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Emotion Construction Without a Sense of the Body

Emotion Construction Without a Sense of the Body

This project extended the investigation begun with the Language of Kim project to further explore how an individual with limited physical sensations perceives and expresses affect and emotion.

This project extended the research team’s investigation of Kim, a remarkable individual without somatosensation, from the restricted area of sensory experience into the broader and more momentous world of affect and emotion. The researchers were motivated by the finding that affect and emotion structure are anchored in interoception, meaning the feeling of the body. Since the feeling of the body depends overwhelmingly on somatosensory sensation, understanding the structure of affect and emotion in a person without somatosensation offers a unique opportunity. Kim is highly social, has likes and dislikes, and does not express any affective, emotional, or social behavior that dramatically differs from the norm. This investigation went beyond casual assessment and compared Kim’s emotion structure to that of healthy and disabled (mobility) controls. Mobility disabled controls were included to account for the challenges and strategies common to those who use a wheelchair to navigate the world while isolating the somatosensory differences unique to Kim.

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The Language of Kim

The Language of Kim

Studying “Kim,” an individual with a radically limited sensory palate, researchers formalized a new method of understanding the link between linguistic encoding of sensory perception and actual perception.

This project adopted a field linguistic approach to interrogate the subjectivity of human experience in the absence of a typical sensory palate. The research, drawing on insights from neurobiology and linguistics, centered on a remarkable individual, Kim, whose sensory world is radically different from that of the typical human. Kim relies on vision and hearing and lacks somatosensation (touch, pain, temperature, proprioception). Kim has minimal taste and smell perception. The project’s aim was to learn “the language of Kim.” This required the formalization of a new methodological approach to understand the interaction between linguistic encoding of sensory perception and actual perception. The new approach has broad applicability, as the method can be extended to understand those of different backgrounds, physical conditions, and even species.

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Making Progress on Death: Towards an Updated Normative Framework

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. © Damien Hirst & Science Ltd. DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.

Making Progress on Death: Towards an Updated Normative Framework

Legal and medical experts and ethicists gathered to re-examine the neurological standard for the declaration of death, which remains a source of debate after 50 years.

Fifty years after its inception, the current position on the Neurological Standard for Declaration of Death (NSDD) is subject to a number of persistent concerns and novel criticisms. There remains considerable public confusion both about the meaning of the term “brain dead” and about its relation to the death of a human being. There is persistent dissent by some clinicians, philosophers, and other critical observers who have never been convinced that “brain death” is, indeed, the death of the human being. There are, as well, pressures against insisting that declaring death, or at least “organ donation eligibility,” requires the irreversible loss of function in the whole brain. And, perhaps most important, there are critics who have published evidence of ongoing integrated bodily activities in some patients meeting the criteria of “whole brain death” and who have claimed that this evidence invalidates the rationale for today’s consensus position. These challenges invite—indeed, necessitate—a reexamination of the neurological standard enshrined in law and medical practice. This research project will undertake such a reexamination.

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