Damasio's "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain"

I once knew a young man named Mike who, riding home after a high-school graduation camping trip, was in a car accident in which the vehicle lost control and crashed into a lake.  Mike was unable to release his seatbelt and was submerged under water for about 20 minutes, causing severe and permanent brain damage.

Mike was my age, within my peer group, and only weeks prior to the accident had been awarded full scholarships to any Canadian university.  He spoke French and scored within the top 5% in the provincial Math Achievement tests.  He was also, I understand, funny and goofy, handsome and mischievous.  He was at the beginning of a life full of promise.

I met Mike about two years after the accident. He needed (and still needs) 24 hour nursing care. His verbal and motor skills are compromised and he experiences frequent and violent epileptic attacks.  He has little control of his bodily functions.  He needs a  physiotherapist and a massage therapist to work with him to relieve the pressure on his continually engaged muscles. After a long, difficult struggle, he regained the ability to sit up and feed himself, however, he will never be able to walk or dress himself again.

Verbally, his speech is slow and thoughtful, but he has a broad vocabulary and it's easy to be taken offguard by the fact that he can speak just as well in French as in English, or that he can continue to work out complex math problems. Those parts of his brain were not impaired by the lack of oxygen.  Unfortunately, however, he has no short-term memory. The last date and details he remembered are from shortly before the accident, and it is unnerving for him as his friends and family no longer resemble the people they were 20 years ago. Personality-wise, Mike is a different person from the teenager who went on the camping trip.  He has little filter for socially appropriate language or behaviour. He presents as developmentally challenged.  He has a hard time mentally or emotionally grasping his situation, and is understandably prone to fits of anger or depression.  Still, taking into consideration his lack of short-term memory, he acts out rarely, even though he has little understanding of what has changed between his yesterday where he was playing guitar next to a camp-fire, and today, where he wakes up in a 38 year old body bound to a wheel-chair.

***

My grandmother had heart troubles for most of my life, which involved surgery after surgery, until the doctors said that she wasn't strong enough to live through any more surgeries, and then they did a few more.  Her heart wasn't strong enough to circulate her fresh blood and oxygen through her body, so like Mike, her brain deteriorated as it was deprived of oxygen, although at a much slower rate.  This was complicated by several strokes and eventually Alzheimer's disease. All of this added up to diminishing fine-motor skills, panic attacks, fixated thoughts, overwhelming anger and sadness, altered memories and ultimately a childlike state.

One of the more interesting aspects of my grandmother's memory loss was the fact that she would change or simply make up stories that would support her emotional state of the moment.  These fantasies were often understandable and logical: for example  she may have built up some form of resentment or anger towards a neighbour, but over time had forgotten exactly why.  In her later years, she would tell me of a long-ago rip-roaring fight where the neighbour was particularly nasty.  This story would be very detailed, with my grandmother providing direct quotes and acting out gestures as the two women almost came to blows.  The thing is, the fight had never happened, but this false-memory helped her to make sense of how she felt.

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Although I've had two long-standing relationships with people with varying degrees of brain damage, I still have an emotional resistance to believing that all that we are is a collection of neurons and hormones. I've seen personalities alter as the brain ceased to function and as memories fell away, but I have never believed that the person had, in fact changed - instead I felt that they were refined and their true core was exposed.

Does this say more about me than them?  Is this simply a symptom of my way of dealing with trauma?  How much of how we see people is based on our own needs, projections and expectations?  We acknowledge our physical weaknesses, but recognising the fact that our subjective sense-of-self is also tied to our corporeal form is terrifying. 

I understand the great philosophers search for the soul, for their need to believe that there is something special about the human race, that we are not completely instinctually driven.

Works Cited:
Damasio, Antonio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin. 1994. Print.