Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

I visited him many times.

I met him through Francis Crick.

And we had this shared interest in the brain and in consciousness.

And he was incredible.

I mean, what made him so singular also in his interaction with patients was his empathy.

So you could have deep empathy with patients and try to imagine these strange otherworldly conditions, like the patient from Mars or these other patients that he described that had very specific...

pathologies that were totally explainable as arising out of brain lesions.

Yeah, he was better at that than most other people trying to imagine.

What is it, for example, to live in the eternal present?

He had one patient that had this profound amnesia, but he could still, he always lived back in, I can't remember now, 20 years earlier.

And in his entire world, his entire memory stopped 20 years earlier.

And that's how he lived.

And it looks crazy, but once you understand that, it makes perfect sense how he responded.

So we each have a bespoke reality, right?

So you have slightly different receptors.

You may have different color receptors.

You may have different taste receptors.

You have a certainly different experience from me.

Right.

You grew up in a different environment.