Well, I am afraid that I have some bad news. You're mind is the product of countless and highly complex so-called 'zombie' programs that you cannot consciously alter, each one responsible for a multitude of different operations. Your emotions, the way that you are feeling right now, is the result of chemical changes within your body and brain. Even small changes to the contained cosmos that is your body can throw the equilibrium that is you at this very point in time. Brain tumours may sound like they are just lumps in the brain and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they cannot change an individual completely. Forgiven , but still wrong.
The following is an extract from David Eagleman's book Incognito that both brilliantly and disturbingly illustrates just how fragile everything that you think you are is. It is a truly concerning read:
"On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The twenty-five-year-old climbed three flights of stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a trunk full of guns and ammunition. At the top he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. He then shot at two families of tourists coming up the stairwell before beginning to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As others ran to help her, he shot them as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and the ambulance drivers that came to rescue them.
The
night before Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:
I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to
be an average reasonable and
intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when
it started) I have been a victim of
many unusual and irrational thoughts.
As news of the shooting spread, all Austin police officers
were ordered to the campus. After several hours, three officers and a quickly
deputised citizen worked their way up the stairs and managed to kill Whitman on
the deck. Not including Whitman, thirteen people were killed and thirty-three wounded.
The
story of Whitman’s rampage dominated National headlines the next day. And when
police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even more grim:
in the early hours of the morning before the shooting, he had murdered his
mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep. After these first killings,
he had returned to his suicide note, now writing by hand.
It was after much thought that I
decided to Kill my wife, Kathy, tonight… I love her dearly, and
she has been a fine wife to me
as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint
any specific reason for doing
this….
Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more
hidden surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions and his
un-remarkable personal life. Whitman was a former Eagle Scout and marine,
worked as a teller in a bank, and volunteered as a scout-master for Austin
Scout Troop 5. As a child he’d scored 138 on the Stanford Binet IQ test,
placing him in the top 0.1 percentile. So after he launched his bloody,
indiscriminate shooting from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted
answers.
For
that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy
be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain – because he
suspected it had. A few months before the shooting, Whitman had written in his
diary:
I talked to my doctor once for about
two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome
by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never
saw the doctor again, and since then I have
been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no
avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was
put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its
vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harboured a tumour about the diameter
of a nickel. This tumour, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a
structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a
third region, called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional
regulation, especially as regards fear and aggression. By the late 1800s,
researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and
social disturbances. In the 1930s, biologists Heinrich Klüver
and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a
constellation of symptoms including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and
overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage showed inappropriate maternal
behaviour, often neglecting or physically abusing their infants. In normal
humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening
faces, are put in frightening situations, or experience social phobias.
Whitman’s
intuition about himself – that something in his brain was changing his
behaviour – was spot-on.
I imagine it appears that I brutally
killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick
thorough job…. If my life
insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts…. Donate the rest
anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can
prevent further tragedies
of this type.
Others had noticed the changes as well. Elaine Fuess, a
close friend of Whitman’s, observed, “Even when he looked perfectly normal, he
gave you the feeling of trying to control something in himself.” Presumably,
that, “something” was his collection of angry, aggressive zombie programs. His
cooler, rational parties were battling his reactive, violent parties, but
damage from the tumour tipped the vote so it was no longer a fair fight.
I feel that since I have posted an extract of his work, I should provide a link for people to buy it if they are as fascinated by it as I was: Buy Incognito on Amazon.com
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