In his cult book Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the story of a group of patients for whom time stopped. Suffering the aftereffects of encephalitis lethargica, a brain infection that swept the world in the 1920s, they remained immobile and impassive in their wheelchairs for many decades until Sacks began treating them with a new drug, L-dopa. Once roused, many of the patients revealed that they had been conscious all along, but it was a frozen consciousness. One woman described it as like living in a still pond forever reflecting itself. Her awareness of the world was bright, fixed and hard-edged—like the picture in a stained-glass window, fantastically pure but empty of possibilities.
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