We can take another path to search for signs of the exocerebrum within the central nervous system. In certain illnesses an accentuated atrophy is observed in the relation between the mind of an individual and his or her sociocultural environment. It has been known for a long time that lesions in the prefrontal region of the brain provoke antisocial and psychopathic behaviors. The celebrated case of Phineas Gage, the worker who had an iron bar go through his head in an accident in New England in 1848 injuring his frontal lobe, was the emblematic beginning of study on the subject: Mr. Gage went from being a kind and reasonable person to becoming unbearably irascible with a permanent blasphemous, obscene, undisciplined, and aggressive behavior. Since then much information has been accumulated on the effects of prefrontal injuries. But now I wish to bring to my aid studies on antisocial people who have not suffered any injury. They are individuals who have been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having antisocial personality disorder: people characterized by continuous transgressive and violent behavior, constant aggressive irritability, and irresponsible indifference to the harm they inflict on others or on themselves. We can assume that these disorders involve communication defects between internal neuronal circuits that have atrophied and circuits of the exocerebrum. This interpretation is confirmed by research results: people with antisocial personality disorder, according to images revealed by structural magnetic resonance, showed a significant reduction of prefrontal gray matter (but not white matter). Very importantly, two other groups were also analyzed in this research: drug addicts and schizophrenics, or people suffering from affective disorders. There was no reduction of gray matter observed in these groups, who are also people afflicted with pathologies causing serious social problems.

It has been thought that if we strip the brain of subjective devices and cultural supplements, consciousness could be, so to say, at our fingertips. Consciousness would be inside our brain, nestled in brain networks, waiting to be able to express itself. There was a spectacular case in the nineteenth century of a person whose two essential channels of communication with the world were cut off for the first seven years of her life. Helen Keller, born in 1880 in Alabama, became totally blind and deaf at nineteen months of age. At the age of seven she began a tutoring process that seems miraculous and that led her to an extraordinary mastery of the language and culture of her time. In a tender and intelligent book, she describes what she calls “the world I live in.” The great psychologist William James, after reading the book, wrote to Helen Keller that he was “quite disconcerted, professionally speaking, by your account of yourself before your ‘consciousness’ was awakened by instruction,” and that he could not understand how she lacked an emotional memory of the period of her life before she began to use the manual alphabet system. Keller herself had written that before the arrival of Anne Sullivan, the teacher who taught her to communicate, she lived “in a world that was a no-world” and she did not think she would ever be able to adequately describe “that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.” It seemed that this brilliant woman almost had the memory of her childhood within her reach, the time when she was all but totally devoid of cultural tools that could mark consciousness “in a natural state” with artificial imprints. In a previous book, her fascinating autobiography, Keller points out that, before learning language, she somehow knew that she was different from others. While she used scarcely a dozen rudimentary signs for expressing her wishes, everyone else moved their lips. She states that during this time “the desire to express myself grew.”