Culled from:\u00a0The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/c19f2607-9188-4c18-8204-5030a48b017f.jpg\")
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\nJules Cotard<\/em><\/p>\nA Beautiful Poem<\/h3>\n
Perhaps the most absurd psychological delusion – in the Sartre\/Camus\/existentialist sense of absurd – is Cotard Syndrome, in which victims insist, absolutely swear, that they’ve died. Also known as walking dead syndrome, it usually strikes older women, and often emerges after an accident: they’re convinced that their suicide attempts succeeded, or that they died in the car wrecks that sent them to the hospital. The seemingly blatant fact that they’re sitting there,\u00a0telling you all this<\/em>, doesn’t impinge; these are people who can hear Descartes’s\u00a0cogito ergo sum<\/em>\u00a0and say, Not so fast.\u00a0 Some even claim they can smell their own rotten flesh; a few have tried to cremate themselves. And in some cases, their delusions plumb the very depths of nihilism. As the first doctor to describe the syndrome, Jules Cotard, said: “You ask them their name? They don’t have a name. Their age. They don’t have an age. Where they were born? They were never born.” Neurologists disagree about the explanation for Cotard, although most feel, as with Capgras syndrome (where the afflicted individual is certain that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter), that two parts of the brain must be malfunctioning simultaneously. One theory interprets Cotard as Capgras turned inward: people feel no “glow” about themselves, and that deadness convinces them that they have in fact died, logic be damned.<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a>
\nJules Cotard<\/em><\/p>\nA Beautiful Poem<\/h3>\n