What is it like to be 'locked-in'?

There is a well known philosophical paper called What is it like to be a bat? It is not so much about bats as about the impossibility of knowing fully some state unless you are yourself in that state. You may know all about echolocation but you will not be able to experience the world like a bat unless you are yourself a bat. I won't be able to understand exactly the thought processes of writers who are slowly losing their mind. And I won't be able to understand the experience of someone who has had a stroke in a different part of the brain. (For example, see this TED talk.) The same goes for being 'locked-in'. There is something ineffable that you will never be able to get.

Take for instance the first time I sat upright after my stroke. I felt as if all my internal organs were hanging down limply as if they were attached to the body wall by sheets of muscles that were limp like the membrane of a pricked balloon. I don't know how else to explain it. The feeling lasted only for a few seconds and has never happened again. You will not be able to simulate the feeling because I suppose the relevant muscles are involuntary.

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker writes:

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four year-old that we take for granted - recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question - in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived ... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

The same is the case with being 'locked-in'. Reading or blogging don't drive me up the wall. That is reserved for the ant in the pant or the mosquito in the middle of the night. You will not be able to understand why time appears to pass slowly when someone removes the railings from my bed and no one stands nearby. (It does not happen every time.) You will have only a vague understanding of my reluctance to travel.

Whenever someone tells me that I should do this instead of that, I am reminded of an incident that I had once heard. The wife was sound asleep when her one year old son gave her a good bite. The wife awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the husband came into the room, heard the whole story and admonished the wife - 'You should know some child psychology. How will a small child know that its actions are causing pain? He was only being playful.' The wife listened quietly. A few days later the boot was on the other foot.The husband was sound asleep when the child gave him a good bite. He awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the wife came into the room, heard the whole story and asked him,'What happened to your child psychology stuff?'

Miscellaneous incidents

My last post gives me the opportunity to segue into a post about a couple of incidents involving Sujit (and not involving me).

Many words have multiple meanings depending on the context, which confuse kids. When Sujit was in std I, he had a lesson called 'Early Man'. When Jaya asked him what it meant, he replied,'It is about a man who gets up early.'

One of my physiotherapists wanted to learn Hindi so that he could converse more easily with some of his patients who were more comfortable with Hindi. So he joined a class for spoken Hindi. When he came home after attending the first day's class, Jaya asked him what he had learned. He said,'It was about first person, second person, third person'. Sujit did not understand him and asked,'Which person were you?'The joke did not end there. The physiotherapist did not hear it properly and replied,'I was the last person!'

This physiotherapist was very keen on learning new Hindi words and he would keep asking for Hindi translations of various English words. Once during such a conversation, he suddenly said,'Can't see'. Jaya and I looked around wondering what he couldn't see. After some discussion we realised that he meant khaansi - the Hindi word for cough.

I become a card sharp!

When Sujit was in KG or Std. I his teacher asked him,'What does your father do?' Sujit thought that she was enquiring about his grandfather and replied,'He plays cards!' He said this because at that time my father-in-law used to play cards for a few hours every Sunday with some of his retired friends.

The teacher was shocked. Poor child - his father is a wastrel!

In the evening, when Jaya went to the school to pick up Sujit, the teacher asked her,'What does your husband do?' Jaya wondered why she wanted to know about me. The teacher related what Sujit had told her that morning. Jaya assured her that there was no such problem and told her about my stroke.

I don't know what shocked the teacher more - the news that I wasted my time playing cards or the news that I am quadriplegic.

Astronomy

Although I read a lot more about evolution, I also read a bit about astronomy - two huge topics that I only get time to skim. The first popular science book I ever read was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson about seven years ago and it stoked my interest in astronomy (nay, in science in general) by giving interesting pieces of information that I had not thought about earlier. For example, although I had an idea of the distances of the planets in the solar system, text books show them equidistant from each other. This gives a misleading picture which had stayed with me. The reality is very different. As Bryson writes:

... this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

I knew something about the solar system but that I was quite ignorant about the things beyond it. I knew the universe is big but didn't have an idea about how BIG it really is. The numbers were mind boggling. Bill Bryson again:

Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion - a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. 'If we were randomly inserted into the universe,'. Sagan wrote, 'the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.'

I started reading some blogs on astronomy and loved reading about galaxies, scales in the universe and other cool stuff. Undoubtedly, it helps that I don't have to put out the rubbish. When things get too complicated for my synapses, I can always feast on some great eye candy that illustrate Carl Sagan's words: "We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

Being a bit better informed about astronomy and evolution also enabled me to be more discerning about science reports. I learned that whenever terms like 'paradigm shift' and 'scientists have to go back to the drawing board' are used, it is usually an exaggeration.

As an example of the kind of things that interest me these days, here is a discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has the knack of talking about abstruse topics in a way that makes me want to hear more.

Mukesh Ambani's "peacock's tail"?

Some days ago I saw a news report about Mukesh Ambani's 27 floor house with, among other amenities, a 50 seat theatre where, I suppose he will enjoy watching Slumdog Millionaire. What makes a person build a house so far in excess of his needs?

One of the interesting questions in biology is: Why does a peacock have such a heavy, gaudy tail? It costs energy to make - energy that can be used elsewhere, attracts predators and makes it difficult to escape from them. William Hamilton proposed a theory that is widely accepted: the peacock's tail is a signal of genetic fitness.

So is "Antilla" the name of Mukesh Ambani's version of the peacock's tail, a potlatch-style display of "I can"? Another peacock's tail (this one not belonging to any particular individual but was the brainchild of a group of of movers and shakers) was the recent Commonwealth Games.

In a podcast, P.Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, talked about a grand party thrown by Emperor Nero for the creme de la creme of Rome, as narrated by Tacitus. A problem was that the light was not enough. Nero solved it in typical fashion: he had criminals brought from the dungeons and burned at the stake to provide the lighting. What bothered Sainath was not the cruelty involved but the question: who were Nero's guests? What sort of mindset is required to silently eat the best foods and quaff the finest wines in the midst of all that cruelty? I also have a similar thought: what sort of mindset is required in order to build a billion dollar house at spitting distance from some of the largest slums in Asia?

You get used to it

If you are suddenly struck by what finance types call a Black Swan event, you become helpless, confused, angry and begin to lament like the Duke of Gloucester, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport."But when Time, The Great Healer, has done enough work you find ways to deal with the new reality and eventually you get used to it.

Sometimes, when I will be sitting on my wheelchair and browsing or reading a book with great interest, I will suddenly feel like passing motion so I will have to be shifted quickly to the bed. Occasionally, by the time the nurse makes the bed ready and Jaya comes to the room to shift me, my metabolic wastes would have made their presence felt.My muscles will stiffen automatically in disgust. (I know it is made of rare stuff but...) This stiffening makes it difficult for the nurse to manoeuvre me around the bed for cleaning the mess thus delaying the whole horrible process.

I found that the quickest way to relax my muscles is to let my mind wander thereby putting me in a state of suspended animation. I will start thinking about some topic that I had read recently for example, the trouble with intuition or inequality aversion or how language shapes thought or how news is made now. While my mind is busy thinking about these issues, I am only dimly aware of my surroundings. My muscles will become relaxed and the nurse will be able to complete her unenviable task quicker. A wandering mind has uses.

Sometimes, when a few visitors will be waiting in the front hall to meet me and I will be about to make my grand entrance, I will feel like passing motion and will quickly have to be shifted to the bed. The protagonist of Five Point Someone, when he finds himself in an embarrassing situation, wishes that dinosaurs were not extinct so that one would come along and gobble him up and put him out of his misery. (Evolutionary biologists will say that dinosaurs are not extinct because birds are dinosaurs but we will let that technical issue pass for the moment.) I also have a similar wish on such occasions especially when the nurse is on leave and Jaya has to perform the duties of a nurse.

Isak Dinesen put things in perspective, “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?” The roof and crown of things? Tennyson must have been joking.

At times I am so lost in my thoughts that I fail to notice the nurse giving me feeds through the feeding tube. When Jaya asks me about the feeding I stare blankly at her and she has to get the details from the nurse. Even I am surprised that I did not notice something so obvious. I suppose the default network of my brain must be active at these times.

I have realised the wisdom in Duke Ellington's words, "There are two kinds of worries - those you can do something about and those you can't. Don't spend any time on the latter." Most people eventually get adjusted to the whips and scorns of time. Even if it means lying on shit. It is not easy. It doesn't happen overnight . But it happens. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events- such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime- must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don't have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as "absent grief". But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.

Learning from the Heart is a book written by Daniel Gottlieb who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him quadriplegic at the age of thirty-three. He writes:

I got insight into the process of becoming more dependent when I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Alborn. When Morrie, the author's mentor, was first being affected by ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), he turned to Mitch and said, "Oh my God, one day somebody will have to wipe my ass."

When I read that quote my immediate thought was, "You'll get over it, Morrie. I did." Having a catheter and needing someone else to bathe and dress me used to be a horrible indignity. Now all those things are simply regular parts of my life, just as anyone who needs to wear reading glasses or bifocals makes a habit of putting them on and taking them off. Whatever you need today that you didn't need yesterday simply becomes a part of your life.

Later, he writes:

No wonder there is a little comedian inside of me who finds great humor when people unthinkingly say to me, "Sometimes when I think about my life, I just feel paralyzed." I just look up and say, "Sometimes I feel that way, too!"

There is grandeur in this view of life

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. - Theodosius Dobzhansky

One disconcerting feature of studying in IIMA was that (apart from being occasionally sucked into a vicious cycle), everybody seemed to know everything better than me. I then worked in the financial sector which again is full of super brains (at least I thought so till a couple of years ago). So I was always under pressure to keep up with various alphabet soup products so that I don't feel left out of a conversation. This pressure was no longer there after my stroke. My eyes used to glaze over when I used to read some article on finance and I switched to reading something else.

At this time I came across an article on Evolution vs Creationism. I had never heard of creationism and wondered what it was. I found that all it seemed to be saying was 'evolution can't do this or that, hence creationism' which did not make sense. Evidence against one theory is not the same as evidence for another theory. But I couldn't follow their arguments because I didn't know much about evolution so I started reading about it. I soon realised that whatever little I thought I knew about evolution was wrong. As Jacques Monod said, " [A] curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it."

When the penny finally dropped, I could see why T.H.Huxley exclaimed on reading the Origin of Species: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that." After I managed to overcome the semantic gap, I could understand better the various strands of evidence for evolution. Reading about Deep Time, when different creatures were abundant and when they became extinct was cool. Richard Dawkins writes in The Ancestor's Tale:

The human imagination is cowed by antiquity, and the magnitude of geological time is so far beyond the ken of poets and archaeologists it can be frightening. But geological time is large not only in comparison to the to the familiar timescales of human life and human history. It is large on the timescale of evolution itself.

The nature programs on T.V., which were becoming boring, took on a new meaning, When I saw some program about predators and prey, I thought about evolutionary arms races. When I saw a program about bats, I thought about reciprocal altruism. I had not heard of these terms before. Reading about evolution of complex parts or communication in slime moulds was far more interesting than reading about naked shorts or covered puts. As Keats said, "in spite of all,/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits" and I looked forward to reading something new about evolution everyday. And I was glad to know that I am not another data point for the Salem Hypothesis.

The Theory of Evolution is beautifully complicated - it is complicated enough to keep me interested but not so complicated that I will give up in a daze. On the other hand if I had started reading about string theory, I wouldn't know what hit me. I remember reading that it dealt with 11 dimensions. I can barely handle three.

I soon stopped reading about creationism because it was so boring. They keep making silly statements like 'nobody saw it' or using weasel tactics. Perhaps they should be answered like this. I loved this email exchange between an evolutionary biologist, Richard Lenski and a creationist. Lenski's second letter was brilliant. Like the author Terry Pratchett, I concluded that 'I would rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel'. There is a (probably apocryphal) exchange between T.H.Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce that took place in 1860. The incident is described in Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea:

When Wilberforece ended his speech, he looked to Huxley. He asked him, half-jokingly, whether it was on his grandfather's or grandmother's side that he descended from an ape.

Later Huxley would tell Darwin and others that at that moment he turned to a friend seated next to him, struck his hand to his knee, and said, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." He stood and lashed back at Wilberforce. He declared that nothing that the bishop had said was at all new, except his question about Huxley's ancestry. "If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."

Apocryphal or not, it is a good story.