A Clinical Inquiry into the Meaning and Means of Consciousness



Neurologic or psychiatric disturbances of perception, emotion, speech, or thought offer us a unique opportunity for looking at the structural framework of the normal mind in a disassembled condition. Clinical manifestations of such disorders are like pieces of a puzzle which, if critically examined together, could help us to outline an irreducible mental blueprint that any theory of mind should be consistent with in order to be taken seriously. Thus, any theoretic formulation of the normal human mind must be readily compatible, if distorted by illness or injury, with some bizarre or conceptually perplexing disorders, such as Babinski's anosognosia, constructional apraxia, Anton syndrome, Bálint syndrome, infantile autism, pressure of talk, conduction aphasia, thought-echoing and thought-broadcasting, schizophrenic language, multiple personality disorder, or splitbrain syndrome.



G. A. de León is a retired, board-certified neurologist and neuropathologist. His postgraduate specialty training was at Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris; Johns Hopkins and Baltimore City hospitals, in Baltimore; and Institute of Psychiatry, in London. Before his retirement, he worked as neurologist and neuropathologist at Temple University Hospital and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, in Philadelphia; and later, as neuropathologist at Children's Memorial Hospital, in Chicago. He is the author of various articles on brain malformations and degenerative disorders.