- seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
options like the relatively new field of neurophenomenology, but for now we turn
to a different comparison, the differences in brain function between being con-
scious and unconscious, or being in some of the many possible states in between.UNCONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN
Imagine you visit an injured friend in hospital and find her lying passively in
bed. Her eyes are open, and she seems at first to be awake but shows no signs of
awareness. You try to talk to her, but she does not respond, and you have no idea
whether she can hear you or not. Is she still in there somewhere? Does some kind
of consciousness remain despite the unresponsive body?
You might worry that your friend has ‘locked-in syndrome’, known in French as ‘la mal-
adie de l’emmuré vivant’, or being walled-in alive. This terrifying, though rare, condition
happens when parts of the midbrain or brain stem are damaged by accident, disease,
or stroke, while higher areas are spared. Usually all muscles are paralysed except for
the eyes. So, some patients have learned to communicate using special computer
interface technology. A famous example is Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose book The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997) was dictated one letter at a time by blinking his left
eyelid – the only muscle he could move. From such accounts we know that there is a
fully conscious, feeling person behind the paralysis. But if your friend were ‘locked in’,
she would be unlikely to recover any motor function or to live long.Monsieur Noirtier was sitting in an armchair which moved on casters,
and which he was placed into in the morning, and pulled out of again
at night. [. . .] Sight and hearing were the only senses which, like two
solitary sparks, still animated this human substance which was three-
quarters of the way to the grave; and of these two, only one could
still reveal the inner life that animated the statue; and the look which
betrayed this inner life was like one of those distant lights which tell a
night-time traveller lost in a desert that a living being still exists in this
silence and this darkness.And in these black eyes of the old Noirtier, crowned by black eyebrows,
while all his hair, which he wore long and flowing over his shoulders,
was white; in these eyes, as often happens with a bodily organ used
to the exclusion of the others, was concentrated all the activity, all the
skill, all the strength, all the intelligence, that once had been spread
across his body and his mind. Yes, the gesture of his arm, the sound
of his voice, the bearing of his body, were lacking, but these powerful
eyes replaced them all: he commanded with his eyes, he thanked with
his eyes; he was a corpse with two living eyes, and nothing was more
frightening, now and then, than this marble face burning from above
with anger or glowing with joy.(Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo [Le comte de Monte Cristo],
Ch. 58, 1845, our translation)