The Experience of Stroke

 I have to say, I was really taken aback by the difference between Dr. Taylor in writing and Dr. Taylor before a live audience.  It did make me think that, unless what she was really describing was a response or pattern common to many brain events (near-death, hallucination, etc) and many people, her specific recollection was probably colored more by her background as a neuroscientist than by a genuine connection with the fine workings of her brain.  I know that similar ideas have been studied to some extent, but don't think that her report can be generalized to others.  I'm also more generally uncomfortable with the strong association of various feelings, affects, and ways of life with which "half" of the brain one is "living" in.  It doesn't sound like a defensible picture of consciousness, even if we have seen some unusual behavior in split-brain patients.

I think one of the most interesting topics that arose during our discussion last week was that people can be conscious without language. Prior to this discussion, I was pretty convinced that you needed language to be conscious and to have any kind of thought. However, Dr. Taylor's account of her stroke revealed that although her language abilities may have been lost, she was still consciousness and very vividly experiencing things.Prof. Grobstein's comment that perhaps consciousness could be subdivided into consciousness that is more closely related to unconsciousness and a consciousness that is more elaborately expressed in consciousness is an interesting notion that provides a possible explanation for why language sometimes plays a larger role in consciousness and it sometimes does not. Maybe when you let go a little and move towards the area between being fully consciousness and unconscious, you enter this "nirvana" that Dr. Taylor experienced where you dont need language to experience things. This somewhat hazy, eupohoric state may be brought about because the voices that usually are so clear in your head quiet down and let you escape from the realities that tie you down to this world. Like Sasha said, this sounds a lot like a state of intoxication and the reason why so many people drink in the first place--to escape reality. Maybe the ability to enter this "middle consciousness" area between unconscious and fully conscious without the use of drugs is the source of true nirvana, and as Sasha said, perhaps Dr. Taylor was trying to teach people how to reach this state of mind.

Throughout the semester I have noticed the way in which our class discussions have been mediated by the seemingly Western view of rational science. We devoted a significant number of earlier classes to the discussion of objectivity vs. subjectivity alone. What I don't understand is why we, as a class, and the larger scientific community want to create this dichotomy between objective/quantitative rationale and subjective/qualitative information. Who is to say that one is better than the other? We have learned in class that lauding the benefits of one method does not necessarily lessen the importance of another. Why should we keep emotions separate from the myriad other issues psychologists are studying today? Isn't the study of emotions what created modern American psychology as we know it? William James, heralded as "the father of American psychology", was obsessed with the study of emotions and fluctuations in mood. He had personal experience confronting "serious psychological difficulties" and this personal experience inspired him to study how his (and others, later on) own spirituality and consciousness related to physiology and neuroscience (how's that for objective experimentation?!). This eventually culminated in the evolution of American psychology. Unfortunately, Freud ruined the science of emotion for most psychologists and now even undergraduate psychology students don't dare whisper about emotions in a neurobiology class. It seems there is no place for emotions in our discussions of neural plasticity and consciousness- but that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense if you believe, as I clearly do, that they are all interrelated.

For a science (and I do believe psychology is a science, even when including emotions into the mix) with its roots in the study of the interconnectedness between emotion, spirituality, consciousness, AND physiology and neuroscience, how can emotions be left out of the discussion? It is disheartening to see that neurobiology- the metaphorical love-child of psychology and biology- has turned a blind eye to the role of emotions in cognition. Were emotions rejected/ignored from the field of study in an attempt to legitimize neurobiology and cement its place amongst the "hard sciences", like biology and chemistry, and to further distance it from the presumed "wishy-washy" abstract concept that has dominated the popular perception of psychology? Can emotions be incorporated into neurobiology without destroying its hard-science allure?

 The point on differing valuations of quality of life in people with locked in syndrome as compared to their loved ones and the potential impact of that difference (in terms of both how the family of the individual treat him or her and in the medical treatment that they potentially may or may not provide but I do not think that those differences are the result of evidence that social contact is not an important component of a fulfilling life.  Obviously it was impossible to determine how satisfied locked in patients are with their life prior to providing them with a means of communication and after that has been accomplished it is possible for the patient to resume social contact.  I do think that self-determination and self-control are a very important part of the appeal of things like “thetaville” (or lucid dreaming or whatever) and that the appeal of fantasy over reality is based very much in the ability to choose between the two.  Of course locked in individuals would still have to face reality at times, even if they were able to satisfy themselves with fantasy, and that would be a very tough transition to bear.

            Moving back to the woman who used the experience of having a stroke to create a philosophy based around the satisfaction gained by putting oneself in either the right or left mind while I don’t consider her approach to be especially scientific or a philosophy that appeals to me as an individual but I don’t think it really reflects at all upon more generally accepted neuroscience.  Beyond the recent evidence mentioned in class discussion that the compartmentalized view of the brain that the idea of “right brained consciousness” depends upon is not accurate the theory depends upon immeasurable and non-quantifiable ideas.  It is possible that (though again I don’t know how you would move consciousness about the brain considering that I don’t consider it separate from the brain as a whole and it’s most likely the result of a number of processes all over the brain) if you were somehow to move your consciousness to the right brain you might experience all of your cells, but I have no idea how that could be measured.  And if the theory is impossible to test it is not science, a scientific theory may not be provable across all possible circumstances, but is must be possible to disprove.  And this cannot.  Though I imagine that public speaking has helped in this case with the recovery of speech, which is certainly a plus. 

 I agree with much of what Vidya has already said. I too watched the video prior to class, and was surprised at how different its impact on me was the second time. There were probably many causes for this change in my attitude, including the laughter in the room, the fact that we skipped the entire introduction to enter on the line "I'm as huge as a whale, swimming through the sea" or something like that, etc. However, I think there's something worth defending from my initial reaction to the video: there was something I was moved by. There is something immediately repulsing by the mixing of emotion and science, subjective and objective. And yet as we discussed in class and Vidya has pointed to, emotion is becoming increasingly a part of that very science; the subjectivity we tried so hard to keep separate has become the very topic to be investigated. This, I think, has loosened us up to the idea that maybe emotion should not be kept so strictly distinct from science. But since Vidya has already talked about emotion, I additionally wonder about another discomforting aspect of Dr. Taylor's talk: her incorporation of religion. I imagine that as repulsive as we find the integration of emotion into science, we find the incorporation of religion about a hundred times worse, and for many legitimate reasons. Strongly held religious doctrines can violently inform, often falsely, the direction that science should/can proceed. Moreover, science is often put in the place to discredit religious beliefs that many derive happiness from. As such, the mixture of religion and science is a messy one at best, and one that many feel we should shy away from. However, Dr. Taylor forcefully brings us into religious language, using abstract metaphor to describe the enormity of her experience, her connection to the universe, to her constituent parts, and nirvana. What should we do about this? Do we reject her from science? Do we convince ourselves that she's not really talking about religion, per se? While these are possibilities that we entertained in class, I wonder if they're the most productive ones. Is it possible that science is an inevitable part of religion, or even more jarringly, that religion is an inevitable outcome of science?