Just to give you an overview of what we're going to concern ourselves with,
I wanna share with you a story which really shows the power and
the profundity of what our nervous system does for us.
And the story is by Jean-Dominique Bauby, and
it's called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of Elle,
the leading fashion magazine in France.
And he lived in Paris, and he lived a very exciting, cosmopolitan life.
He had two children.
And one day he was driving, and
he had a sudden onset incapacitation.
It turned out to be a stroke, a massive stroke, in his brain stem.
He says in the beginning of the prologue before this happened,
he'd never even heard of the brain stem.
Well, you're gonna hear about the brain stem.
So he had this massive stroke in the brain stem and this left him paralyzed.
So he couldn't move his arms, or his legs.
He couldn't point.
He was on a respirator because he could not breathe on his own.
He couldn't swallow.
So they had to deal with him drooling.
At one point in this book, which I'll tell you how he wrote in a minute,
he says he was very happy to get his own clothes back,
because if he had to drool, he at least wanted to drool on cashmere.
So, how did he write this book?
He's paralyzed, he can't write.
He can't speak, he's on a respirator.
He can't move his laryngeal muscles.
He can't really form his upper airway to form words.
So how did he do it?
Well it turns out that people with this syndrome, and
it's called the Locked-in Syndrome, oftentimes can move an eyelid.
And indeed, he could move an eyelid.
And they realize that because in fact,
Locked-in Syndrome patients often are able to do that.
So what occurred was, there was a French alphabet.
In other words, the most common letters in the French language were listed
from most common to least common.
And when a person would point to each one of these letters or read them aloud,
and when they got to the correct letter, Bauby would blink his working eyelid.
And he blinked out letter by letter, this entire story.