News Ticker




Minds, Bodies, and the Three D’s

by Daryl Gregory

Let’s start on a down note, shall we?






I started reading non-fiction books for the layman about consciousness and some of the hard questions in neuroscience. What is thought? How does the brain generates consciousness? And what is the “self” anyway?

I became particularly interested in what happens when things go wrong. The books all had the theme of The Brain vs. one of the three Three D’s: Drugs, Disease and Disaster. There were so many fascinating studies about people whose minds were affected by strokes, tumors, viruses, bacterial infections, pharmaceuticals, and head trauma. Often, these malfunctioning brains told us more about how consciousness worked than the healthy ones.

And the more I read, the more I understood that the body in the mind/body problem included more than the brain. That chunk of gray matter requires an entire ecology—the nervous system, the endocrine system, even the digestive system—to function, and changes or errors in any one of them can affect the mind.

For example: The enteric nervous system in your gut has a hundred million neurons. It can operate pretty much independently of the brain — and most of the neural pathways from gut to gray matter are delivering outbound messages. So your stomach’s not taking orders from the brain; if anything, it’s giving them. This isn’t news to anyone who’s noticed that their moods are affected by what they’ve eaten (or what they’ve not eaten). “Gut instinct” is not just a metaphor.

So given all the ways the body can screw with the mind, is there any such thing as the “true self”?

Well, no. Sorry.

We all suffer under the illusion—and it’s a pretty convincing one—that we’re a mind that has a body. That there’s a little person sitting behind our eyes, steering this body around. But it’s clear that the reverse is true: we’re a body that has a mind.

Science has so far been unable to find any aspect of the mind that is unaffected by genetics, chemistry, or physiology—up to and including that ultimate personality change when metabolism fails. (Dead people, it turns out, are almost all boring conversationalists.)

Most people are pretty comfortable with the idea that our memory, thinking skills, and mood can be affected by the Three D’s. After all, we’ve been listening to Prozac for years. But in Afterparty I wanted to talk about the aspects of the mind that we usually think of as being in the province of philosophy or religion, not biology. Do we really have free will? Is our moral reasoning affected by the way we’ve evolved? And when we experience the numinous—that moment when we know there’s a higher power in the world larger than ourselves—is that just an illusion too?

The main character of Afterparty is an ex-neuroscientist and current addict named Lyda Rose. She’s also technically, if artificially, insane—an overdose of a smart drug called Numinous (see what I did there?) left her with a permanent hallucination of a personal deity, the white-coated angel Dr. Gloria. As a scientist, Lyda “knows” that Dr. Gloria doesn’t exist, but she also can’t refrain from talking to her.

Some of the other victims of Numinous never doubt that their deities are real—they feel that the drug has opened up a portal to God. And many of these people do seem to be better off with their god than without. Certainly Lyda is a kinder, more rational person when she’s listening to the advice of Dr. Gloria.

So, does it matter if these chemicals are injected into you, or if they’re manufactured naturally by your own body?

This is why I love science fiction. We can invent some technology, or some disease, to ask interesting questions. We can have characters with problems that let us look at the world differently.

I’m not saying that characters with disabilities are there to provide “magical insight” for able-bodied people, the way nineteenth-century writers used to glorify consumptives, saying that they were somehow more spiritual and sensitive than the poor saps who had the bad luck to not get tuberculosis.

But I am saying that by showing characters that are neuro-atypical, or who are dealing with some unusual aspect of the body, we can all think a little harder about why our bodies and minds work like they do.

Let’s end on a down note, shall we?

My wife, a psychologist and chair of a university department that has three programs that focus on disabilities, likes to remind able-bodied students that their condition is temporary.

I’ll add one more reminder: Even if you manage to miraculously avoid the three D’s, that fourth D is coming for all of us.


  1. David Greybeard // April 22, 2014 at 8:26 am //

    Great post. I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy of AFTERPARTY.

Comments are closed.