Following is a footnote picked from ‘A leg to stand on’ – Oliver Sacks. I found it very insightful (which is only a fraction of the entire experience narrated in the work) from the Agnosia vs. Hysteria perspective. There still is a lot of disbelief on these fronts, especially in countries that carry super-extra cultural and religious baggage, India being one of them. Also yesterday marks the day Sai Baba of Puttaparti expired. While my wife told me about it, my in laws were glued to the television. My wife was in the Sai Baba mode and we were sharing ‘stories’ we keep hearing. One of them ‘some women in whom some Mata’s soul enters, leaving them in a lurch’. I recalled one instance when I was standing at ‘Sankat Mochan’ (the Hanuman temple) in Banaras and a few priests were trying to exorcise a dead woman. I don’t know how else to qualify it because I kept watching the entire pandemonium from a distance, while the dead was accompanied by her family and kin. I don’t know whether she came back to life. I had also heard stories when demented subjects are still brought to priests and black magic experts to wash off the devil. Woah! Still! It still happens.

There is a big digital bill board around South-Ex in Delhi that counts the population in India and I am sure a few go unnoticed every now and then. Such a pillage of growing infants whose only education is parents and company that is itself bereft in 21st century education.

My Father-in-law asked, ‘Why does this new Sai Baba (heir) have to be found in India? Why not Srilanka, Pakistan, England?’

While the world is talking about Godmen and heroes in cricket, business and bollywood, I count a possibility while reading ‘A leg to Stand on’. The soul is the body, the body is the soul or in words refined further, the soul is the nerve bundle in a human body and vice-versa. How else indeed can phantom limbs be defined.

My personal experience during meditation is a loss of sensation of my body, limbs, everything. My nerves start resting as it brings the soothing sensation around my cortex. When I start coming out of meditation, my limbs don’t come back instantly. There is a hiatus between my intention and when I actually start feeling my limbs and body. It’s the Main switch turned on, but the individual switches take a moment.

We fear abnormality, we hide them as if they are not existent in our society, Hysteria, Dementia and equate all such subjects with a negative mark. First remark that comes out is ‘Unlucky chap’, ‘what a boy he was when he was young’, ‘she is so beautiful otherwise, who would say she suffers from such a thing.’ A small twitch in the nerves and I could be the next one. My soul, belief, everything will go for a toss while I hold my toe curled in an embryo, waiting for redemption.

Here is the excerpt from ‘A Leg to Stand On’ which I think defines the difference between Agnosia and Hysteria very well indeed.

Neuropsychological syndromes are ‘bottom-up’ disorders, in which a lower-level neurological disorder causes a higher-level psychological one. Hysteria,  by contrast, is a ‘top-down’ disorder, where the primary disturbance occurs at the highest level – in higher-order consciousness, which is symbolic and liguistic – any disturbance at lower levels being secondary to this. There is a primary disturbance oflocal mapping and primary consciousness in ‘alienation’, but no primary disturbance of thse i hysteria. (There could, of course, be some secondary disturbance.) Higher-order consciousness (which includes the psychonanlytic ‘unconsciousness’) is charged with specific, intense affects in hysteria – whereas it is merely bewildered in alienation.

We can never know primary consciousness directly, Edelman stresses; we can only know it through the higher-order consciousness. Animals lacking higher-order consciousness can experience it directly, but cannot report it. If there is any situation in which human beings are able to give, a report a pure primary consciousness, uncontaminated by higher-order consciousness, it is, Edelman suggest, in ‘split-brain’ patients, patients in whom the right hemisphere has been surgically disconnected from the left. Such patients may report perceptions (from the left side of the body, or the left half of the visual field) without their being modulated by the linguistic and reflective powers of the left hemisphere.