the heroes of fairy tales who wake up from a spell, they wake up to themselves and to their place in the immense and extraordinary world in which they live. May we all wake up to what we are and what we are doing.