The Ghost in My Brain (30 page)

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A cognitive sense, thought to be located in the superior parietal lobe.

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For those concussives reading this, looking for tips, I'll note: it was harder to ask women, who apparently have to be more cautious about this kind of thing (though once they've committed they are more helpful); it was easier to ask a stranger for a push than a tug because the former seems to feel less personal.

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People will identify
correctly
a darting animal in their yard as a squirrel, not a platypus, because this is highly likely—they follow the base rates; they
incorrectly
fear mass murderers in schools when their children are vastly more likely to be harmed in a car accident—they don't follow the base rates.

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From an anatomical perspective we might wonder if the
caudate nucleus
is missing critical visual pattern-matching input that inhibits its ability to send suppression signals to the
cingulate gyrus
to tell it to stop sending anxiety triggers; an inappropriate balance between these two parts of the brain is suspected in OCD.

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Isolating the causes of suicide is complex. Depression can lead to substance abuse problems. Substance abuse can lead to family problems. Concussion can lead to any of these; any can lead to an increase in suicide risk. However, we
can
say that “loss of self” is a critical risk factor, and that there is an increased risk of suicide after TBI.

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That is, whatever we decide the real implementation of these processes is, any neurologically faithful daemons built from it will nonetheless still have to exhibit
all
the behavior we now independently describe.

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In computer science, we have related constructs called
processes
that are used to implement the daemons. These constructs are similar to our daemon brain processing: they allow the computer to do many things at once, mostly in the background, of which the user is not aware. For example, a quick look at the list of computer tasks currently running on my laptop—which I am currently using only for the single, simple, “conscious” task of editing this book—shows that there are eighty-one other processes now running in the background: checking for network connectivity, updating my file index search function, listening for new USB connections, and so on.

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I mentioned this in a talk, and afterward a recovered stroke victim told me I had precisely captured his own experience: he could hold a candy bar in his hand, and describe every aspect—and function—of it, but could not for the life of him tell you what it was, or himself make use of that information—even though he absolutely knew this in another part of his brain.

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In one fascinating episode, my respected Tai Chi teacher asked me to mail letters for him. I was having lots of trouble making sense of geometry at the time and could not “see” the
shape
of my having put the white rectangular envelopes
into
the opening in the mailbox. Thus the letter-mailing daemon did not recognize its termination conditions. I began to worry that an important letter did not get mailed for this esteemed master. Despite the fact that I
knew
full well that I had mailed the letters, I ended up calling my teacher repeatedly over the course of two weeks, describing the details (but not the gestalt) of my actions in placing the letters in the mailbox—asking if this was good enough—before the daemon finally resolved itself and went away. The link between daemon termination and
certainty
is thus also made clear.

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Because my experience with this was so ubiquitous, and so debilitating, I consider it to be one of the most crucial concepts we will consider, and perhaps one of the most helpful for those with TBI.

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To set this in context, consider that a pair of super-macho day laborers who had earlier done heavy work on the foundation of my house showed up and said they would cut the tree down for a budget price. They laughed and taunted each other before climbing up to get to work, but each of them returned down the ladder after only a minute—with their knees uncontrollably shaking. They soon gave up, and left.

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One of my graduate students—who also had suffered a brain injury—said that he understood
exactly
about the loss of elemental cognitive concepts when he had balance problems. In his case the most pronounced result was a flattening of affect, because he could not support the concepts of complex emotions without the more basic concepts of relationship between himself and others, and between himself and the world.

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Ultimately, after five years one M.D. did go out on a limb and say, “Sure, of course,” and sign a form for me. The rest of the paperwork took me a difficult month to get through; the rearview-mirror placard was only good for three months; much of the time the Chicago Police ignored the placard and gave me a ticket anyway. It was great at Home Depot, but the paperwork was far too exhausting to ever apply for a
temporary
placard again.

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This sense of direction is represented as a spectrum in the general population and is also thought to be at least somewhat sex-linked, relating to—and here relevant to our discussion—
spatial rotation
capabilities.

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Interestingly, after treatment, I am now more toward the center: I have periods of both dreaming and dreamless sleep. Some people who dream all the time wake up perpetually tired (see, e.g., “epic dream disorder”) and we have to wonder if the kinds of treatment I received might also help them. Further evidence to suggest this might be worth pursuing is the number of such people who also report balance problems.

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Many people who experience sleep paralysis at one point or another also have hypnagogic hallucinations—embodied as visions of various demon incubi or succubi sitting on their legs, or whispering in their ears, and so on. Given the already somewhat terrifying nature of sleep paralysis, I have to say I am
extremely
glad I never experienced these latter symptoms!

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Reported by inventor Stanley Koren and neuroscientist Michael Persinger, though others have not been able to replicate their results. Regardless,
neuroethology
—the study of such phenomena—is an ongoing branch of research.

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And of course we could, in theory, also reverse the process—turning our computer brain into a human one by replacing our computer implementations with the real cells they are modeling, one by one. Each of these is a variation of what is known as the “China brain” conundrum discussed by Lawrence Davis in 1974.

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George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in
Metaphor and Thought,
edited by Andrew Ortony (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–51.

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Though for scientific readers with an open mind, I can refer to studies of time-reversed causality that at least suggest this may not be the last word on cause and effect: D. I. Radin, (2011), “Predicting the Unpredictable: 75 Years of Experimental Evidence,” in D. Sheehan (Ed).,
Frontiers of Time: Quantum Retrocausation
(American Institutes of Physics, forthcoming), and Daryl J. Bem, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
100(3) (March 2011): 407–25 (though not yet replicated). Thus modern science raises additional questions about why concussives—who operate closer to unfiltered reality—may have trouble with time.

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There are many extremely detailed measures of working memory in cognitive psychology. I use the term loosely here to refer to my explicit experience, but offer no commentary about any formal, testable properties in this context.

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In fact, our perception rate is
far
higher in many instances: in working out the debate between analogue and digital music recordings, for example, it has become clear that we hear changes in sound quality that occur in ten thousandths of a second, and perhaps even
far
less than that.

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We might ask: how do we address it when someone has, instead, an elemental concept of himself as the one who “can't do it”? If my experience is anything to go on, we'd have to look at the deepest levels of symbolic cognition to make changes to such a built-in program. We're talking about shapes and colors and primitive relationships here—not the story of one's family life.

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Imagine I gave you drawings of (1) a spiky figure, and (2) a gently curved line, and asked you to identify them as either a
Patiki-tiki
or a
Smoo
. Almost everyone would associate the spiky figure with the Patiki-tiki, and the curve with the Smoo, based on the
ideas
of spikiness and gentle curves. For me, at times of stress, such ideas, which affected perception and meaning, would blend with objects in the real world.

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Jake is expert in knowing things like what style and color of street sign each city uses.

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Putting myself in rule-following mode worked to avoid problems with specific, highly structured scripts like going to dinner. There was, however, no algorithm that ever worked for avoiding choice in general.

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The pathology of concussion may also contribute to this problem, especially in older concussives. Some of concussion damage is due to axonal injuries—injuries in the connections between neurons. It is believed that some axonal regeneration can take place, but that the regenerated connections may not be as efficient as before (especially in people over forty), resulting in slower processing speeds.

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I tried wearing earplugs when shopping but the change in the aural environment was usually too disconcerting. It also further overloaded my visual system, which had to make up for the loss of environmental
spatial context
information I ordinarily got from my ears.

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This was an instance of “emergency adrenal mode” where I called on extreme resources to respond to special circumstances. But it took its toll: Several people helped me to my car, with my groceries. I waited for a long time before I could drive. I had to leave the groceries in the car when I got home—where they spoiled several days later. I went without food the rest of the week.

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Surprisingly, modern research has shown that there are significantly more neural pathways dedicated to top-down feedback control than there are for the actual bottom-up feed-forward input signal that they are filtering.

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Atul Gawande, “The Itch,”
New Yorker
, June 30, 2008 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande).

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W. Timothy Gallwey,
The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
(Random House, 1974).

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You can see the strong link between the brain's visual/spatial processing and locomotion in the following way: Next time you are able to go running (or some equivalent), push yourself to where you can just keep up the pace—you are working hard. Now, try solving simple arithmetic or logic problems in your head. You'll find it is
really
hard to do both at the same time. You'll want to stop running, or drop into a more automatic pace, so that you can work out the problem in your head, because each of these tasks is competing for the same visual/spatial resources.

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The race was aborted because of the extreme heat, and my path thus cut short, but I ran for an hour in Grant Park afterward and completed thirty miles.

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Another difficulty that concussives may encounter is that there is no accounting for the interaction between independent tests: For example, a concussive is given a pattern matching test on which she scores almost perfectly, but which leaves her incapacitated after only a few minutes. Following this she is given an independent test of memory on which she scores poorly because she is worn out from the first test, but which would ordinarily be no problem at all. In the classic case she'll try to explain this to the neurologist administering the tests and be dismissed because it “is not part of the tests.”

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This passage was actually recorded when Erin was slightly older, but it is representative of the earlier time.

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A scheme we worked out together was the only thing that allowed me to keep going during this period: Each morning, for more than two years, we would put on music—symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, jazz, operas—and dance for forty minutes. Then we'd listen for another two hours during which time I would work on my computer and Erin would either continue to dance or sit quietly at her own desk and paint.

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It was the fascinating book by Norman Doidge, M.D.,
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
(Penguin, 2007), that started us looking for those connected with brain plasticity research. Dr. Doidge very graciously wrote back to my inquiry—the only one. He was, understandably, somewhat overwhelmed by the flood of e-mail he was receiving, and did not have any immediate ideas, though he kindly suggested writing to him again if I still was at a dead end. By then we had found Dr. Donalee Markus.

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These can be cheaply purchased. Search for “Color Therapy Glasses” on eBay, though I recommend a healthy skepticism when reading the various therapeutic claims, which have nothing to do with Donalee's application.