I think criticisms of the main character’s obliviousness are missing the point. SOMA is all about the horror of neuropsychological trauma. The consciousness transfers and the robots confused about their bodies, all of that is a science fictional extrapolation of real cognitive phenomena: Anosognosia. There are many disorders, usually caused by physical trauma to specific areas of the brain, that cause cognitive, perceptual, or performative deficits that the conscious mind is completely oblivious to.
I’ll give you some examples. After experiencing traumatic injury to the right hemisphere of the brain, one can develop a condition called Hemineglect. A patient with hemineglect will tend to ignore one side of their visual field without realizing it. When asked to draw a clock, the patient will draw a circle and two hands, but will only draw the numbers on the right side of the clock (If you’ve watched the show Hannibal, you’ll remember a great dramatic portrayal of this test). The patient will ignore objects in the left half of their visual field, eating from only the right side of a plate, shaving only the right side of their face, writing only on the right side of the page. The patient will be completely unaware of this deficit, and if questioned will claim that they did draw the clock correctly, and they did eat their entire dinner.
Anosognosia can occur with a number of other conditions. Many of them are even more foreign to neurotypical experience, some to the point that they’re difficult to even imagine. For example, a patient who has suffered damage to the V5 area of their visual cortex may experience Akinetopsia, also known as motion blindness. A sufferer of Akinetopsia is unable to perceive the motion of objects in their visual field. They may see a series of snapshots of the object in a given point in space as it moves, but they are unable to form these snapshots together into a fluid perception of its motion.
There are a number of other aphasias and agnosias, too many for me to write up. One man may repeat a single syllable to the rhythm of a sentence and be completely convinced that he said the proper sentence he’d intended. A woman may be completely paralyzed on the left side of her body and swear up and down that she can do cartwheels. When things go drastically wrong, the brain compensates. Sometimes, part of that compensation includes hiding the deficit even from itself.
In SOMA, when Simon continually looks for excuses to justify his strange body or his sudden manifestation of a flashlight or his ability to breathe underwater, he’s exhibiting a case of anosognosia. The brain is unable to process the strange circumstances it’s been squeezed into, so it does its best to ignore or rationalize them.
This kind of stuff is very real, and can be very frightening. We’re all potentially one stroke away from experiencing disorders like those I’ve mentioned in this post. SOMA is, in its way, about this anxiety. And I can’t think of another game that has ever even approached subject matter like this. I thought it was marvelous.
(Putting my Cognitive Science BA to use tonight!)