NEURODISABY CHILD
These children are not only awake and often alert, but show responsiveness to their surroundings in the form of emotional or orienting reactions to environmental events […] The children are, moreover, subject to the seizures of absence epilepsy. Parents recognize these lapses of accessibility in their children, commenting on them in terms such as ‘she is off talking with the angels’, and parents have no trouble recognizing when their child ‘is back.’ […] The fact that these children exhibit such episodes would seem to be a weighty piece of evidence regarding their conscious status.1
A
Patient B., whose insular cortices were entirely destroyed, experienced body feelings as well as emotional feelings. He reported feeling pain, pleasure, itch, tickle, happiness, sadness, apprehension, irritation, caring and compassion, and he behaved in ways consonant with such feelings when he reported experiencing them. He also reported feelings of hunger, thirst, and desire to void, and behaved accordingly. He yearned for play opportunities, for example, playing checkers, visiting with others, going for walks, and registered obvious pleasure when engaged in such activities as well as disappointment or even irritation when the opportunities were denied. […] Given the impoverishment of his imagination, Patient B.’s existence was a virtually continuous ‘affective’ reaction to his own body states and to the modest demands posed by the world around him, undampened by high-order cognitive controls […] According to Craig (2011), the tell-tale sign of self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, an ability that in his words ‘can only be provided by a functional, emotionally valid neural representation of self’. Patient B. passed this test consistently and repeatedly. In brief, these findings run counter to the proposal that human self-awareness, along with the ability to feel, would depend entirely on the insular cortices and, specifically, on its anterior third (Craig 2009, 2011). In the absence of insular cortices, we need to entertain neuroanatomical alternatives to explain the basis for B.’s feeling abilities and sentience.3
A
A
No comments:
Post a Comment