When it comes to our sense of self some of the most, I won’t say problematizing, but let’s say nuancing phenomena are brain injuries and lesions that lead to bizarre neurological conditions (at least for us dualists who believe that there is a soul that is greater than the sum of our brain’s biomechanical parts). 

By connecting aspects of our “self” that we intuit are fundamentally part of who we are to brain regions they raise all sorts of questions about agency, guilt, personhood, and human connection. (There are a number of fine books that go into more fine-grained detail about the kind of thing I’m talking about. I especially like V.S. Ramachandran’s popular press works on this, but he hasn’t written anything for a while. ) 

So with that below are some of the conditions and what they might mean really big-picture. I’ve also included some conditions that are less existentially shaking still have some connection to gospel themes. 

Capgras Delusion: A person believes a loved one has been replaced by an identical imposter.

One hypothesis about this is that the connection between feelings and faces is severed. People still feel emotions, and they see faces, but the kind of emotion people feel when they see a loved one or friend is deadened, so they think it’s not really them. From a gospel perspective, because so much of the restored gospel deals with the “same sociality that exists in this life,” this would be a special kind of hell when you intrinsically can’t feel love for people in the moment. 

Fregoli Delusion: The belief that different people are actually a single person in disguise.

Not a lot is known about this, but it may be that the feeling one person connects with another person goes haywire and is imposed on multiple people. Your mother is everywhere. 

Cotard’s Syndrome: The belief that you are dead or don’t exist

It’s speculated that Cotard’s Syndrome is kind of like Capgras Syndrome but internal-facing. One doesn’t feel anything existentially, not in the ennui, existential angst sense, but in the literal feel anything when confronted with evidence for one’s own existence. I’m not sure how they get around the “I think therefore I am,” but in some cases it involves people denying the existence of the universe itself. I remember hearing a Truman Madsen talk where he discussed having a particularly vivid nightmare as a child about nothingness that stuck with him. If Celestial glory is being, life, and vivacity, living in an existential nothingness is sort of its own outer darkness. 

Alien Hand Syndrome: A hand literally has a mind of its own

In Alien Hand Syndrome one’s hand performs actions that the person is not consciously aware of, as if it is somebody else that is steering and controlling the hand to do its own bidding. This can even get so bad that the individual has to use one arm to force the other arm to stop doing an action it doesn’t want it to do. It sounds like the punchline for a South Park episode (like the one where Cartman pretends to have swearing Tourette Syndrome), but it’s real. 

This often arises from split-brain cases where somebody can seemingly have two autonomous decision-making centers in the same brain. Typically one overrides the other but sometimes they have overt conflict and control different parts of the body. In one example given in the Wikipedia page on the subject, one hand can want to get dressed and will be pulling up one’s pants while the other hand doesn’t want to, so it’s trying to take them off. Of course, the implications for free will, sin, culpability, and agency are obvious. Who sinned, the man or the man’s arm? 

Somatoparaphrenia: Denial that a limb belongs to one’s self

This usually happens on the left side of the body (no idea why), but people refuse to believe that a limb or part of their body belongs to them, and they come up with rather sophisticated, sincere explanations when presented with fairly clear evidence to the contrary. The question here is, if we are capable of such sophisticated, on-the-spot ad hoc sincere, self-convincing explanations for something that is so patently false; what does that mean for all of our other beliefs, be they political, religious, etc.? Not to sidetrack, but I’ve long been convinced that the meta-ethical position of moral realism (basically, good and bad actually exist) is patently absurd from a naturalist perspective (there’s nothing but atoms and atomic charges), but highly intelligent natural moral realists come up with all sorts of confabulations to justify it (and I’m sure many of them would accuse us religionists of the same kind of self-serving, after-the-fact justifications). 

Anosognosia or Anton Syndrome: Denial of one’s disability (they think they can walk when they can’t)

Similar to Somatoparaphrenia, people with Anosognosia have a disability; say, they are unable to walk, but they insist that they can. When challenged on this they come up with all sorts of very sincere excuses (I’m resting, or I have a sprained ankle). Anton Syndrome is a visual variation on this, where people who are demonstrably blind; for example, their retinas are completely detached, insist that they can see, but again come up with all sorts of excuses that they actually believe when challenged to demonstrate that they can see. Again, it shows just how wrong our intuition can be when mapped onto reality. Between this and things like quantum mechanics it raises questions about the epistemological validity of our beliefs, not just for obvious controversial things like spiritual knowledge but even our basic intuitions about reality.  

Body Integrity Disorder: People want to remove their own limbs

This one doesn’t raise existential questions as much as medical policy questions that are somewhat adjacent to the transsexual debate. Some people feel intense discomfort with having a particular limb or, say, finger. They don’t feel like it’s their own and they want the foreign object removed. (And it’s clear this isn’t some confabulation, when BID sufferers are asked to identify where exactly the foreign limb begins, and then asked a month later they point out the exact same spot). 

If self-autonomy is the prime directive for legality and/or rightness–you can do whatever you want to yourself as long as it is your own decision, should these people be able to get a doctor that will amputate a perfectly functional limb? This condition is extremely rare, so there isn’t a lot of research on it, but what research has been done shows that amputating the offending limb for people with BID does actually resolve the issue. 

Another variation on this is people who have a strong desire to have a disability. To be, say, blind. So once again, should people be able to go to a doctor to remove perfectly good eyes if that’s what the person wants? Obviously we’re not going to resolve that here, but just to point out that it raises interesting ethical questions. 

Synesthesia: People can smell colors and taste shapes

Synesthesia is the mixing of different senses; for example visual stimuli are connected to smells or vice-versa. There’s an intriguing (if limited) subgenre in revelatory history of people trying to describe divine experiences using senses and words that seem outside our normal range of experience. The sound of rushing waters. Brighter than the noonday sun. (Also, see my earlier post on “The Color of Paradise”). The idea that senses can cross boundaries raises all sorts of additional possibilities for a sensory luminous experience. What is the smell of heavenly light? The literal taste of respect? 

Geschwind syndrome: Obsession with religion, writing, and sex in some people with epilepsy

The only reason I mention this is that I’ve seen some people speculate that Joseph Smith had this, but my take on this is about the same as it is for the armchair ephebophilia diagnosis. 

Memory Conditions

One of the most creative cinematic murder mysteries is Christopher Nolan’s Memento, where a man with no short-term memory tries to solve his wife’s murder, recording evidence and conclusions on his body because he knows that ten minutes later he’ll forget where he was, so you’re taken on a sort of non-linear, postmodern detective story as you piece together the clues from little snippets of awareness.

Don’t know that this is connected to the gospel, but journalist Helen Thomson interviewed a patient in her book (Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains) that had the opposite problem–he could literally remember every day of his life as if it was yesterday, and this condition yields a variety of God-view insights. For example, for we normies painful memories have the ability to fade with time. Not so for these people, and I imagine God is in a similar situation. In an eternal universe of experiences to draw from he can feel the pain of, and draw perfect lessons from, every single one of them as if it was yesterday. Every personal life lesson is crisp and clear, and doesn’t fade with time. However, there is a positive side to this as well, as relayed by Bob, who can use his memory omniscience to enjoy a sort of celestial experience where loved ones never go away.

You know, one of the best things about having a perfect memory is the ability to remember those that I have lost. I make sure I think a lot about people I love when they’re alive so that I can go back to any time in their life that I was with them and remember it like it was yesterday. Then if they’re no longer with me, it’s like I can still spend time with them. The people I’ve lost don’t feel like they’re truly gone because my memories of them are so clear. 

Hypersexuality

The same book reports how “Luke,” who lived a pretty standard life as a married schoolteacher, suddenly suffered from incredibly powerful deviant sexual urges he couldn’t control. He collected a massive collection of child and adolescent pornography, would pursue sex workers relentlessly, and was eventually expelled from a court-mandated sex addicts program after he kept sexually harassing the nurses. He eventually turned himself in, reporting both a splitting headache and a worry that he would rape somebody. They performed a routine brain scan and discovered a brain tumor. Upon removing the tumor his personality returned back to normal and he was released. Later the brain tumor came back, and with it his impulses, but upon removing it he again returned back to normal.

And there are a lot of other, similar cases where brain injuries and other conditions lead to hypersexuality. One case study coming out of Turkey reported on a devout Muslim woman who became hypersexual after a brain surgery. We tend to throw around terms like pornography addiction or hypersexuality, and that’s fine, but this is a whole other level.  At one point she was masturbating for 20 hours a day, damaging her genitalia in the process, and refused to leave her room because she didn’t think she could resist having sex with any men she met.

So of course this naturally raises questions about the extent to which God grades on a curve with issues like sexuality where there’s a continuum of severity of sexual temptation, all the way from, say, gray asexuals who barely feel anything in that department, to these extreme cases where their agency is almost completely extirpated. So as much as we like to think that the person who burns down his life and hurts everyone around him (and it usually is a him) from an out-of-control sex drive is just a pervert or a selfish chauvinist (and maybe they are), maybe we’ll get to the other side and realize they actually did better than we would have with their brain chemistry. Of course, we have to be careful going there because then everybody can just plead special circumstances, at some point you have to just assume people are responsible for their own actions. (As an aside, the one NC-17 movie I’d love to see if I could get an edited copy is Shame, where Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict that destroys his life, both because I heard it’s a fairly accurate depiction of sex addiction and also because I love everything Michael Fassbender is in).