“In the movie Awakenings, a young, fictionalized Oliver Sacks, played by Robin Williams, examines a woman who appears to be awake but is completely unresponsive. She is a long-time sufferer of “sleepy sickness,” a rare form of encephalitis, encephalitis lethargica. The disease swept the world in the years between 1917 and 1926, affecting a half-million people, one-third of whom were left with postencephalitic Parkinsonism. In his book, Awakenings, Sacks describes their condition: "They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies."

In the critical scene from the movie, Williams holds a pair of reading glasses just in front of the woman’s face. She yields not a twitch of a response until, that is, he releases the glasses. The falling object compels the woman’s hand to swoop up and snatch them in midair. In the next scene, Williams is presenting the patient to a small group of more senior doctors. He demonstrates her chronic catatonic state as he waves his hand in front of her statuesque face. Then he steps back and tosses a ball toward the woman, which she adeptly catches. The skeptical doctors dismiss the act as a mere reflex. Williams counters that if she had batted it away, it might be a reflex, but to catch it indicates something more. He goes on to explain, “It’s as if having lost all will of her own on which to act, she borrows the will of the ball.” The doctors scoff and excuse themselves.

Both Williams (Sacks) and the incredulous doctors have valid points. For Sacks, it is not a simple touch-induced grasp reflex like that found in newborns, but a complex, coordinated act that aligns movements of the body with the flight dynamics of an external object of a particular size and shape. To the incredulous doctors, however, it is not a fully willful act in that it is triggered by an external stimulus. The Sacks character's line, she borrows the will of the ball, captures this tension.

Such will-of-the-ball phenomena are ubiquitous in behavioral neurology. Not only have modern studies of Parkinson’s disease replicated the ball-grasping effect in controlled experiments—better grasping when triggered by a moving than stationary ball—but similar complex “reflexes” show up in utilization behavior in which the patient is compelled to use an object placed in the front of them even if inappropriate for the situation, and in echophenomena, the tendency to inappropriately mimic the gestures (echopraxia) or speech (echolalia) of others. Such symptoms are associated with a range of psychiatric and neurological conditions including Tourette’s syndrome, autism, ADHD, catatonic schizophrenia, dementia, epilepsy, and aphasia.”

Continue reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wired-for-words/202507/the-will-of-the-ball