[MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome to Understanding the Brain. We're gonna talk about the neurobiology of everyday life. I'm really excited about this. I've learned so much by preparing for this class. And I think that we're gonna learn a lot as you go along in this class, and as we talk to each other every week. Just to give you an overview of what we're going to concern ourselves with, I wanna share with you a story which really shows the power and the profundity of what our nervous system does for us. And the story is by Jean-Dominique Bauby, and it's called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of Elle, the leading fashion magazine in France. And he lived in Paris, and he lived a very exciting, cosmopolitan life. He had two children. And one day he was driving, and he had a sudden onset incapacitation. It turned out to be a stroke, a massive stroke, in his brain stem. He says in the beginning of the prologue before this happened, he'd never even heard of the brain stem. Well, you're gonna hear about the brain stem. So he had this massive stroke in the brain stem and this left him paralyzed. So he couldn't move his arms, or his legs. He couldn't point. He was on a respirator because he could not breathe on his own. He couldn't swallow. So they had to deal with him drooling. At one point in this book, which I'll tell you how he wrote in a minute, he says he was very happy to get his own clothes back, because if he had to drool, he at least wanted to drool on cashmere. So, how did he write this book? He's paralyzed, he can't write. He can't speak, he's on a respirator. He can't move his laryngeal muscles. He can't really form his upper airway to form words. So how did he do it? Well it turns out that people with this syndrome, and it's called the Locked-in Syndrome, oftentimes can move an eyelid. And indeed, he could move an eyelid. And they realize that because in fact, Locked-in Syndrome patients often are able to do that. So what occurred was, there was a French alphabet. In other words, the most common letters in the French language were listed from most common to least common. And when a person would point to each one of these letters or read them aloud, and when they got to the correct letter, Bauby would blink his working eyelid. And he blinked out letter by letter, this entire story. That's just such an amazing action, such an amazing accomplishment. So with the one avenue that Bauby had to express himself, he did. And he did so extremely eloquently. I just reread this. I think I've read it five or six times. And it's just a really interesting, moving book. And what struck me when I read it this time was the craving. The craving for expression, for life, for participation. Unfortunately, he died just after this book was published. It's a hard thing to live with the body not being supported by the central nervous system. So the title, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, refers to his yin and yang. He's in a diving bell in the sense that his body is not under his control. He cannot move, he is paralyzed. At the same time, he has all sorts of sensory abnormalities. He feels pain, even though he can't feel touch. He cannot feel actual stimuli, actual things that are happening to his body, but he feels these abnormal sensations akin to amputation pain. There's nothing there, but a person feels pain. Well, he feels that kind of sensation, as well. So he's stuck in this diving bell. A diving bell is an iron globe that people used to use as submersibles to go down into the ocean. And that's all he can do, is be in this constrained existence where he can't actually move himself. But at the same time, he can soar. He can soar with his brain. He can soar in his thoughts and his emotions, his memories and his feelings. And he does. And he describes, for instance, he describes his feelings about Empress Eugenie at the naval hospital. And he describes this entire interaction at the hall, in the naval hospital, with these various pieces of art. And he describes it all in the present tense. It's as real as if it's happening. It's happening in his brain. And in fact, that's our reality. So we're gonna use The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Bauby's experiences. The things that he lost, the things that he retained, as a framework within which we can explore the nervous system. Okay, we're gonna get started now. [MUSIC]
