To whom do our physical bodies really belong? The following stories are real. Check it out:
A man decides to take an extended sailing trip, and ends up spending a number of days in the doldrums, with no wind to blow him anywhere. He had no radio to speak of, and the sea was calm and noiseless. Several days into his stagnation, he begins to hear an endless heavy metal guitar solo in his head. Hours and hours of endless thrashing a la Eddie Van Halen. When he describes the noise, he says that it is not the "song stuck in my head" type of low drone, but loud, distracting, like the soloist were playing just off the deck of the ship. Days later, the guitar gives way to a bagpipe, which keeps him company until he was able to return to shore. Several other people, deaf and hearing alike, report having other kinds of aural hallucinations whilst spending a lot of time in soundless environments.
A man slowly loses his sight as a result of a genetic disorder. He went from having full sight, to seeing mostly in black and white, to being completely blind. Years after losing his vision, he is lying on the couch listening to a story about sailors during the Revolutionary War, when a man passes into his transom, a man that he can describe down to the buttons on his vest. What's more, the two acknowledge the other's presence, and the sailor proceeds to accompany the blind man for the next few hours. He goes to his doctor, who tells him that many blind people experience the same thing. It's called Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it has occured with blind and sighted people alike (when sighted people are deprived of their vision for only a few hours). Besides the sailor, the blind man hallucinates of curtains, dresses, and other random objects. He says that he can now induce these hallucinations by eating tuna sashimi. Go figure.
Here's one we've all heard of: amputees can actually feel their former limbs for a lifetime after they've lost them. They ache, they get sore, they even itch, when the nerve endings that would cause any of these sensations have long since gone. It's interesting to note that Herman Melville actually included this symptom in the one-legged character of Captain Ahab, who lost his leg to Moby Dick. How's that for doing your research?
The strangest to me, though, is Alien Hand Syndrome. Sometimes, patients of brain surgery report losing control of one of their hands. Their hands may adopt separate personalities, and do things even to thwart the other hand, such as unbuttoning a shirt that the other hand is trying to button, or knock silverware out of the hand during a meal. Sufferers of AHS will give names to their foreign limbs, and may even create elaborate stories about the "occupier's" identity and past.
Many of these strange syndromes can be explained by the fact that neurons, when not being used, simply come up with work for themselves. If you're blind, for example, the neurons in your brain that receive visual signals get bored after a few years, and so invent things to see.
But what does that imply for the anima of the person him/herself? What about things like AHS, in which it would seem like, during brain surgery, the person has actually been divided into two pieces, and one bit of consciousness is trapped inside the hand, while the larger part, perhaps, takes control of everything else, like sight and speech?
The world is a crazy place.
End Transmission.
A man decides to take an extended sailing trip, and ends up spending a number of days in the doldrums, with no wind to blow him anywhere. He had no radio to speak of, and the sea was calm and noiseless. Several days into his stagnation, he begins to hear an endless heavy metal guitar solo in his head. Hours and hours of endless thrashing a la Eddie Van Halen. When he describes the noise, he says that it is not the "song stuck in my head" type of low drone, but loud, distracting, like the soloist were playing just off the deck of the ship. Days later, the guitar gives way to a bagpipe, which keeps him company until he was able to return to shore. Several other people, deaf and hearing alike, report having other kinds of aural hallucinations whilst spending a lot of time in soundless environments.
A man slowly loses his sight as a result of a genetic disorder. He went from having full sight, to seeing mostly in black and white, to being completely blind. Years after losing his vision, he is lying on the couch listening to a story about sailors during the Revolutionary War, when a man passes into his transom, a man that he can describe down to the buttons on his vest. What's more, the two acknowledge the other's presence, and the sailor proceeds to accompany the blind man for the next few hours. He goes to his doctor, who tells him that many blind people experience the same thing. It's called Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it has occured with blind and sighted people alike (when sighted people are deprived of their vision for only a few hours). Besides the sailor, the blind man hallucinates of curtains, dresses, and other random objects. He says that he can now induce these hallucinations by eating tuna sashimi. Go figure.
Here's one we've all heard of: amputees can actually feel their former limbs for a lifetime after they've lost them. They ache, they get sore, they even itch, when the nerve endings that would cause any of these sensations have long since gone. It's interesting to note that Herman Melville actually included this symptom in the one-legged character of Captain Ahab, who lost his leg to Moby Dick. How's that for doing your research?
The strangest to me, though, is Alien Hand Syndrome. Sometimes, patients of brain surgery report losing control of one of their hands. Their hands may adopt separate personalities, and do things even to thwart the other hand, such as unbuttoning a shirt that the other hand is trying to button, or knock silverware out of the hand during a meal. Sufferers of AHS will give names to their foreign limbs, and may even create elaborate stories about the "occupier's" identity and past.
Many of these strange syndromes can be explained by the fact that neurons, when not being used, simply come up with work for themselves. If you're blind, for example, the neurons in your brain that receive visual signals get bored after a few years, and so invent things to see.
But what does that imply for the anima of the person him/herself? What about things like AHS, in which it would seem like, during brain surgery, the person has actually been divided into two pieces, and one bit of consciousness is trapped inside the hand, while the larger part, perhaps, takes control of everything else, like sight and speech?
The world is a crazy place.
End Transmission.
posted by napalmbrain at
7:43 PM
3 Comments
