Imagine waking up one morning absolutely convinced that you are dead. Not metaphorically dead. Not feeling empty or numb or depressed. Actually, literally, medically dead. You can see yourself breathing. You can feel your heart beating. You can touch your skin and feel warmth. But your brain insists, with total certainty, that you are a corpse. You try to explain this to your family: “I’m dead. I don’t exist anymore.” ...
On September 13, 1848, a three-foot-seven-inch iron rod weighing thirteen pounds shot through Phineas Gage’s skull at the speed of a cannonball. It entered below his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, tore through the front part of his brain, and exploded out through the top of his head, landing about 80 feet away, covered in blood and brain matter. Gage was packing explosives into a rock using a tamping iron when a spark ignited the powder charge prematurely. The rod became a projectile, and Gage became the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. ...
On the night of February 1, 1959, nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their tent from the inside and fled barefoot into the Ural Mountains winter. The temperature was around -30°C (-22°F). They were dressed only in underwear or light clothing. They had functioning equipment, warm clothes, and a secure shelter. They abandoned all of it and ran. Search teams found their bodies weeks later, scattered across the mountainside. Some had died from hypothermia. Others had massive internal injuries—broken ribs, fractured skulls—with no external trauma. ...
On November 4, 1970, a social worker in Arcadia, California encountered a girl who appeared to be six or seven years old. She wasn’t six. She was thirteen. She weighed 59 pounds. She couldn’t stand up straight. She couldn’t chew solid food. She couldn’t speak—not a word, not a sound beyond occasional whimpers. She’d been locked in a small room for nearly her entire life. Tied to a potty chair during the day, confined to a sleeping bag in a crib at night. No toys. No conversation. No human interaction beyond someone occasionally bringing food. ...
In 1930, four identical baby girls were born to a family in a small Midwestern town. Genetically, they were as similar as four humans can be—monozygotic quadruplets, sharing 100% of their DNA. They grew up in the same house, with the same parents, eating the same food, attending the same schools. And all four developed schizophrenia. On the surface, this seems like a clear-cut case of genetic determinism: identical genes, identical illness. ...
In the late 1800s, in the remote logging camps of northern Maine, there was a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks who would obey any sudden command without conscious control. Startle them and shout “Jump!” and they’d jump. “Throw your axe!” and they’d hurl it, even if someone was in the way. “Hit yourself!” and they’d strike their own face. They had no choice. The response was involuntary, immediate, and uncontrollable. They couldn’t stop themselves, even when they knew the command was dangerous or humiliating. ...
Dr. P. was a distinguished music teacher and singer who could tell you the exact interval between any two notes you played. He could identify a Brahms sonata from the first three measures. He could conduct a choir through complex harmonies without missing a beat. But he couldn’t recognize his wife’s face. Worse than that—when Dr. P. went to leave the neurologist’s office after his examination, he reached for his wife’s head and tried to lift it off her shoulders. ...
In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior judge in the German court system, published a 450-page memoir titled “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” The book described in meticulous, articulate detail how God was transforming him into a woman. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through divine rays that penetrated his body and rewrote his nervous system. The transformation, Schreber explained, was necessary because humanity had been destroyed. He needed to become female so he could be impregnated by God and repopulate the Earth with a new race of humans. ...
In March 2013, a woman in the village of Kalachi, Kazakhstan walked into her kitchen to make breakfast. She felt suddenly drowsy. Overwhelming exhaustion washed over her. She lay down on the couch “just for a moment.” She didn’t wake up for six days. When she finally regained consciousness, she had no memory of what happened during those six days. No dreams. No sense of time passing. Just… nothing. She wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t be the last. ...
There’s a horror story that has circulated online for years, known as “The Russian Sleep Experiment” or “The Soviet Sleep Experiment.” The story goes like this: In the 1940s, Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and used an experimental gas to keep them awake for 15 days straight. By day five, the subjects became paranoid and stopped talking to each other. By day nine, they were screaming. By day 15, they had mutilated themselves and were begging the researchers not to let them sleep. ...