After delivering graduation speech as principal of a Catholic school a woman I examined thought something so terribly wrong that she petitioned the Monsignor to give her last rights before coming to the hospital. She confessed to him three separate times not recalling she’d already done so.   She felt disoriented. She is an intelligent woman and used language and logical processes perfectly and recognized her students and co-workers without a problem. This is what witnesses told her. She persists in the most uncomfortable situation of being unable to recall anything that occurred between approximately  8AM and 5PM, at which time she started to come back to herself and register memories. I happened to see another woman with a similar history the next day. She also had given a detailed flawless presentation, in her case,  regarding pensions as a financial advisor, and recalled nothing of it at all. She realized just afterward that something was terribly wrong. Both ladies ended up in the hospital.

When you have lost a few hours of your conscious life in the condition known as Transient Global Amnesia, most personal memory for these events never returns. Seen in the midst of such an episode, the subject will fail to register explicit, that is specific mostly verbal memories, something that anatomically implicates the hippocampi in the medial temporal lobes on both sides of the brain. Seen afterward, the person suffers a blankness for the hours of time that they were affected, so that they can’t recall events and have forever to take other people’s word for them. What is termed episodic or biographical memory for that specific time is gone. You don’t feel as if you’ve personally experienced anything over the timeframe of the episode,  what may be termed time numbness.  Other mental processes apart from registering recent memories, even remote recall, work fine. You can talk and do arithmetic, follow logical processes and do presentations if they are familiar enough, but not being unable to feel your life events for yourself, can be most disconcerting.

Numbness is unpleasant and can turn painful,  an anesthesia dolorosa.  You shouldn’t be able to feel pain if you are numb but often do in the same way as in a phantom limb where the limb is gone but the central processors of sensation remain.  The brain, failing to receive signals from the affected part, makes for itself private sometimes unpleasant painful sensations. Should a limb become numb or even just tingly that is a cause for alarm even as in most cases it means the blood supply is leaned on, and your first impulse is to reposition the limb or shake it. The limb is numb space as opposed to numb time. As I pointed out in another essay on computer simulations, a critical difference between living things over machines, is that living organisms sense their own bodies, even if their bodies are just one cell. The human brain has evolved a large number of spatially specific pathways that result in multiple inner specific maps and models of the body and also the outer world. These start out modality specific, that is devoted to separate paths for touch, vision, hearing and so forth which then integrate to become multi-modal.

Helen Keller has always fascinated me as a woman who lost two of her most critical senses at an early age, namely sight and sound. Before I knew of her I would have guessed that a person thus afflicted would be cognitively impaired and have little feeling at all and many persons unfamiliar with the condition did indeed think that in the nineteenth century. Many deaf young persons of her time failed to develop speech and so were termed dumb. Obviously, experience has yielded the opposite of these expectations, as Keller was especially brilliant woman who thought and felt deeply,  despite  or even because of her limitations and as we know today.  We now know parts of her brain, particularly in the visual brain, instead of being used to process sight, can be reassigned, thus adding enormous computational capacity to language and thought, and might thus have contributed to her genius and depth of thought and experience. All of this is theoretical but the reassignment of large volume of neurons may occur if an insult occurred to sight during some critical period of early childhood. Should an injury to one’s eyes occur too early, patches of cortex might fail to develop, too late and these areas are permanently assigned to vision and may not be able to be repurposed after an early age. I learned that Helen Keller was preceded by an even worse case, that of Laura Bridgeman described in the new novel, What is Visible by Kimberly Ells. Bridgeman had lost sight, sound, taste and smell to an early illness and had only touch, but she was educable even brilliant.

In an unforgettable passage in Numbers in the Bible, Aaron, brother of Moses and high priest, steps between the living and the dead of a sudden plague to burn incense which cures the sick and stops the rapid spread of death through the people.   On first contact with this legend so many years ago, I thought of Aaron as a heroic physician who at his own peril, stands up to the angel of death.  Given the plague’s visual image as spreading death, Aaron’s very position at the dividing line,  is in itself remarkable.   The line dividing the living from the inanimate is one of feeling and awareness which no machine will ever attain. A computer has sensors but cannot  actually feel anything, much as a statue has eyes but cannot see, ears but does not hear. For even if the mechanical sensors bring back information, the computer fails to experience anything.  As I had put it elsewhere in these pages,  the computer is not a living thing with its own skin in the game.

In our own lifetimes we are seeing how mechanical material contrivances increase our power of thought. They are wonderful tools for our own use.  Computers make possible remarkable things and are firmly integrated into our civilization.  In the future they stand to transform the cold dark dumb universe into a universe of universal light. Many of us may feel we are standing between the living and inanimate numb computer parts that are almost part of ourselves. Computers stand to be more and more be integrated into ourselves, first to overcome disabilities, but later to extend life and give us super-human capacities.  Future humans will be human computer hybrids or cyborgs. We would like to innervate these numb extensions so as to feel our numb mechanical parts.

In the future we will become partly non-human.  Stalin sought to dehumanize everything, to take away everything relating to the individual in favor of the collective. One interesting story I heard on NPR was about Soviet kitchens. Our American kitchen is the center of our household.  Kitchens it is said,  sell you house whenever your put it on the market. But the Soviets sought to eliminate the family kitchen fearing the private meal might be a place of  discord and revolution against the authorities. Food was communally prepared, bland and tasteless. The Soviets sought to remove pleasure from food and saw it as bland nourishment. It was against their principles that  a worker should  savor or enjoy. You had to be very careful of what was said around the table as everyone, especially your own children and spouse, reported on everyone else. Thus they hoped food especially at meals would lose forever the human element. But humanness did  eventually bubble again to the surface.  Certain individualistic behaviors recurred. People put locks on cabinets to declare to others they still had  some meagre personal belongings. As time passed and slightly more liberal politicians such as Khrushchev took the reins, some of the humanness of the kitchen and the mealtimes returned as did dissent.  Biological needs are in the end undeniable especially those that bring pleasure to life like food and sex.

In accounting for the now 7 billion live humans we have on this planet, we tend, since humans are so commonplace, to dehumanize our brothers and sisters.  Models of cognition are more computational which means wedded pure physical constructs. This is a denial of the biological basis of who we are and so thus serves to dehumanize. In accounting for ourselves we reduce to a series of numbers.  Otherwise our unique identity would be lost. Social security, medical, student, credit card, numbers assigned by various  impersonal bureaucracies.  But for these arbitrary numbers it would be impossible to distinguish one individual from another. The numerical identities I carry, that I can’t keep track of except with a memory devices, are strongly reminiscent of the numbers placed on the arms of concentration camp inmates. Biological tools such as fingerprints, retinal scans and voiceprints are slightly more palatable, as at least humans are viewed as unique living entities. Most of us have employers who want us to be smiling automatons catering to the pleasure of the customer or our boss. Leaving your own self and problems at home when you come into the workplace you are expected to be some smiling human simulacrum or robot bearing scant resemblance to anything truly human except bare form.  At work as at school and as citizen you are expected to obey obey obey. Someday soon robots will indeed serve as model employees.

Yet there will always be the rumble of a human backlash, a hankering for human delights.  In his book Year Zero about 1945 and the end WWII, Ian Buruma talked about people coming out of the internment camps. Starved and objectified woman skeletons accidentally given a load of lipstick instead of food, craved the lipstick, as putting it on made them feel human again. Defying medical knowledge of the effects of starvation on fertility, women of the camps had babies in large numbers.   Human life so long repressed, has an inner need for florescence and to make up for lost time. Death leads ultimately to repopulation of the world.

The scientific or objective view of humanity has brought us to a higher level of understanding while increasing material possessions.  Even so, I feel us missing the human element, and predict a backlash into whatever makes us human and biological, a renaissance, call it re-innervation of feeling in space and in time, a reaction to numb time and numb space. You and I will be moved to re-declare our own basic biological existence.