MARK HADDON is the author of three novels, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Red House , and a volume of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea . He has written drama for stage, TV and radio. His latest book, a collection of short stories, is The Pier Falls , published by Jonathan Cape. STATES OF MIND: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness is an exhibition developed by Wellcome Collection to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience. Exploring phenomena such as somnambu- lism, synaesthesia and disorders of memory, the exhibition examines ideas around the nature of consciousness, and in particular what can happen when our typical conscious experience is interrupted, damaged or undermined. WELLCOME COLLECTION is the free visitor destination for the incurably curious. It explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health by supporting bright minds in science, the human- ities and social sciences, and public engagement. A collection of literature, science, philosophy and art Introduction by Mark Haddon Edited by Anna Faherty First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Wellcome Collection, part of The Wellcome Trust 215 Euston Road London NW1 2BE. Published for the Wellcome Collection exhibition States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness, curated by Emily Sargent. www.wellcomecollection.org Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness © The Wellcome Trust 2016. Introduction © Mark Haddon 2016. See pp. 243–252 for details of other copyright holders. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78125-655-8 Editor: Anna Faherty Editorial: Rob Reddick Design: Studio Hato Printed and bound in Belgium by Cassochrome Any omissions and errors of attribution are uninten- tional and will, if notified in writing to the editor, care of the Wellcome Trust, be corrected in future printings. Contents Introduction The Hardest Problem Mark Haddon ................................................. ix 1: Science | Soul ‘Body and Soul Must Part’ Robert Blair ..............................................5 The Soul Hovering over the Body… Luigi Schiavonetti after William Blake ...........................................................................6 The Stolen Body H G Wells ................................................................ 7 A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body Andrew Marvell .......... 14 The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow W W Denslow ..................... 16 ‘Where the Soul Exercises Its Functions’ René Descartes .................17 ‘A Finely Fram’d and Well-Tun’d Organ-Case’ George Cheyne ........18 What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel .....................................19 ‘What a Strange Nature Is Knowledge!’ Mary Shelley ..................... 23 ‘Superadded Consciousness’ George Eliot .........................................26 Antechamber of Consciousness Francis Galton ................................29 ‘The Perfect Combination’ De Mirjian Studios .................................33 ‘Teletransportation’ Derek Parfit ...................................................... 34 A Grand Transformation Scene F Anstey .........................................38 ‘Thou Splendid, Heavenly Lady!’ E T W Hoffman ..........................42 Humanoid Robot Dianne Harris ..................................................... 47 ‘Opinions Opposed to My Own’ Alan Turing ...................................48 ‘Stream of Consciousness’ William James .........................................51 ‘The Proper Approach’ Francis Crick ................................................53 The Hippocampus Camillo Golgi ......................................................55 Astrocytes Santiago Ramón y Cajal ..................................................56 Golgi’s Door Katherine Sherwood .....................................................57 The Psychological Working of Colour Wassily Kandinsky ............... 58 ‘A Bed Filled with Bread Crumbs’ H L Gold .....................................61 ‘Won’t She Be Cross?’ Morton Prince ..............................................69 ‘The Brute that Slept within Me’ Robert Louis Stevenson ...............71 States of Mind 2: Sleep | Awake ‘The Hour of Deep Sleep’ Charles Sherrington ...............................79 The Dream of a Ridiculous Man Fyodor Dostoyevsky ......................81 ‘The Dream’ Unknown artist ...........................................................82 Recollections of Dreamland James Clerk Maxwell ...........................83 ‘The Dream’ Unknown artist ........................................................... 85 Stripes of Conscience Brocas ..............................................................86 ‘A True Portrait of My Nights’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge .................87 Hypnos H P Lovecraft .......................................................................89 Hypnos Fred Holland Day ................................................................95 ‘Oliver Twist Sleeps’ Charles Dickens ............................................. 96 Etymologies of the Nightmare Experience Owen Davies ..................98 Nightmare Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli ........................100 ‘The Will Presides Not’ Erasmus Darwin .......................................101 A Child’s Nightmare Robert Graves ............................................... 102 The Counterpane Herman Melville ...............................................104 Fud o My o-o Unknown artist ..........................................................106 Sleep Haruki Murakami .................................................................107 Reverie Robert Macnish ....................................................................111 The Bride of Dreams Frederik van Eeden .......................................112 ‘Les Rêves’ Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys................................114 Mesmeric Experience Harriet Martineau ........................................115 ‘Animal Magnetism’ Unknown artist ............................................. 117 The Clairvoyant or, the Sleepwalker Gustave Courbet ....................118 Sleep-Waking John Elliotson ............................................................119 An Account of Jane C Rider L W Belden ........................................120 The Somnambulatory Butcher Anonymous ...................................122 ‘Extraordinary Plea of Somnambulism’ Boston Daily Mail ...........124 3: Language | Memory The Dumb House John Burnside .................................................... 131 ‘The Gang Mahal’ Abu’l-Fazl .......................................................... 135 A Report to an Academy Franz Kafka ............................................ 136 The Mark of the Beast Rudyard Kipling ..........................................138 Contents What Does Your Inner Voice Sound Like? Jennifer Hodgson ....... 142 Examples of Mistakes in Speech Sigmund Freud ............................145 Speech Amnesia Johann A P Gesner ..............................................148 ‘Syntactical Aphasia’ Henry Head .................................................. 151 ‘Impotence of Memory after Paralysis’ Robert J Graves ..................152 ‘Something More Speakingly Incomprehensible’ Jane Austen .........154 ‘Remorse Is Memory Awake’ Emily Dickinson ............................... 155 ‘The Thief’ Wilkie Collins ...............................................................156 Drawing a Blank Arthur W Pinero .................................................161 Feather Brain Sarah Grice ..............................................................164 ‘The Uncapturable Whirling Medley’ Marcel Proust ......................165 Memory Theatre Robert Fludd ....................................................... 170 The Mind of a Mnemonist Alexander Luria ....................................171 How Reliable Is Your Memory? Elizabeth Loftus ...........................173 ‘Retroactive Hallucinations’ Hippolyte Bernheim .........................177 False Memory Archive: Erased UFOs A R Hopwood ..................... 180 4: Being | Not Being Playing Dead Andrew Hudgins ......................................................185 Sarah Bernhardt Asleep in Her Coffin Unknown artist ................186 ‘This Borrow’d Likeness of Shrunk Death’ William Shakespeare ...187 Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields W B Seabrook ................... 188 ‘Who Knows What She May Be Thinking?’ Émile Zola ................189 Medical Aspects of the Persistent Vegetative State The Multi-Society Task Force on PVS ..........................................195 More Dead than Dead Kurt Gray, T Anne Knickman, Daniel M Wegner ..........................................................................196 ‘Locked Inside a Box’ Roger Highfield ...........................................199