"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ) is a memoir of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby describes how it changed his life, having awakened from a deep coma, caused to him by a stroke, which has deteriorated all motor function, leaving him in the condition called locked-in syndrome (syndrome of the lock).
The "lock syndrome" is a state of deafferentation subtotal, usually produced by a ventral pontine lesion (Jan. vascular), which interrupts the beams bilaterally and cortico-nuclear and those pyramid schemes, without affecting the afferent pathways nor SRRA (ascending reticular activating substance) which regulates alertness. Thus, the persons affected by this syndrome is dumb and mmobile, but alert, aware and able to communicate with limited movements of the eyelids and eyes, even possible because the routes cortico-nuclear oculomotrici are spared.
The book was entirely written by Bauby blinking his left eye, only contact with the outside world. An employee's reciting the alphabet in order of frequency of the French language (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, O, M, P, D, C, F, B, V, H, G, J, Q, Z, Y, K, X, W) and Bauby beat his brow to the desired letter. Thus, letter by letter, Bauby dictated words, phrases and whole pages. To write the whole book took about 200,000 blinks of an eye, and it took two minutes to spell a word. The book is a chronicle of daily events and life of a person with locked-in syndrome.
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