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As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self.
In 2016, Noga Arikha began an 18-month study of the psychiatric clinic of Pitié-Salpêtrière, France's largest hospital, to gather research for this book, a look at how people lose, and regain, a sense of self. Vanessa, has lost ten years of memories in an instant, Toussaint, is haunted by voices of former friends, Thomas, no longer knows how to answer questions. New neuroscientific research had begun to show that our sense of self was not born in the mind, as is often thought, but in processes of the body, like circulation, digestion, temperature regulation, and arousal. This is known as interception. If, Arikha wondered, interception allows us to study the self empirically, what could we learn about mental illnesses, when the self is lost?
Soon, these intellectual questions would become incredibly personal. Arikha began to notice that her mother, Anne, would call her and then forget she'd called. Stories told the same way for years began to change. Anne began to utter odd phrases, syntactically perfect yet meaningless: "The ceiling inside, the ceiling outside!" Anne was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And, as The Ceiling Outside unfolds, Arikha tells the stories of the patients at Pitié-Salpêtrière, who work to regain their sense of self as Anne's slips away: Throughout, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she's set out to study. Interoception offers rigorous and precise models of disorder, but how are you supposed to apply those impersonal models to a real person, sitting in front of you, with a life so much more complex than any model can hold? Finding no easy answers, Arikha concludes by exploring what neuroscience will have to do to offer insights that are not simply precise but genuinely helpful.
In the spirit of The Noonday Demon and An Unquiet Mind, The Ceiling Outside is an illuminating and moving journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and the each other.
In 2016, Noga Arikha began an 18-month study of the psychiatric clinic of Pitié-Salpêtrière, France's largest hospital, to gather research for this book, a look at how people lose, and regain, a sense of self. Vanessa, has lost ten years of memories in an instant, Toussaint, is haunted by voices of former friends, Thomas, no longer knows how to answer questions. New neuroscientific research had begun to show that our sense of self was not born in the mind, as is often thought, but in processes of the body, like circulation, digestion, temperature regulation, and arousal. This is known as interception. If, Arikha wondered, interception allows us to study the self empirically, what could we learn about mental illnesses, when the self is lost?
Soon, these intellectual questions would become incredibly personal. Arikha began to notice that her mother, Anne, would call her and then forget she'd called. Stories told the same way for years began to change. Anne began to utter odd phrases, syntactically perfect yet meaningless: "The ceiling inside, the ceiling outside!" Anne was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And, as The Ceiling Outside unfolds, Arikha tells the stories of the patients at Pitié-Salpêtrière, who work to regain their sense of self as Anne's slips away: Throughout, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she's set out to study. Interoception offers rigorous and precise models of disorder, but how are you supposed to apply those impersonal models to a real person, sitting in front of you, with a life so much more complex than any model can hold? Finding no easy answers, Arikha concludes by exploring what neuroscience will have to do to offer insights that are not simply precise but genuinely helpful.
In the spirit of The Noonday Demon and An Unquiet Mind, The Ceiling Outside is an illuminating and moving journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and the each other.