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""The Diving Bell and the Butterfly""

17 Comments -

1 – 17 of 17
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Diane Ackerman's husband has "some word signifying the inability to recall words facilely", aphasia! Maybe, and she's been trying to publish it, but I guess it's just too weird. It is weird, but people buy the BS stories, like "Tuesdays with Morrie," before the fact, since they're life-affirming, right? Anyway, aphasia Ackerman is a little too distressing...a little too attuned to the chaotic, messed-up undertones of human cognition.

Ghost-writer stuff for the dramatic situation...just what the doctor ordered!

2/20/08, 8:04 PM

Anonymous none of the above said...

Why didn't he learn Morse code? That would surely have been much faster.

2/20/08, 8:09 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

I asked the same question in my review. After all, POW Jeremiah Denton blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E when put on North Vietnamese TV.

But I think I have an answer: Morse Code would have been too hard for Bauby's visitors to learn. It doesn't look like it in the movie, but (according to his book) he actually had a fair number of visitors drive down from Paris. They could pick up the alphabetical system for deciphering his blinks much faster than they could pick up Morse Code.

2/20/08, 8:20 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Northern NJ paper The Bergen Record used to have a regular feature where local residents wrote autobiographical profiles. One was written by a fellow who had the "locked-in" syndrome. He was a high school music teacher who was going out to pick up bagels one Sunday and suffered a massive stroke. When his profile was published, he was living in a nursing home. He used the blinking method to communicate too, but since conversing was difficult that way, he'd 'dictate' a message every morning to one of the nursing home aides, and the aide would call his wife and read it to her.

- Fred

2/20/08, 9:15 PM

Anonymous dodo said...

The Japanese title is "The Diving Suit that Dreampt it Was a Butterfly."

Different, too.

2/20/08, 10:15 PM

Anonymous Nick said...

When I saw the film, I thought the way that they used was too slow. What they should have done is create a 5 by 5 grille then fill it in with the alphabet (French doesn't use w or k, or you could amalgamate two letters, i and j, say) in order of frequency. For instance in English the first row would be ETAOI, second row NSHRD, etc. Suppose Bauby wanted to say 'NO', the secretary would have read out '1, 2 ...', (Bauby blinks, meaning the letter is in row 2), then '1, ...', (Bauby blinks, meaning that the letter is in column 1 of row 2, ie it's N, etc. This would have been way quicker. When I saw the film I kept on wondering why no one ever thought of this. You could also drop vowels, like in Arabic and Hebrew, and write in telegraphic style.

2/20/08, 10:56 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Great idea.

2/20/08, 11:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nick, I thought of the same thing because table-driven look-ups are always faster.

What I really wondered, though, was, why didnt they use a computer navigated by eye/pupil movements? These things have already been developed. They could place the table you mention on the upper half of its screen, then place vocabulary words at the lower half (arranged, again, according to frequency). Batting your eyelids on the upper lookup table could navigate to the word on the list below. Then after you reach the vicinity of the word by say first few letters, you'd navigate the rest by looking at the word. Finally, you'd double-bat your eye to enter the word. Way way quicker.


JD

2/20/08, 11:40 PM

Anonymous James Newcomen said...

Steve you may have heard about Christopher Nolan the Irish poet and author?

He had a different condition but he could inspire such a story.

2/21/08, 4:24 AM

Anonymous HTC said...

Well, being French, I suppose they might have used the alphabet-blink method in homage to Alexandre Dumas, one of whose characters used it to settle a critical inheritance question in The Count of Monte Cristo.

2/21/08, 4:35 AM

Blogger Kai Carver said...

I wanted to try out an online subscription to American Conservative magazine, but it didn't work. :-(

No doubt I'll try again some time.

I don't want to subscribe to the paper edition because:
- I don't read paper anymore;
- a subscription to France is a bit pricy;
- they probably don't send the mag in a plain unmarked envelope. Subscribing to something with the words "American" and "Conservative" could get me killed in my neighborhood.

(that last item is a joke)

2/21/08, 4:42 AM

Blogger michael farris said...

Well surely people involved in this looked for shortcuts.

That is, I'd assume that any secretary taking notes this way would be making guesses (and that they had a basic yes/no protocal worked out).

I R - E - M

"Remember?"

yes

okay

L A

"last?"

yes

okay

S U

"summer?"

yes

etc

2/21/08, 9:00 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

At 3 hours per day, I come up with it taking over 180 days assuming perfect ability to recite the letters and blink.

2/21/08, 9:24 AM

Anonymous none of the above said...

Just a random aside: there's a whole well-developed field involving the best way to do this sort of thing. If you assume no context (that is, you don't change encodings based on what the previous letter was), you can construct an optimal code for a given set of letter frequencies using a pretty simple algorithm. Go look at the Wikipedia entry for Hamming codes if you want to see this. The codes can get more efficient if you take previous letters into account in the encoding, in various ways, but that will quickly get too complicated for a human to do in his head.

Anyway, I think Morse code is not too bad, as this goes. It would surely be faster for someone to stay near him who can understand Morse code, and have them translate. Besides, if none of the guests understand Morse code, you can just have the "translator" be the ghostwriter.

Wasn't there some kind of fraudulent treatment for seriously bad-off autistic kids, several years ago, like this? The specialists would "help" the kids express themselves somehow. I seem to recall having heard claims that it was woo, but I don't know much about it....

2/21/08, 9:42 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The method for blinks nick speaks of is very similar to that Russian prisoners have historically used-Arthur Koestler describes it in Darkness at Noon, and I've seen it in other sources.

Planetary Archon Mouse

2/21/08, 10:11 AM

Anonymous Martin said...

I seem to recall several cases, a few years back, in which some people claimed to be able to communicate with deeply autistic children. As I remember, there was no evidence that they were doing anything more than just making up stuff they thought the parents wanted to here.

Then of course, there are dog psychologists and dog psychics, who claim they can tell you what your pooch is thinking.

The things people will believe....

2/21/08, 11:31 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I loved "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", but the movie I'd rather see is "My Stroke of Insight", which is the amazing bestselling book by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor. It is an incredible story and there's a happy ending. She was a 37 year old Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke in the left half of her brain. The story is about how she fully recovered, what she learned and experienced, and it teaches a lot about how to live a better life. Her TEDTalk at TED dot com is fantastic too. It's been spread online millions of times and you'll see why!

6/15/08, 7:01 PM

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