When I was doing my Clinical Pastoral Care course at a major regional hospital, a beautiful young woman who had just had a baby and thus was hormonally vulnerable, suffered a stroke that made her what is called “vegetative.” This is, she looked conscious, but she wasn’t. Her eyes would follow and she moved, but she was considered brain dead. I tried to get her to respond by talking to her, but the nurses didn’t like it and made me stop. They already felt bad enough but their defense was that it was hopeless.
Recently there has been much more interest in what might really be going on, possibly unperceived consciousness, in a person who looks unconscious. This is not just human — Sid Gustafson’s veterinary novel, "Horse Racing in America," talks about the use of succinylcholine, a paralyzer that is used for euthanasia, and that leaves consciousness active.
The essay below is one among many that discuss new research with technology that can perceive brain action even if it is disconnected from the body, both nerves and muscles.
Working on the question of what is happening when people have an experience of intense epipaphy means looking carefully at “consciousness.” Apparently the relevant experience is at least related to human perception, regardless of where it comes from or why. Drugs? God? Theories depend on who is asking and in what discplinary context the theorist is working. Philosophy has always liked the problem, bringing logic to bear on something so illogical. Who can prove them wrong?
Now that our technology is so supersensitive, we have a number of ideas about how a brain “works.” First of all, the “brain in a bucket” that references computers, is pretty well discredited. Clearly the body (“embodied cognition”) carries memory, like riding a bicycle. Another line of inquiry values the senses and/or memory as the “keeper” of the “card file” of time and place that preserves our feeling of who we are and what happened on a rainy Sunday downtown when we were ten.
Much research is done to sort out which sub-group of brain much does what — like LeDoux and the amygdala or Porges and his polyvagus nerves. The notion forms that the brain both maps everything in-skin and out, but also forms complexes or frames or nexuses by plugging one neuron into another, physically, until they form a context of some kind. We say, colloquially, “my head is not there”, “it’s not where my mind is at,” and can feel ourselves moving from one system to another, one “mood” or attitude to another.
Probably one of the most relevant and difficult shifts is from consciousness to the unconsciousness of sleep and back out the other way. Sometimes we act as though it were conscious and deliberate, but it isn’t always. Ask the insomniac. Suspicion is that either a nerve is not operative or the proper secretions are not happening, which tempts the use of meds to give the molecules a kick into action.
So this brings up the problem of how to manage our UNconsciousness, most of which is not in the fancy recent parts of our brain but is inherited from our previous species — like directions for how to grow fur or give milk that came to us from the mammals. Now we’re told that garter snakes, reptiles, get attached to buddies and hideouts. What could be more central to humans? To be obvious: breathing, heart beat, digestion — all the rhythmic stuff, which may be why music helps. Evidently even with cobras in baskets.
Much of the knowledge we have about minds comes from Damasio and others investigating split brains, which become two minds that don’t talk to each other, or amputations which exist to the brain though not in reality. We used to speak of multiple personalities but now call it “dissociation” which can mean a whole new person made up of a brain construct with great detail, like speaking a language only known in some slantwise way, like on the radio in childhood. Now we recognize that a mind under intolerable stress can “go to” some other awareness of some mysterious place.
This is somewhere halfway between the work of the physiologist who studies what cells do and how, versus the work of many psychologists who operate like Candid Camera, trying to set up situations that reveal what happens, like teaching the brain about amputations by using mirrors, maybe to stop phantom pain.
In the past a lot of the research was not about how the body’s system works, but about how to make a person behave like everyone else — to become “normal” and capable in the social world. Things like censoring one’s self-presentation in the presence of a boss or a love interest were not thought to have a physiological base, something really happening in the brain. Other things, like stealing small things, were thought to be deliberate when they were close to reflexive, triggered by seeing.
Labeling moments of high exaltation or deep peace as being supernatural has kept them from being investigated for fear of disappating the magic, which naturally confirms that they are from someplace else unseen and powerful. Not even questioning how the person receives such a moment is allowed. But is it possible anyway? Can a person deliberately set out to have such an experience? Can you have an epiphany in an elevator? Has the industrial revoution actually destroyed access to wonder and awe through nature?
Or has our reluctance to dispel the illusion of the numinous actually been a preservative for a part of human experience we haven’t touched yet, a wellspring of knowledge, a consciousness, that will bring us the future without a lot of paraphernalia? Do we need to master focus and flow instead of math and science?
Back in 1980 I had a rough time in that Clinical Pastoral Care class, partly because I was twice the age of the others and partly because I came from the same community as the group leader, so we saw each other in pre-determined identities. But the leader had another higher leader, who was the father of the beautiful sleeping beauty. On the last day he came to say goodbye and kissed me on the mouth, because I had tried to reach his daughter. That was the meaning I kept. Quite human.
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