The Ghost in My Brain (11 page)

After an hour or two, or four, or six, of sitting there being completely, staggeringly bored, my brain was rested enough to support the imagery of dreaming, and I could allow myself to fall asleep.

One of the other sleep symptoms I began to experience one or two times a month after the crash was
sleep paralysis
—a startling state in which I would wake up enough to rise into consciousness, with full sentient awareness of my body, but was not awake enough to be able to move at all, in what is known as
complete REM paralysis.
*

The most disconcerting problem of sleep paralysis, and
one often experienced immediately upon waking in this eerie state, is that your natural inclination will be to take a deep breath in anticipation of the need for action, but because of the paralysis nothing happens. Your body, which is still asleep, is in fact autonomously getting enough air for its needs, but it
feels
like you are suffocating, since you're not consciously able to draw breath. You might also experience other minor bodily discomforts, suddenly magnified in a claustrophobic way because you can't do anything about them: you might feel too hot, or your limbs might be uncomfortable, but it's impossible to move. Finally, with great effort, after a few long minutes have passed, you can usually move an eyelid, or a fingertip, and, as with the initiation problem, this gives enough feedback to get the body moving again. You can finally breathe in a gasping lungful of air.

I find it troubling that so many people (reportedly, many millions of people) have to deal with sleep paralysis, and it is often considered exclusively from a psychiatric perspective as part of a general category of sleep disorders. The fact is, I never had this problem before the crash. I suffered from it for the eight years following the crash. I got better after effective treatment for concussion, and I've never had it again. Doesn't this at least suggest the possibility that people who suffer from this frightening condition might benefit from the same sort of primarily visual-system treatments that we'll later see I received?

We also might be suspicious that at least some of those who suffer from sleep paralysis may have had earlier, undiagnosed brain concussions. In my own family, the one of my children who suffered regularly from sleep paralysis was also the one who had incurred a serious concussion from a bicycle fall.

Because of my eight years' experience on the other side, so to speak, I now have a lifelong appreciation of the graceful way that most of us can slip so elegantly into and out of sleep, and the natural effortlessness with which this complex transition is managed.

RELATIONSHIP IN MEDITATION.
When considering the long hours I spent being painfully bored, staring at a wall, doing nothing, giving my visual system a rest, a reasonable person might ask, what about meditation? After all, one of the goals of many kinds of meditation is embracing nothingness: being so present in the current moment that you are doing nothing at all. This seems ideal for giving visual systems in the brain a rest, while also using the time in a productive, self-enhancing, and restorative way. Alas, these two forms of nothingness—the type I pursued when trying to rest my concussion-wearied brain, and the kind pursued by meditators—are very different, in important ways.

Prior to the crash, at times of great intellectual demand, I found that I could rest in a meditative state and would emerge rejuvenated. An hour's focused meditation would be equivalent to several hours' worth of sleep.

Sometimes I would meditate in traditional ways. More often I would listen to music late at night, and would enter into a deeply meditative state, fully awake, without thought, highly concentrated, seeing nothing but a real-time vision of the music unfolding before my closed eyes. I would “see” the sounds of the music as interacting colors and shapes in all their interwoven complexity. It was pure sensory input, without thought. If someone spoke to me during such a meditation I wouldn't be able to hear her, as though I were in a deep sleep. I tuned out
the sound of voices just as I tuned out acoustic defects in the recordings. But if my interrupter became more intrusive, such as by tapping me on the shoulder, I might startle awake, even involuntarily calling out as I was wrenched back up from those deep levels of concentration.

Meditation, and to my mind at least, every contemplative practice, has the critical element of
relationship
. Such states are experienced as a profound unveiling of the relationship of the individual to the rest of the universe, a revealing of the interconnectedness of life, and spirit, and the world. It is a becoming of the moment, and an understanding of how that moment is connected to all other moments both prior and following.

But all of this, the sense of relationship to God, the spiritual connection to the universe, and the global sense of nothingness/everythingness, is
highly visual/spatial in nature
. It was unequivocally my experience that I could not enter into such a state without making use of the spatial processing areas of my brain. And of course, this was exactly the part of my brain that so often needed rest.

For this reason, meditation was not often something I could engage in after the crash, and was most especially one of the worst things I could do when my visual systems were debilitated.

DIALOGUE WITH GOD AND THE MATTER OF SENTIENCE.
Since my very early teens, I've had the sense of a dialogue with God. Though I did not grow up religious, praying was easy for me. I talked to God, and God listened. God talked to me (in pictures, and through intuition), and I listened. Dialogue with the spirit was easy and natural: comforting, occasionally demanding,
real
.

Almost immediately following the crash, this dialogue disappeared. I recall very distinctly entering the small chapel at
DePaul's downtown university campus, sitting alone on one of the chairs to pray for my students, and for my ability to serve them as their professor—something I often did. In a profoundly disturbing moment I realized that there was no longer anyone there. No one was listening. I thought:
These are just empty words I am saying to myself. My prayers are no different than if I were reading aloud from an auto repair manual.

I felt a deep sense of loss, but in a weird way. Though I understood, intellectually, about the loss of dialogue with God, and I felt quite disturbed about how sterile my life had become because of it, I nonetheless couldn't quite “see” what was missing. It was like trying to remember a dream. I still believed in God, but viscerally it was an entirely different experience: there was no longer anyone there.

When we consider the nature of my later recovery, and the many examples we've seen of how our internal world is so very symbolic in nature, it becomes apparent that it was the loss of my visual/spatial ability to represent symbolic
relationship
that was at the heart of my troubles with God. If so, then losing the closeness to God I felt pre-concussion raises some interesting questions about our connection to the larger universe around us. Could this sense of connection be located entirely in one of the visual/spatial centers of our brains? After all, in my case I had this easy faith up until the moment of the crash. I lost it in the days after the crash. I didn't have it for eight years. I got it back again after treatment for my concussion. This is pretty strong evidence that it is our brains—our
physical
brains—that support this kind of spiritual faith.

What this means is still up for grabs, however. As scientists, we have to allow for at least two possibilities. On the one hand we could take this as evidence that a sense of God, and
the spirit, is just an artifact of the neural, and possibly other, programming in our brains—a purely physical uprising from a locus in our heads. Certainly there are researchers who talk about the “God spot” in the parietal, and other, regions of the brain that are thought to give rise to spirituality. Some have even have claimed to have created a “God Helmet” that artificially stimulates a profound religious experience via artificial manipulation of the brain.
*
On the other hand, we could just as easily imagine that these parts of the brain allow us to connect to a real channel of spirituality, and that without them we have simply lost one dimension of our sensory capabilities. That is, if we lose our hearing, the world is still full of sound; in the same way, if we lose our sense of God, that doesn't mean that God is not still out there.

There is another, related question that we have already raised: we have discussed that concussives often feel as though they have become nonhuman. In my case I felt this profoundly. And, as we will see, when the Ghost later returns, it is because my brain can once again support the
necessary cognition
for being fully human. So what does this tell us about the nature of any sort of life after death? No one will disagree that our brains are physical devices, and that they perform all sorts of computational functions on our behalf. If losing some of the brain's computational capabilities causes us to become so very much less human, then what does this say about our humanness when the physical brain stops functioning altogether? After all, we don't take our brains with us when we die.

A scientist might then suspect that life after death—life without a physical brain—might necessarily be a very foreign, thoroughly nonhuman existence indeed.

These are not trivial questions. As computers get increasingly powerful, most thoughtful cognitive scientists must take such questions seriously. Consider the following enigma:

Suppose we built a synthesized mind, which runs on a computer. It is completely artificial, and there is no part of it that is not implemented as zeros and ones in silicon registers. Most of us would have no problem terminating the artificial mind by turning off the computer, or frightening it, because we know it is not real. It doesn't
actually
feel anything—after all, we are just, say, replacing a “0001” with a “0011” in some
fear register
. On the other hand, those of us who are not sociopaths
would
have a problem terminating the gardener working next door, or frightening him, because he has a right to life, and
does
feel the emotional pain of being scared. One is real, the other is not.

Yet we can imagine that in the coming years we will be building very much more complex artificial minds—ultimately, perhaps as complex as those of humans. But they are still artificial, right? Because they are running as zeros and ones on silicon chips . . .

Not so fast. If both the computer and the human are simply computational devices—software activations of zeros and ones running on silicon hardware in one case, and neural activations running on a brain and body system in the other—then what about the following:

From a theoretical standpoint, we can fully implement all the functions of a single neuron (or glial cell, etc.) with a modern computer. We can model all its input and output functions,
and also all its networked connections to other neurons. So now, one by one, we replace each brain cell of our gardener working next door with a networked computer that fully implements both that cell and all of its connections to other cells. At some point, we will have replaced
all
of the gardener's brain cells with our exact artificial copies of them. We have turned our gardener into a computer, but one that
fully implements him
. (Keep in mind that every thought, every memory, every feeling—including the most minute aspect of our gardener's sense of self—would be supported in either case—human or computer—and in every hybrid case along the way.)
*

Because the gardener's mind and the computer-simulated mind each can be transformed into the other, at what point is the gardener real, and at what point artificial? Do we simply argue that there is some “critical mass” of complexity after which sentience arises within
any
such system, regardless of the implementation? With the advent of computer science, issues such as the dualism arguments of Descartes and Ryle become grounded in precision: when we build a computer model, each bit is on, or it is off, completely, irrefutably, implementing the minutest part of our theory.

And what happens, then, when we build such systems from scratch? Do
they
have rights? The right to “life”? Does it now become unethical for us to turn them off? Do they, independently of us, communicate with God?

Or, suppose that separate from the ability to build artificial life in this way, we also have the ability to manipulate its
configuration. Suppose that, having isolated the computational (feeling of?) connection to God that I lost for eight years, we can build artificial beings that always experience this connection, and are in a constant state of enlightened bliss. Are we then obligated to build as many of them as we can, in the way that we feel obligated to do our best so that our children have happy, possibly spirit-based lives?

These are interesting questions, not so easily answered, but also, in the computer age, not so easily dismissed. And my own experience—my partial loss of human sentience coinciding with my loss of brain functionality—brought them
much
closer to home.

WHEN TIME LOSES ITS STRUCTURE.
In 2001, two years after the crash, I went to see the recently released movie
Memento
, a drama with an odd narrative structure in which time runs both forward and backward in a series of flashbacks and “flash-forwards.” The main character, Leonard, suffers from short-term memory loss and can only remember recent events for a few minutes. In trying to unravel a rapist-drug-dealer murder mystery and find his wife's killer, he records important events by tattooing summaries of them on his body so he won't forget them.

I hadn't known anything about the movie prior to entering the theater—a rare opportunity had arisen for some time off, and I'd simply picked a movie at random. After just the first few scenes I was sickened by what I was seeing, but mesmerized
nonetheless. The director, Christopher Nolan, had managed to capture so clearly the
essence
of what I was going through every day of my life. I was both horrified to see so clearly in front of me what my life was like, and how truly incapacitated I was, but also, at the same time, grateful that at least one central truth of my existence could be captured and expressed.

Unlike the main character in
Memento
, I did not have short-term memory loss. Nor did I have to tattoo events on my body to remember them. And, of course, I was not trying to find the murderers of my wife. So why did this movie have such a strong, sad, remorseful, cathartic, essence-capturing effect on me?

For concussives, there is a disturbance in the normal apprehension of
time.
Most people in the Western world have an innate sense of time flowing smoothly, endlessly, from the past, through the present, and into the future. At least, this is how we Westerners
talk
about time, and conceptualize it when making plans and explaining our lives. But concussives can lose this (seemingly) innate sense of time, and we often have to manually construct the “natural” narrative of sequenced events from its raw component parts. In doing so we must face a lower-level reality: that the West's “civilized” conception of time—which we ordinarily think of as a purely physical property of the world around us—is in fact almost entirely metaphorical.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff at the University of California at Berkeley discusses such metaphors in his widely read article “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.”
*
For example, the following statements (in italics) from Lakoff's article accurately describe pieces of our common conception of time,
but have little to do with the actual physics of atomic motion that underlie the reality of time:

“Times are things [in the physical world]
.
”
Okay, sure. But if 2:35
P.M
. is a physical thing, how much does it weigh? Where is it?
“The passing of time is motion.” “Future times are in front of the observer; past times are behind the observer.”
Yes, but what does time
actually
have to do with being in front of us or behind us, or passing us by? (Hint: absolutely nothing, except if, for example, we are walking, and time is motion.) Our physical future might just as easily lie behind us to the east, or over our heads in the penthouse apartment above us. And doesn't time also pass for a rock sitting in the desert?
“He stayed there [e.g., in that stage of his life] a long time.”
Where, exactly, on Earth is he staying?

For a concussive who is struggling to understand something as simple as a friend saying,
“I'll see you next Tuesday at 4:30,”
the ubiquitously metaphorical conceptions of time are both suspect and elusive. In my case I would experience rapid thought processes such as:
Time is like motion. So it's like a train passing. And if I'm standing on the platform, then 4:30 Tuesday is like where the train is headed to down the tracks—so there will be some billboard there as the train later passes it, and that is my future.
And then, of course, I would struggle to visualize how some place I was supposed to be, such as my friend's house next to the train tracks, relates to the square in a calendar with a number (day of the month) in it, and what the symbol
4:30
(four-colon-thirty) has to do with it.

While all this thinking was going on under the hood, like Leonard in the movie I would smile and nod and say,
“Sure, 4:30 on Tuesday,”
knowing all the while that I had no idea what the phrase meant, that the effort to understand it was interfering with my balance, and that I was hoping to figure out how to get it into my simple calendar so I could better “deal with it
later” before the nausea from the internal visualizing of the moving objects (such as the train) got too great to bear. And, of course, if my friend were to start saying something else, I might have a moment of internal desperation trying to process the “
4:30 Tuesday
” soon enough that I didn't lose either the “
4:30 Tuesday
” or whatever the new spoken input was.

For most of us, time is stored as a partially ordered collection of vignettes with a much stronger sense of before- and-after ordering than there is any sense of an immutable “continuous ether” in which these scenes are parked. To make sense of the narrative sequence, then, most of us will visualize not only the individual scenes themselves, but also a visual/spatial representation of them across a metaphorical “time” spectrum—from the earliest scene, through the present, and into the future. We can illustrate this by having you “point to” three scenes representing (1) when you got up this morning, (2) the present moment, and (3) tonight when you will go to bed. The chances are that you have some symbolic, highly
spatial
way of keeping these three scenes ordered (at least partially) according to time. You may have some kind of left-to-right ordering, a high-to-low ordering, or a foreground-to-background distinction. Or, you may have something much more abstract. The point is that you have
some
symbolic way to place such scenes in sequence. Ordinarily these will be located in three different areas in the physical space around you.

Because of the visual nature of these representations, shifting through the indexes of all these ordered scenes that make up the flow of time may greatly tax the already overworked visual/spatial processing systems in a concussive's brain. And as we are seeing in so many different ways, for
concussives this visual processing is often
the
scarce resource that has to be jealously hoarded if they are to even minimally get through the day. Those dealing with concussives may, for this reason, find even the most naturally organized among them reluctant to make plans, to set dates, and to engage in activities such as scheduling their days.

An additional problem that I myself had, and that other concussives may share, was that under brain stress I lost the basic concept of before and after—of
ordering—
because I lost about half of what numbers meant. The
cardinality
of a set of items (in this case, time-stamped events)—the quantity of them, a more basic concept—was still intact, but the
ordinality
of them—the ordering of them—was gone. These two concepts are quite elemental in our thinking. If we consider the number “five,” for example, it has both properties inherent in it: On the one hand it represents, say, the five children I have, the quantity of them, the set of five. On the other hand, it also represents the “fifth-ness” of my fifth child—
after
the fourth child—and thus implies an ordering. This loss of one's natural ability to order events can be quite troubling when it comes to making sense of narrative and the metaphors of time.

Imagine again the three scenes representing when you got up this morning, the current moment, and when you will go to bed tonight. The morning and evening scenes are very distinctly
not now
, and as such they live only as intellectual fabrications in your imagination. Compared with what is before your eyes and ears in this present moment, you can see that the
this-morning
and
this-evening
scenes are quite symbolic in nature—scenes filled with iconic representations of those parts of the real scene that are important: bed
covers, sunlight or darkness, toothbrushes, clothes, what the floor looks like, and so on. It is also possible that, unlike the present moment, you have the perspective of looking
at
yourself—observing yourself in the narrative scene—rather than through the perspective of looking out
from
your own eyes. If so, this is de facto proof of the iconic nature of the images.

But now imagine yourself as a concussive who has lost the ability to “see” these elaborate spatial relationships. Now, instead of a natural, innately ordered progression of events, time becomes a
right-now
chaotic jumble of randomly intermixed scenes. Most troubling is the mixing up of those future scenes, which have been imagined—for the purpose of setting goals and creating plans—and those past scenes, which have already occurred, and are being stored as data. (Though note, very specifically not in a delusional way—the problem is sequencing, not knowing what is real.)

Lastly, an additional difficulty for a concussive may be in recognizing that a formerly future scene has now arrived. Consider that for most people, if their spouse has told them to be sure and mail a letter today, they'll form a picture of mailing the letter. Their body will, sooner or later, be prompted by the letter-mailing daemon that has been hovering around since morning waiting to match reality with that future image they have formed. To wit: when they enter the kitchen later in the day, the scene
reminds
them of the letter-mailing goal, they will open the kitchen drawer, take out the letter, and go outside to put it in the mailbox for pickup.

For a concussive, if the gestalt meaning, and context, of the current scene in the kitchen is missing because of visual
system brain fatigue, the letter-mailing daemon may still sense some kind of match and try to break through to the drawer-opening mechanism, but ultimately can't. But the concussive is meanwhile growing unsettled, because she knows there is something wrong. This processing breakdown requires additional resources to sort out, in a downward spiral, and the visual processing now also deteriorates as visual-symbolic resources are used up trying to make sense of the kitchen, the unsettled feeling, and the repeated attempts to retrieve “something” that just isn't there. The balance system now gets affected, for the reasons we've discussed above, and nausea may set in because of it.

In trying to figure out what to do, everything becomes
right now
for the concussive. Instead of triggering
What was it I should be remembering?
, processing might become
Here are my hands in front of me; here is the floor; the ceiling is above the floor; it is late morning; there is light coming in the window,
and so on, all the while knowing all this is important (the prompting from the letter-mailing daemon), but not knowing why.

Sooner or later a concussive will sort it out, and probably get the letter mailed, but let us make no mistake: asking a concussive to do something as simple as mailing a letter may be an especially draining way for them to start their day.

It was, of course, Nolan's dissection of the structure of time that was so difficult for me to witness in
Memento
, and which caused me to identify so strongly with the experience of the main character: Leonard and I shared a sense of the literal,
right-now
nature of time, with all other temporal relationships being more or less a mystery that required intense intellectual effort to disentangle—a fictional portrayal that was yet truly evocative of my real-life experience.

CALENDARS AND THE INABILITY TO PLAN.
Prior to the crash I was a skilled internal planner. Despite an appearance of chaos in my life—caused by my tendency to take on many big projects at the same time—I had a strong sense of how long those projects would take, and how they should best be interleaved both with one another, and with the many short-term goals I was also pursuing. I was the ultimate multitasker.

Within days of the crash, this intuitive planning skill disappeared completely. The way it disappeared, and my particular—and extreme—struggles with planning after the accident, are revealing. We can best understand my difficulties by first looking at four aspects of time, and also the way time relates to calendars: concepts that we typically take for granted, and which are crucial for planning.

First, as discussed, we tend to think of time as being linear: there was a yesterday, there is a now, there is a future. An important extension of this idea, crucial to developing plans, is the concept of
causality
, which comes with the constraint that earlier events can
cause
later events, but never the reverse.
*
Because I could no longer see the relationship between events, I was also generally unable to form images of causality, and of causal chains.

Second, in the modern world we associate geometry with blocks of sequenced time. Rectangles on a page—the days of a
calendar—are associated with, for example, the rising and setting of the sun each day. But this is a complex relationship: the unseeable spinning motion of the earth; the interplay of shadows and light and dark; the memory that tells us this day is
like
one that came before, and the logic that predicts it is
like
the one that will come tomorrow. And the calendar-geometry gets more complex: the artificial grouping of a line of days into rectangular seven-day weeks, rectangular weeks into square months, and layered 2D square months into a depth of 3D years, each represented on the page symbolically. As a concussive, when my brain was fatigued, I couldn't “see” the shapes in a calendar, nor could I conceptualize their link to events in the natural world. How do you draw a line from a one-inch square to an eight-thousand-mile diameter spinning rock traveling around the distant sun? The representation held no meaning for me.