michael leviton
columist

I think I know what it’s like to go insane. I don’t get very sick often but when I do, I have fever dreams and delusions. I close my eyes and hear voices and when I open them there’s no one there. The voices belong to people I’ve known, friends and enemies I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. The fever dream is like a reunion. Sometimes the things they tell me are really nice to hear and sometimes they are rude to me. Once, I believed that my illness was part of a protest, like when Ghandi fasted, and that there were thousands of people rooting for me to continue being sick. The voices, in this case, belonged to people supporting me in the protest. I distinctly remember wholeheartedly believing this. 

Once, I was too hot under the covers and too cold without them. I decided the only way to solve my temperature problem was to take a cold shower and get in bed under the covers still wet. I tried this and, believe it or not, it felt perfect.

Last year I saw a bit of documentary footage about a specific group of people who used one particular bad batch of heroin that ruined their brains. This heroin destroyed the part of the brain that produced L-Dopa, which works as the connector between will and physical action. They could still see, hear, and feel but they couldn’t tell their bodies to do anything. 

This winter, I saw one of those movies about innocent youngsters who end up in jail for life in a foreign country. My first response to those movies is always that the whole idea of jail feels unfair. If your crime takes five minutes to commit, wouldn’t it make sense maybe to spend ten minutes in jail, or fifteen? The idea that five minutes could translate to eighty years in jail just sounds strange. The second thing I thought was that maybe I could still live a somewhat satisfactory life in jail. Depending on what they give me in jail, maybe I could read or write or draw. Maybe I could take correspondence courses, lift weights, maybe they’d let me practice a musical instrument. 

However, if I were conscious but trapped in my body, it would be nearly impossible to live a life I considered meaningful. The only way it could work is if someone who knew me decided to devote her life to me. She would have to just guess what I wanted because I wouldn’t be able to speak. She could take me to museums, play music for me, tell me beautiful things, dance naked in front of me, hold books before my eyes or read to me. This all sounds very unlikely. So, I resolve that being trapped conscious in my body is the worst thing that could possibly happen to me and I want it recorded that if it is to ever occur, I want someone to kill me.

Four summers ago, my ex-friend Josh took me to the office of psychic research at Princeton University to have a mind race. Scientists there had devised a computer game to pit one person’s psychic power against another’s: Psychic Racing. A scientist led us to a computer screen with Atari-esque crude race cars waiting on it. The scientist asked us who wanted to go high and who wanted to go low. I went low. The scientist told us there was a random number generator in the computer, that some people could psychically manipulate the random number generator, pushing the numbers generally higher or lower. The race cars on the screen reflected whether the numbers were tending to be high or low. If your car won, it meant you’d psychically pulled the random numbers harder than your opponent. The scientist started the game from a separate room so that his brain wouldn’t interfere in our game. Josh laughed, furrowing his brow, making ugly mock-thinking faces while I concentrated on low numbers. My car lapped his several times. The next race, he insisted that we switch, that he be low and I be high. That was fine with me and Josh stared very seriously at the screen, this time genuinely trying, I think. My car beat him by even more. He looked mad. It was funny because, though neither of us actually trusted this game as a test of anything, I bet he expected to beat me. And, even stranger, when I beat him, I felt like it meant this machine was actually valid, that it really told you who truly had the stronger brain, that finally the truth had come out, that Josh had to face the fact that I was the superior human being. I know, though, that if I’d lost in psychic racing, I would have judged the game pathetically inaccurate as a brain measure. I played Josh again and beat him quite badly once more. We weren’t friends for long after that. 

The heaviest brain ever recorded weighed 5 pounds, 1.1 ounces. It belonged to a thirty-year old man from Chicago who died in 1992. I wonder how one arranges to get his brain weighed after death? Well, someone out there right now has the heaviest brain on earth and does not know it. I imagine she’s a very sad person that doesn’t understand how everyone else can enjoy themselves so much all the time. She thinks only she recognizes the true weight of things, how heavy the world is, but actually it’s only her brain that’s heavy.