The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self (35 page)

CHAPTER 3: THE MAN WHO DIDN’T WANT HIS LEG

“The leg suddenly assumed”
:
Oliver Sacks,
A Leg to Stand On
(New York: Touchstone, 1998), 53.

“Theoretically you can”
:
V. S. Ramachandran in Christopher Rawlence,
Phantoms in the Brain,
2000, https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&list=PL361F982E5B7C1550&v=PpEpj-JgGDI#t=138.

They have also suggested Xenomelia
:
Paul D. McGeoch et al., “Xenomelia: A New Right Parietal Lobe Syndrome,”
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
82 (2011): 1314–319.

“an invincible obstacle”
:
Leonie Maria Hilti and Peter Brugger,
“Incarnation and Animation: Physical Versus Representational Deficits of Body Integrity,”
Experimental Brain Research
204, no. 3 (2010): 315–26.

The first modern account
:
John Money et al., “Apotemnophilia: Two Cases of Self-Demand Amputation as a Paraphilia,”
Journal of Sex Research
13, no. 2 (May 1977): 115–25.

homosexuality was also labeled
:
David L. Rowland and Luca Incrocci, eds.,
Handbook of Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 496.

The patient died of gangrene
:
“Complete Obsession,” transcript, BBC, February 17, 2000, http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/obsession_script.shtml.

A Scottish surgeon named Robert Smith
:
Ibid.

First embarked on a survey
:
Michael B. First, “Desire for Amputation of a Limb: Paraphilia, Psychosis, or a New Type of Identity Disorder,”
Psychological Medicine
35, no. 6 (June 2005): 919–28.

a meeting in New York
:
“Meetings,” BIID.ORG, undated, http://www.biid.org/meetings.html.

“It seems like my body”
:
“Complete Obsession.”

“I have become convinced”
:
Ibid.

cognitive scientists at Carnegie Mellon University
:
Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen, “Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See,”
Nature
391 (February 19, 1998): 756.

coined the phrase “phantom limb”
:
See V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Perception of Phantom Limbs: The D. O. Hebb Lecture,”
Brain
121 (1998): 1603–630.

body parts that were absent
:
Peter Brugger et al., “Beyond Re-membering: Phantom Sensations of Congenitally Absent Limbs,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
97, no. 11 (May 2000): 6167–172.

this area is thinner
:
L. M. Hilti et al., “The Desire for Healthy Limb Amputation: Structural Brain Correlates and Clinical Features of Xenomelia,”
Brain
136, no. 1 (January 2013): 318–29.

the right SPL showed reduced
:
McGeoch et al., “Xenomelia.”

This network, they suggest
:
Lorimer G. Moseley et al., “Bodily Illusions in Health and Disease: Physiological and Clinical Perspectives and the Concept of a Cortical ‘Body Matrix,’”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
36, no. 1 (2012): 34–46.

“regulate its interaction”
:
Thomas Metzinger, “The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective,”
Networks
3–4 (2004): 33–64.

“any regulator”
:
Roger C. Conant and Ross W. Ashby, “Every Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That System,”
International Journal of Systems Science
1, no. 2 (1970): 89–97.

the property of
mineness
:
Thomas Metzinger,
Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 267.

a simple and elegant experiment
:
David Brang et al., “Apotemnophilia: A Neurological Disorder,”
NeuroReport
19, no. 13 (August 2008): 1305–306.

“
desired line of amputation”
:
Ibid.

their brains were prioritizing
:
Atsushi Aoyama et al., “Impaired Spatial-Temporal Integration of Touch in Xenomelia (Body Integrity Identity Disorder),”
Spatial Cognition & Computation
12, nos. 2–3 (2012): 96–110.

“absolute, utter lunacy”
:
Randy Dotinga, “Out on a Limb,”
Salon
, August 29, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/08/29/amputation.

Working swiftly, he bandaged
:
Minor details about Dr. Lee’s pre-surgery preparation have been changed to protect him and his medical staff.

The hospital itself
:
Some details about David, Patrick, Dr. Lee, the hospital, and its environs were changed to protect the identities of those concerned.

CHAPTER 4: TELL ME I’M HERE

Tell Me I’m Here
:
Title of chapter comes from a book of the same name. Anne Deveson (New York: Penguin, 1992).

“What gives me the right”
:
Quoted in Louis A. Sass,
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 216.

“For any true grasp of delusion”
:
Karl Jaspers,
General Psycho-patholog
y (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 97.

I met Laurie and her husband, Peter
:
Some sensitive details, including their names, have been changed.

“Sorry, I’m Sophie”
:
Some identifying details, including her name, have been changed.

his 1992 book
:
Sass,
Madness and Modernism.

“the study of ‘lived experience’”
:
Louis A. Sass and Josef Parnas, “Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self,”
Schizophrenia Bulletin
29, no. 3 (2003): 427–44.

“This experience of one’s
own
”
:
Louis A. Sass, “Self-Disturbance and Schizophrenia: Structure, Specificity, Pathogenesis (Current Issues, New Directions),”
Schizophrenia Research
152, no. 1 (January 2014): 5–11.

Charles Bell and Johannes Purkinje
:
Bruce Bridgeman, “Efference Copy and Its Limitations,”
Computers in Biology and Medicine
37, no. 7 (July 2007): 924–29.

in 1950, Erich von Holst and Horst Mittelstaedt
:
Erich von Holst and Horst Mittelstaedt, “Das Reafferenzprinzip,”
Die Naturwissenschaften
37, no. 20 (October 1950): 464–76. Translated as: “The Principle of Reafference: Interactions between the Central Nervous System and the Peripheral Organs,” in
Perceptual Processing: Stimulus Equivalence and Pattern Recognition
, P. C. Dodwell, ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), 41–72.

“Eristalis has a slender”
:
Ibid.

“Its small size”
:
Roger Sperry, “Neural Basis of the Spontaneous Optokinetic Response Produced by Visual Inversion,”
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
43, no. 6 (December 1950): 482–89.

“The subjective experience”
:
Irwin Feinberg, “Efference Copy and Corollary Discharge: Implications for Thinking and Its Disorders,”
Schizophrenia Bulletin
4, no. 4 (1978): 636–40.

“Thus, if corollary discharge”
:
Ibid.

the cricket tunes in
:
James F. A. Poulet and Berthold Hedwig, “The Cellular Basis of a Corollary Discharge,”
Science
311 (January 27, 2006): 518–22.

It’s near impossible to tickle yourself
:
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore et al., “Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself?,”
NeuroReport
11, no. 11 (August 2000): R11–16.

people experiencing auditory hallucinations
:
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore et al., “The Perception of Self-Produced Sensory Stimuli in Patients with Auditory Hallucinations and Passivity Experiences: Evidence for a
Breakdown in Self-Monitoring,”
Psychological Medicine
30, no. 5 (September 2000): 1131–139.

possible disruption of the copy mechanism
:
Daniel H. Mathalon and Judith M. Ford, “Corollary Discharge Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Evidence for an Elemental Deficit,”
Clinical EEG and Neuroscience
39, no. 2 (2008): 82–86.

one’s sense of agency should be subdivided
:
Matthis Synofzik et al., “Beyond the Comparator Model: A Multifactorial Two-Step Account of Agency,”
Consciousness and Cognition
17, no. 1 (March 2008): 219–39.

they tend to rely more
:
Matthis Synofzik et al., “Misattributions of Agency in Schizophrenia Are Based on Imprecise Predictions about the Sensory Consequences of One’s Actions,”
Brain
133 (January 2010): 262–71.

“support the notion of”
:
Ibid.

In one harrowing section
:
Deveson,
Tell Me I’m Here,
132.

there is hyperconnectivity
:
Ralph E. Hoffman and Michelle Hampson, “Functional Connectivity Studies of Patients with Auditory Verbal Hallucinations,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
6 (January 2012): 1.

Broca’s area and the auditory cortex
:
Judith Ford, “Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Their Neural Basis,” Hearing Voices: The 2013 Music and Brain Symposium, Stanford University, April 13, 2013, http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/31412393.

“There is Tran, nicknamed Moxi”
:
Lauren Slater,
Welcome to My Country
(New York: Anchor Books, 1997)
,
5.

CHAPTER 5: I AM AS IF A DREAM

“How far do our feelings”
:
Virginia Woolf,
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2: 1912–1922
. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978), 400.

“Forever I shall be”
:
Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
(New York: Vintage, 1991), 19.

“Even though I am”
:
Quoted in Mauricio Sierra,
Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8.

“An abyss, they say”
:
Quoted in Ibid.

“a state in which the”
:
Quoted in Dawn Baker et al.,
Overcoming Depersonalization & Feelings of Unreality
(London: Constable and Robinson, 2012), 24.

“I find myself regarding”
:
Henri-Frédéric Amiel,
Amiel’s Journal
, trans. Mary Ward. The Project Gutenberg ebook is at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8545/8545-h/8545-h.htm.

“whether perception, bodily sensation”
:
Quoted in Sierra,
Depersonalization
, 17.

“As the car was spinning
:”
Russell Noyes Jr. and Roy Kletti, “Depersonalization in Response to Life-Threatening Danger,”
Comprehensive Psychiatry
18, no. 4 (July/August 1977): 375–84.

“The interpretation of depersonalization”
:
Ibid.

Sarah is a slim
:
Some identifying details, including her name, have been changed.

“Of the ideas advanced”
:
Antonio Damasio,
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
(New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 21.

a term defined by American
:
“What is Homeostasis?,”
Scientific American
, January 3, 2000, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-homeostasis.

“which foreshadows the self”
:
Damasio,
Self Comes to Mind,
22.

“broken only by brain”
:
Ibid.

“provide a direct experience”
:
Ibid.

“reflect the current state”
:
Ibid.

“the condition manifests as”
:
Mauricio Sierra and Anthony S. David, “Depersonalization: A Selective Impairment of Self-Awareness,”
Consciousness and Cognition
20, no. 1 (2011): 99–108.

“(1) feelings of disembodiment”
:
Lucas Sedeño et al., “How Do You Feel when You Can’t Feel Your Body? Interoception, Functional Connectivity and Emotional Processing in Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder,”
PLoS One
9, no. 6 (June 2014): e98769.