Brain damage and dementia and what they tell us about the soul
I'm sure, with so many people dying recently, that we've been thinking about what happens after death. I know this topic has been done over a million times since the dawn of language and man itself, but there are a couple things that I have never seen talked about. It can be phrased as a single question: what happens to the soul when dementia or brain damage removes and alters personality and perception?
I worked with a couple of older folks with dementia during my short stint as a live-in caretaker, and I saw that, though their core personalities were intact, they were not experiencing our world as concretely as us neurotypicals are. They had lost something important that us non-sick people take for granted, and as an extension, assign to our "soul."
But these people were clearly still alive. They were experiencing things, just not in the way that we typically assign to experience.
Let me talk about a man named Phineas Gage. If you've ever taken an intro to psychology class, you have probably heard of him. He's the man who took a railroad spike through the brain and lived back in the 1800s.
People say that, after the spike to the brain, Mr. Gage became a changed person. Whereas, before, he was quaint and measured, after he was a drunken, impulsive fireball. Though he died a couple of years later because of complications (literally spitting out his own brains before collapsing), his case tells us that personality is contained within a physical package that can be influenced by physical trauma.
This puts ideas about the soul in a precarious position. We who do believe that a piece of ourselves leaves our physical body must struggle with the implications of Mr. Gage's experience and the experience of others who lost brain function in one way or another.
If our memory, our personality, and our sense of reality are based purely on a physical machine--a proven point--then what separates after that brain gets destroyed in the course of death?
When we meet our grandma who died of Alzheimer's in heaven, will she be in the state she was before she died, or will she be in her original state? We don't know. We can't tell. This is another question I'm not smart enough to understand. But I want people to know that the soul and personality might not be as connected as people think. How much of it do we get to keep upon death is an unknown factor. Does it even matter? The life we will live after death is probably a lot more phenomenologically different than our life down here than we think. We could be up there as anything.
But one thing I do hope to believe is that there is a world up there that is waiting for us, regardless of whether we bring our earthly personalities up there. Those who were wounded due to dementia and brain damage may be healed, or they may maintain what they were before they died. Or there might not even be thought or personality up there that we recognize. Who knows? Not I.
Just take comfort in the fact that, no matter what, when it's over, you will get to sleep in for the rest of eternity. No more alarm clocks to wake you up may sound bad at 5 pm, but at 7:14 am when the alarm is about to send you to work, it may seem like a good thing after all.
I worked with a couple of older folks with dementia during my short stint as a live-in caretaker, and I saw that, though their core personalities were intact, they were not experiencing our world as concretely as us neurotypicals are. They had lost something important that us non-sick people take for granted, and as an extension, assign to our "soul."
But these people were clearly still alive. They were experiencing things, just not in the way that we typically assign to experience.
Let me talk about a man named Phineas Gage. If you've ever taken an intro to psychology class, you have probably heard of him. He's the man who took a railroad spike through the brain and lived back in the 1800s.
People say that, after the spike to the brain, Mr. Gage became a changed person. Whereas, before, he was quaint and measured, after he was a drunken, impulsive fireball. Though he died a couple of years later because of complications (literally spitting out his own brains before collapsing), his case tells us that personality is contained within a physical package that can be influenced by physical trauma.
This puts ideas about the soul in a precarious position. We who do believe that a piece of ourselves leaves our physical body must struggle with the implications of Mr. Gage's experience and the experience of others who lost brain function in one way or another.
If our memory, our personality, and our sense of reality are based purely on a physical machine--a proven point--then what separates after that brain gets destroyed in the course of death?
When we meet our grandma who died of Alzheimer's in heaven, will she be in the state she was before she died, or will she be in her original state? We don't know. We can't tell. This is another question I'm not smart enough to understand. But I want people to know that the soul and personality might not be as connected as people think. How much of it do we get to keep upon death is an unknown factor. Does it even matter? The life we will live after death is probably a lot more phenomenologically different than our life down here than we think. We could be up there as anything.
But one thing I do hope to believe is that there is a world up there that is waiting for us, regardless of whether we bring our earthly personalities up there. Those who were wounded due to dementia and brain damage may be healed, or they may maintain what they were before they died. Or there might not even be thought or personality up there that we recognize. Who knows? Not I.
Just take comfort in the fact that, no matter what, when it's over, you will get to sleep in for the rest of eternity. No more alarm clocks to wake you up may sound bad at 5 pm, but at 7:14 am when the alarm is about to send you to work, it may seem like a good thing after all.
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