Cotard's syndrome
Psychologist Paul Broks described some Oliver Sacks-type case studies of people who had lost aspects of consciousness, such as the sense of continuity through time:One patient had a strong sense of identity and autobiography but believed that she had ceased to exist. "Am I dead?" she asked. This condition, Cotard's syndrome, was due to a neurological decoupling of feelings and thoughts. Thinking that one exists was not enough: the notion had also to be felt--"I feel I think, therefore I am."
Another Cotard's patient believed that her voice was all that was left of her. She was "just a voice, and if that goes, I won't be anything." We all have an inner voice, a stream of sub-vocal speech. It keeps the story going and helps sustain the illusion there's "someone home." One man, recovering from a stroke that had virtually abolished his capacity for speech, including self-talk, described the condition of total wordlessness as being like confinement to a continuous present.
But these words you are now reading, whose are they? Yours or mine? The point of writing is to take charge of the voice in someone else's head. This is what I am doing. My words have taken possession of the language circuits of your brain. I have become, if only transiently, your inner voice. Doesn't that mean, in a certain sense, that I have become you (or you me)? It's a serious question. Written text is a primitive but powerful form of virtual reality.
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