Like their forerunners, post-Hellenistic doctors also grappled with the unclear boundaries between healthy versus pathologic sleep, and consciousness-unconsciousness. Furthermore, they incorporated new diseases and redefined others - like lethargy - that were specifically associated with this process. Celsus considered sleep as all-or-nothing phenomenon, without recognising different depths. Regarding mental capacities, he subsumed most of them in his idea of mens/animus. Aretaeus, on the other hand did conceive different depths of sleep, and his eclectic method enabled him to find alternative pathophysiological explanations to characterise several of its main features. Similarly, although his organization of mental capacities varied according to what he was explaining, the opposition gnômê-aisthêsis was important in his idea of mind.

Some Hippocratic doctors regarded sleep as a healthy process, and some as a pathological one; some of them struggled to distinguish between hallucinations and nightmares, and some between deep dreamless sleep and total loss of consciousness. This chapter explores how different treatises from the Hippocratic corpus navigated these ambiguities, how they explained different depth of sleep (i.e. different levels of consciousness), and how such understanding relates to their views on mental capacities (which they subsumed in concepts such as phronesis, sunesis, gnômê, and nous).

Ch. 6 New developments in science and philosophy can led to a new natural theology based on induction and probability. Natural theology today requires insights from the sciences, analytic philosophy, and hermeneutics.

This introductory chapter presents and contextualises the main sources under study, and addresses the problems of a definition of consciousness. Given the vagueness of the notion, a working definition is proposed, which is based on cognitive model that uses three prototypical clinical presentations of impaired consciousness: delirium, sleep and fainting.

This chapter presents sleep within a system of opposing tensions (consciousness-unconsciousness, health-disease), and in the midst of extra biological debates, particularly anthropological and sociological. Such tensions and debates illuminate how understanding sleep can be useful to apprehend ancient doctors’ ideas about the mental capacities that are compromised in impaired consciousness.

In face of the difficulty of establishing clear biological boundaries between sleep and the other forms of impaired consciousness, the sociological and anthropological analyses can provide hints as to where those limits were set in real life. The terminological analysis suggested a common feature that persisted throughout the different authors and periods: different levels of consciousness (from drowsy to hyperactive, and from delirium to koma) where always related to the impairment of mental capacities, regardless of the way in which each medical writer grouped or understood them.

Galen conceived sleep and wakefulness as a continuum that depended on the mixture of qualities within the ruling part of the puschê (the hêgemonikon) located in the brain. Naturally, in his system whenever pathological sleep occurred the doctor needed to determine if the brain was affected directly or by sympathy (from another organ), and the precise imbalance of qualities that needed to be counteracted by their opposites. His idea of mind was very accurately and hierarchically structured: it resided in the logical part of the soul, located in the brain, and several diseases with impaired consciousness compromised its normal functioning.

The cognitive approach sees behaviour as resulting from the operation of internal mental processes. Our visual systems did not evolve to present us with a true description of the world; rather, they evolved to give us a useful description of the world that supports our actions upon it. We can see this in perceptual constancies in which a changing world is stabilized by the actions of our visual system, resulting in visual illusions. Although problems such as under-age drinking are often thought of as problems of logic (such as the abstract Wason task), they are perhaps better thought of as problems of duties and obligation and play a role in detecting freeriders to better enable cooperation. Statistical misconceptions such as the gambler’s fallacy and the hot hand fallacy may arise from our sensitivity to the patchiness of the world that we inhabit.

This chapter introduces the hard problem of sensory phenomenal consciousness and the three-part solution, the MOUDD theory, developed in the book.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

Chapter 4 draws on both existing research and semi-structured interviews with people with visible differences to explain what we know about the human experience – both psychological and social – of having a disfigurement. For instance, are particular types of disfigurement more vulnerable to discrimination than others? Are certain life contexts impacted more acutely? Are coping mechanisms commonly used? It considers the link between physical appearance and perceived personality traits. And it challenges common assumptions – like the idea that more severe disfigurements are always worse to live with (an erroneous assumption which lives on undaunted in the law). Despite methodological difficulties in researching such a dynamic and underexplored area, this chapter identifies significant disadvantages in looking different. With this in mind, this chapter probes how people with lived experience of visible difference understand their experiences and relate them to the law. Exploring the legal consciousness of this group of people provides a partial insight into the low numbers of claims brought under the relevant part of equality law. It interrogates the gulf between what the law says on paper and how it works in real life, revealing tensions and mixed messages which undermine law’s potential for effectiveness.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.

TOT states are conscious experiences. When we are in a TOT state, we know it and we feel it. A major conclusion from the work presented in this book is that reliance on subjective reports remains a critically important means of investigating the TOT phenomenon. How TOTs influence other thoughts, decisions, and behaviors remains an important area for future investigation. One of the newest areas in TOT research and one that is driving recent research is the finding that TOT states are associated with a number of cognitive biases in the moments that those TOT states are occurring as well as with indicators of goal-oriented behaviors aimed at information-seeking and possibly ultimately at TOT resolution. This research shows that TOTs help to put people on a path toward resolution, enabling and even motivating them to pursue and eventually obtain the answer. We highlight some other future directions in TOT research, such as focusing on TOTs in people with anomia.