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I Am, Therefore I Will; A Personal Story of Consciousness, Will, and the Transformative Power
of Music
Martha Curtis, Jonathan Schooler
Her life and work have been profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes, NBC’s The Today Show, Biography Magazine and Globo TV Brazil.
Martha has an amazing story of love of music and the determination to be seizure free by convincing a team of doctors to remove much of her right brain. Martha Curtis is a concert violinist who learned how to co-exist with epileptic seizures even from the stage. Curtis suffered from epilepsy all her life. She began playing violin at age 9 and managed to graduate as salutatorian from the Interlochen Arts Academy and graduate with honors from the Eastman School of Music. Although experiencing seizures regularly, she was able to perform as a professional musician with various orchestras. The other musicians, she says, knew what to do if she experienced a seizure.
Much of what we know about consciousness has been learned through the study of various neurologic disorders. This workshop will use temporal lobe epilepsy to illustrate different levels of impaired consciousness with the subject of the study, Martha Curtis, presenting her own seizure videos. We will watch seizures ranging from simple-partial to complex-partial, and into generalized or grand mal seizures.
Martha will use the terminology and definitions supplied by Antonio Damasio to ask these questions: What does it look like when extended consciousness is destroyed leaving only core consciousness intact? How much of the self remains? What does it look like when a seizure takes over the entire brain and impairs even core consciousness? We will watch the answers to these questions while Martha is being interviewed in seizure by a nurse at the Cleveland Clinic.
In the final hour we will discuss the efficacy of consciousness and heritable power of choice. How does it look to see a powerful being emerge from impaired consciousness back to a full palette of choice. How did that play out in the world both on and off stage as Martha performed orchestrally and seized intermittently? How does that look and feel? We will get to view the first person mind in contrast with third person behavior and hear the description of this experience from the person both having and viewing the seizure. Throughout she will perform on the violin to make her understanding of human consciousness very clear.
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