The Ghost in My Brain

by Clark Elliott

  But how hard this is to explain to a normal! There is no checkbox on a neurologist’s form, nor is there a DSM-5 code to describe this unsettling loss. “Doctor, do you have a diagnosis for me? I can’t find north in my dreams anymore. . . .”

  SLEEP AND THE VISUAL SYSTEM. In addition to losing the NSEW grounding of my dreams, I had other visual/spatial problems associated with sleep, some of them surprising.

  In previous passages we have seen that I learned to fall asleep with my eyes open, and in the first few months after the crash I had to resort to this often to keep from getting seasick once I closed my eyes. But sleeping with one’s eyes open is not necessarily so unusual. Some parents reading this may recall those times when they’ve checked on their babies at night wondering if they have a zombie child: sound asleep, staring sightlessly off into the distance.

  Contemporary research, indicated by self-reporting but consistent with fMRI scans, suggests that people vary widely in how “visual” they are in their thinking. Some people create images in their minds that are almost as vivid as the deepest, most vivid dreams. A small percentage of the population reports not being visual at all in their thinking. I am toward the high end of the spectrum of visual thinkers. I made use of this predilection, for example, in my graduate study days, when I actively trained myself to enter a mild “lucid dreaming” state when working on the most difficult problems.

  Similarly, there is a wide range in how much people dream. The conventional thinking has long been that people dream during REM sleep, and experience dreamless sleep at other times. But it turns out that some people also dream during the non-REM periods, and this is only sometimes associated with disorders. Prior to the crash I was at the absolute end of the bell curve of sleep dreamers: if I was asleep I was dreaming. Always.*

  My being a highly visual thinker, combined with the fact that if I was asleep I was dreaming, happened to be two parts of an unfortunately bad mix, especially during the first year after the crash. By the end of the day, the visual processing parts of my brain were almost always exhausted, and were what most needed rest. But dreaming is primarily a visual exercise—especially so for a highly visual thinker like me. This meant that during the process of falling asleep I would immediately enter into my visually vivid dream world, and within a few minutes would become exhausted, nauseated, and completely disoriented—absolutely overwhelmed. When I was in this state, instead of going to sleep, no matter how tired I was, I had to sit and stare at some object five to ten feet away, doing absolutely nothing that would require the creation of any scenes in my head—any of the symbols of thought. (And although I didn’t piece it together until later, it turned out that on days when I did not have to make too much use of my eyes for balance, I could often sleep in the normal way.)

  After an hour or two, or four, or six, of sitting there being completely, staggeringly bored, my brain was rested enough to support the imagery of dreaming, and I could allow myself to fall asleep.

  One of the other sleep symptoms I began to experience one or two times a month after the crash was sleep paralysis—a startling state in which I would wake up enough to rise into consciousness, with full sentient awareness of my body, but was not awake enough to be able to move at all, in what is known as complete REM paralysis.*

  The most disconcerting problem of sleep paralysis, and one often experienced immediately upon waking in this eerie state, is that your natural inclination will be to take a deep breath in anticipation of the need for action, but because of the paralysis nothing happens. Your body, which is still asleep, is in fact autonomously getting enough air for its needs, but it feels like you are suffocating, since you’re not consciously able to draw breath. You might also experience other minor bodily discomforts, suddenly magnified in a claustrophobic way because you can’t do anything about them: you might feel too hot, or your limbs might be uncomfortable, but it’s impossible to move. Finally, with great effort, after a few long minutes have passed, you can usually move an eyelid, or a fingertip, and, as with the initiation problem, this gives enough feedback to get the body moving again. You can finally breathe in a gasping lungful of air.

  I find it troubling that so many people (reportedly, many millions of people) have to deal with sleep paralysis, and it is often considered exclusively from a psychiatric perspective as part of a general category of sleep disorders. The fact is, I never had this problem before the crash. I suffered from it for the eight years following the crash. I got better after effective treatment for concussion, and I’ve never had it again. Doesn’t this at least suggest the possibility that people who suffer from this frightening condition might benefit from the same sort of primarily visual-system treatments that we’ll later see I received?

  We also might be suspicious that at least some of those who suffer from sleep paralysis may have had earlier, undiagnosed brain concussions. In my own family, the one of my children who suffered regularly from sleep paralysis was also the one who had incurred a serious concussion from a bicycle fall.

  Because of my eight years’ experience on the other side, so to speak, I now have a lifelong appreciation of the graceful way that most of us can slip so elegantly into and out of sleep, and the natural effortlessness with which this complex transition is managed.

  RELATIONSHIP IN MEDITATION. When considering the long hours I spent being painfully bored, staring at a wall, doing nothing, giving my visual system a rest, a reasonable person might ask, what about meditation? After all, one of the goals of many kinds of meditation is embracing nothingness: being so present in the current moment that you are doing nothing at all. This seems ideal for giving visual systems in the brain a rest, while also using the time in a productive, self-enhancing, and restorative way. Alas, these two forms of nothingness—the type I pursued when trying to rest my concussion-wearied brain, and the kind pursued by meditators—are very different, in important ways.

  Prior to the crash, at times of great intellectual demand, I found that I could rest in a meditative state and would emerge rejuvenated. An hour’s focused meditation would be equivalent to several hours’ worth of sleep.

  Sometimes I would meditate in traditional ways. More often I would listen to music late at night, and would enter into a deeply meditative state, fully awake, without thought, highly concentrated, seeing nothing but a real-time vision of the music unfolding before my closed eyes. I would “see” the sounds of the music as interacting colors and shapes in all their interwoven complexity. It was pure sensory input, without thought. If someone spoke to me during such a meditation I wouldn’t be able to hear her, as though I were in a deep sleep. I tuned out the sound of voices just as I tuned out acoustic defects in the recordings. But if my interrupter became more intrusive, such as by tapping me on the shoulder, I might startle awake, even involuntarily calling out as I was wrenched back up from those deep levels of concentration.

  Meditation, and to my mind at least, every contemplative practice, has the critical element of relationship. Such states are experienced as a profound unveiling of the relationship of the individual to the rest of the universe, a revealing of the interconnectedness of life, and spirit, and the world. It is a becoming of the moment, and an understanding of how that moment is connected to all other moments both prior and following.

  But all of this, the sense of relationship to God, the spiritual connection to the universe, and the global sense of nothingness/everythingness, is highly visual/spatial in nature. It was unequivocally my experience that I could not enter into such a state without making use of the spatial processing areas of my brain. And of course, this was exactly the part of my brain that so often needed rest.

  For this reason, meditation was not often something I could engage in after the crash, and was most especially one of the worst things I could do when my visual systems were debilitated.

  DIALOGUE WITH GOD AND THE MATTER OF SENTIENCE. Since my very early teens, I’ve had the sense
of a dialogue with God. Though I did not grow up religious, praying was easy for me. I talked to God, and God listened. God talked to me (in pictures, and through intuition), and I listened. Dialogue with the spirit was easy and natural: comforting, occasionally demanding, real.

  Almost immediately following the crash, this dialogue disappeared. I recall very distinctly entering the small chapel at DePaul’s downtown university campus, sitting alone on one of the chairs to pray for my students, and for my ability to serve them as their professor—something I often did. In a profoundly disturbing moment I realized that there was no longer anyone there. No one was listening. I thought: These are just empty words I am saying to myself. My prayers are no different than if I were reading aloud from an auto repair manual.

  I felt a deep sense of loss, but in a weird way. Though I understood, intellectually, about the loss of dialogue with God, and I felt quite disturbed about how sterile my life had become because of it, I nonetheless couldn’t quite “see” what was missing. It was like trying to remember a dream. I still believed in God, but viscerally it was an entirely different experience: there was no longer anyone there.

  When we consider the nature of my later recovery, and the many examples we’ve seen of how our internal world is so very symbolic in nature, it becomes apparent that it was the loss of my visual/spatial ability to represent symbolic relationship that was at the heart of my troubles with God. If so, then losing the closeness to God I felt pre-concussion raises some interesting questions about our connection to the larger universe around us. Could this sense of connection be located entirely in one of the visual/spatial centers of our brains? After all, in my case I had this easy faith up until the moment of the crash. I lost it in the days after the crash. I didn’t have it for eight years. I got it back again after treatment for my concussion. This is pretty strong evidence that it is our brains—our physical brains—that support this kind of spiritual faith.

  What this means is still up for grabs, however. As scientists, we have to allow for at least two possibilities. On the one hand we could take this as evidence that a sense of God, and the spirit, is just an artifact of the neural, and possibly other, programming in our brains—a purely physical uprising from a locus in our heads. Certainly there are researchers who talk about the “God spot” in the parietal, and other, regions of the brain that are thought to give rise to spirituality. Some have even have claimed to have created a “God Helmet” that artificially stimulates a profound religious experience via artificial manipulation of the brain.* On the other hand, we could just as easily imagine that these parts of the brain allow us to connect to a real channel of spirituality, and that without them we have simply lost one dimension of our sensory capabilities. That is, if we lose our hearing, the world is still full of sound; in the same way, if we lose our sense of God, that doesn’t mean that God is not still out there.

  There is another, related question that we have already raised: we have discussed that concussives often feel as though they have become nonhuman. In my case I felt this profoundly. And, as we will see, when the Ghost later returns, it is because my brain can once again support the necessary cognition for being fully human. So what does this tell us about the nature of any sort of life after death? No one will disagree that our brains are physical devices, and that they perform all sorts of computational functions on our behalf. If losing some of the brain’s computational capabilities causes us to become so very much less human, then what does this say about our humanness when the physical brain stops functioning altogether? After all, we don’t take our brains with us when we die.

  A scientist might then suspect that life after death—life without a physical brain—might necessarily be a very foreign, thoroughly nonhuman existence indeed.

  These are not trivial questions. As computers get increasingly powerful, most thoughtful cognitive scientists must take such questions seriously. Consider the following enigma:

  Suppose we built a synthesized mind, which runs on a computer. It is completely artificial, and there is no part of it that is not implemented as zeros and ones in silicon registers. Most of us would have no problem terminating the artificial mind by turning off the computer, or frightening it, because we know it is not real. It doesn’t actually feel anything—after all, we are just, say, replacing a “0001” with a “0011” in some fear register. On the other hand, those of us who are not sociopaths would have a problem terminating the gardener working next door, or frightening him, because he has a right to life, and does feel the emotional pain of being scared. One is real, the other is not.

  Yet we can imagine that in the coming years we will be building very much more complex artificial minds—ultimately, perhaps as complex as those of humans. But they are still artificial, right? Because they are running as zeros and ones on silicon chips . . .

  Not so fast. If both the computer and the human are simply computational devices—software activations of zeros and ones running on silicon hardware in one case, and neural activations running on a brain and body system in the other—then what about the following:

  From a theoretical standpoint, we can fully implement all the functions of a single neuron (or glial cell, etc.) with a modern computer. We can model all its input and output functions, and also all its networked connections to other neurons. So now, one by one, we replace each brain cell of our gardener working next door with a networked computer that fully implements both that cell and all of its connections to other cells. At some point, we will have replaced all of the gardener’s brain cells with our exact artificial copies of them. We have turned our gardener into a computer, but one that fully implements him. (Keep in mind that every thought, every memory, every feeling—including the most minute aspect of our gardener’s sense of self—would be supported in either case—human or computer—and in every hybrid case along the way.)*

  Because the gardener’s mind and the computer-simulated mind each can be transformed into the other, at what point is the gardener real, and at what point artificial? Do we simply argue that there is some “critical mass” of complexity after which sentience arises within any such system, regardless of the implementation? With the advent of computer science, issues such as the dualism arguments of Descartes and Ryle become grounded in precision: when we build a computer model, each bit is on, or it is off, completely, irrefutably, implementing the minutest part of our theory.

  And what happens, then, when we build such systems from scratch? Do they have rights? The right to “life”? Does it now become unethical for us to turn them off? Do they, independently of us, communicate with God?

  Or, suppose that separate from the ability to build artificial life in this way, we also have the ability to manipulate its configuration. Suppose that, having isolated the computational (feeling of?) connection to God that I lost for eight years, we can build artificial beings that always experience this connection, and are in a constant state of enlightened bliss. Are we then obligated to build as many of them as we can, in the way that we feel obligated to do our best so that our children have happy, possibly spirit-based lives?

  These are interesting questions, not so easily answered, but also, in the computer age, not so easily dismissed. And my own experience—my partial loss of human sentience coinciding with my loss of brain functionality—brought them much closer to home.

  TIME IS A METAPHOR

  WHEN TIME LOSES ITS STRUCTURE. In 2001, two years after the crash, I went to see the recently released movie Memento, a drama with an odd narrative structure in which time runs both forward and backward in a series of flashbacks and “flash-forwards.” The main character, Leonard, suffers from short-term memory loss and can only remember recent events for a few minutes. In trying to unravel a rapist-drug-dealer murder mystery and find his wife’s killer, he records important events by tattooing summaries of them on his body so he won’t forget them.

  I hadn’t known anything about th
e movie prior to entering the theater—a rare opportunity had arisen for some time off, and I’d simply picked a movie at random. After just the first few scenes I was sickened by what I was seeing, but mesmerized nonetheless. The director, Christopher Nolan, had managed to capture so clearly the essence of what I was going through every day of my life. I was both horrified to see so clearly in front of me what my life was like, and how truly incapacitated I was, but also, at the same time, grateful that at least one central truth of my existence could be captured and expressed.

  Unlike the main character in Memento, I did not have short-term memory loss. Nor did I have to tattoo events on my body to remember them. And, of course, I was not trying to find the murderers of my wife. So why did this movie have such a strong, sad, remorseful, cathartic, essence-capturing effect on me?

  For concussives, there is a disturbance in the normal apprehension of time. Most people in the Western world have an innate sense of time flowing smoothly, endlessly, from the past, through the present, and into the future. At least, this is how we Westerners talk about time, and conceptualize it when making plans and explaining our lives. But concussives can lose this (seemingly) innate sense of time, and we often have to manually construct the “natural” narrative of sequenced events from its raw component parts. In doing so we must face a lower-level reality: that the West’s “civilized” conception of time—which we ordinarily think of as a purely physical property of the world around us—is in fact almost entirely metaphorical.