Three centimeters behind the eyes are there, I am alive and I am conscious. Immobilized in a hospital room Riccardo Borrazzini, a "total locked-in," a man who has been in a vegetative coma for more than five years, tries to shout mute his will to stay alive, his radical refusal toward the turning off of the machines to which he is attached. And it is a cry against the superficiality of platitudes, the glibness of catchphrases, the automatic manners and taped expressions of everyday communication. In asserting his resilience, the need for hope and an irrepressible will to live, the protagonist sets the stage for one of the most topical and tremendous problems facing neuro-scientific research, opening wide to the reader an otherwise unknown and seemingly inconceivable world. That instead exists and questions us.

In his never despairing, often ironic, at times angry monologue against the empire of kitsch, Richard invites us to suspend our disbelief, as scientists and artists of life do, opening our attention to the unthinkable. That too we should always try to think.

Pino Donghi, trained as a semiotician, has been involved in cultural design and science communication for more than 30 years. Head of programs at Spoletoscienza from 1989 to 2011, he collaborated with Luca Ronconi in staging scientific texts, and has been artistic director and editor of many festivals and cultural reviews, some of which are still being planned. An adjunct professor of "science communication," editor of editorial series and essayist, his latest volumes are Errore together with Giulio Giorello (il Mulino, 2019) and an interview with Paolo Fabbri entitled Rigor and Imagination. Semiotic Pathways on the Sciences (Meltemi, 2021). In 2013, with Science Express, he published Ronconi's Infinites.

He lives in Frascati and, in his spare time, plays tenor sax.