Consciousness

So I relapsed.

Taken by Surprise

After going through this routine once or twice (three times now if anyone's counting), I imagined that I could easily spot a relapse and dispatch it judiciously. This was not the case. In retrospect it might seem obvious that something was amiss. As I had begun to feel progressively better, I had an undoubted confidence that I was making incremental progress each week. The tasks which I could perform but previously couldn't were easy to enumerate. I had been practicing the saxophone religiously, writing here faithfully, even if not eloquently. Just more than a month ago, that quickly changed.

I had hoped not to return so soon to the topic of my changing brain. Interfering with my ability to write about anything else, it had other ideas.

Yesterday I was bombarded by the sorts of sensations I described in my last post. The experience was overwhelming and somewhat incapacitating. Since these odd feelings initially appeared as I began to improve, I took the correlation for granted. While there is a basis for this idea, I should probably be less of a zealot.

I’m roughly four months into my recovery. Several weeks ago I created this site so that I could write about my experiences both suffering and recovering from an autoimmune encephalopathy. As I got better, I thought, this would become a forum for other thoughts and essays, even those unrelated to brain disease. But the initial goal was to capture some artifact of my experience.

The ‘Singularity’ is in vogue. Now that computers can beat us at chess, recognize characters, and do more mathematical calculations than the entire human species armed with graphing calculators, the idea of intelligent technology has ballooned as a topic of conversation. Most articles don’t talk about machines of equal intelligence, instead showcasing their deep understanding by discussing machines that dwarf human intelligence.

Imagine your brain was suddenly and neatly partitioned into two separate minds, neither of which could communicate with the other. Each contained aspects of ‘you’ - that is to say, the ‘you’ of present. One half possessed your visual cognition, empathy, and human emotions. The other contained your capacity to reason, the better part of your access to past memories, and perhaps your love of chocolate. Which half would be ‘you’? If they were later reunified, which half would the recombined ‘you’ identify with, remember having been? In the process of reunification would something of the individuality of each half be destroyed?

I have wanted, for some time, to write about my experience with brain disease and altered consciousness. The question I inevitably pose to myself is ‘when?’ Since commencing high-dose steroid treatment and immune system suppression, the ascent towards lucidity has been startling rapid. The following trade-off emerges: should I wait longer to express my thoughts, exchanging their timeliness and authenticity for greater fluidity of expression?

Having decided to write now, I have perhaps lost many of my memories, keeping no artifact to preserve them. Yet, I still lack the organization of thought to express the totality of my experience in one well-structured narrative. While my thoughts are vivid, they are scattered and I can only summon them contextually. I’ll try to post here a collection of the thoughts and experiences that have emerged from my experience.