The Ghost in My Brain (12 page)

Third, we assume time sequences are universal. To wit: when it is four o'clock in the afternoon in the living room in my house, it is also four o'clock in my office at the university, and if it takes an hour to drive from my house to the university, it will be five o'clock when I get there. But when I am at home in my living room, it is not ordinarily possible to see, or feel, or otherwise physically sense my office. The idea that time unfolds identically as a sequence of parallel events in all locations at once is purely conceptual, having no experiential correlation in our here-and-now perception of the world. (That is, we are
here
, or
there
, but never both at the same time, so we must trust our imagined construct of what is happening, in parallel, in the other location.)

And yet I came to understand that it is possible to be intelligent, and logical, and cogent, without having a concept of the
universal nature of time, because when my brain grew fatigued I would lose it. Instead I would move down one level to a series of disconnected images: of time moving through the vehicle of a set of ordered images both at home, and differentially at the office, but without any intuitive sense that the events unfolding in each location were linked. To create time—to make it useful for planning where I needed to be, and when—I had to link the paired series of images together manually, consciously, using reasoning, and logic, and the memory that at one time I knew how it all fit together.

Lastly, we use numbers to represent both quantities and sequences of time, and while these concepts are intertwined, they are not the same. For example, when we make an appointment to have a suit of wedding clothes tailored on the eighth, we will want to schedule this appointment
before
our wedding on the fifteenth, and we care primarily about the before-and-after ordering of the dates—not the fact that 15 minus 8 yields an intervening period of 7 days. But when we schedule a week's vacation in California, we
are
primarily concerned that the start day and end day are seven days apart.

After the crash I lost almost all reliable representation of the above concepts—especially the linking of the natural world to geometric shapes and numbers on a page, making the use of a normal calendar impossible.

And yet I always had some
memory of having known
what a calendar was, and how to use it. So, in this way I was able to fake conversations about days, and weeks, and times, and even, in some cases, to successfully make an appointment without any real conceptual understanding of what I was doing. (As an analogy, consider that Google software is able to accurately translate the sentence “The dog is hungry” into German, but
it has no more meaning to the software than does the sentence “Sewing is blue.”)

In my daily life I had to very much stick to routines: For example, I would meet with a counselor, Dr. Miller, at 9:00
every other Wednesday
for practical advice on how to manage life with brain damage. If I more-or-less figured that it was the right week, then I would go to see him. If it turned out to be the wrong Wednesday, then I would sit in his waiting room, he would not be there, and I would go home. This worked: I wasted quite a few mornings driving to a nonexistent appointment, but I almost never missed the appointments that I did have.

But if Dr. Miller had to change the appointment to another day—say Thursday at 10:00—this was very difficult for me. I might, for example, find myself staring at a card in my hand that said, “Next appointment, Thursday, February 8th, 10:00
A.M
.,” and I would be on the phone saying into his voicemail: “I see that I have an appointment on Thursday, February eighth, at ten
A.M
. I believe then that I am not coming on Wednesday, but I am not quite sure what that means. So, if this is not correct, please call me.” Then I would call back days later, again holding the card, and say, “Today is Thursday. It is nine o'clock. I will be coming to your office to arrive at ten o'clock. I have a card here that says I am supposed to come to your office at ten o'clock, but I am not sure what that means. If I should not be driving to your office now, please call me back.”

Then I would arrive at his office at ten o'clock, holding the card in my hand that said this was the time for me to be at his office, and I still was not confident that I was in the right place at the right time. Ten o'clock meant very little to me.
Thursday meant very little to me. The relationship between figures and dates written on a card, and my wristwatch (which gave both the date and time), meant little to me. The relationship between my wristwatch and the real world meant little to me.

It was not until two years after the crash, after a concerted, intense, and debilitating monthlong effort, that I was able to come up with something I thought might work: a simple, printed, one-page-per-month calendar where I numbered the days myself by hand. With difficulty, I gradually taught myself to use it . . . sort of. But until my recovery years later, my rudimentary use of the calendar was almost purely through procedural pattern matching, and with no linking to the underlying concepts and metaphors we use to manipulate time in the modern world.

I believe that many concussives have similar difficulties with calendars, dates, planning, and the conceptual building blocks of time. For example, the famous linebacker Junior Seau was believed to have exhibited signs of brain injury after his retirement, prior to his suicide. In a
San Diego Union-Tribune
article that ran in late 2012, Seau's family talked about how hard it was to schedule anything on the calendar with him. His wife is reported as saying, “His keeping appointments had gotten progressively worse. The kids and I would call him three, four, or five times a day to remind him about their games or events. We'd say, ‘Don't forget about tonight.' He'd say, ‘Where is it?' And we'd say, ‘We've told you 50 times. Go back into your text messages and look.' It got to the point where you couldn't tell him the day before an event and expect him to remember.”

COGNITIVE SLOWING.
One of the recurring difficulties that would arise after the crash was
cognitive slowing
, as though my brain's mainspring were simply winding down. I would increasingly experience both cognition, and the movement of my body, in super slow motion. My brother Will recently commented on noticing this when he visited about a year after the crash:

I remember us sitting in a restaurant and I watched you reach for the salt shaker. You were concentrating intensely. First you looked at the salt shaker, then your hand, then the salt shaker again. As you slowly guided your hand across the table in this way, it was as though you were inventing—for the first time and from first principles—the whole idea of space, and movement
through that space to pick up an object. Really striking. Really weird.

This slow-motion effect could be extreme. During one test at a rehabilitation center several years after the crash, a specialist attempted to measure my reaction time, as I responded to visual displays on a computer screen by pressing keys on the keyboard. Despite our best efforts I was ultimately deemed untestable: under the visual/spatial demands of the test my reaction times to press a key would go from less than a second, to several seconds, to a minute, to five minutes. At that point the software would time out, assuming we had abandoned the test. Internally I was still going through the same procedures as I did for the one-second response—but it was now taking me three hundred times as long to manage the steps of moving my hand.

This kind of general cognitive slowing often resulted when I had to push myself through difficult balance problems. For example, after being forced to take a commuter train home in 2004 it took me four hours to come down the stairs from the train platform, and walk the one mile home from there. I noted my progress by following individual leaves along the hedges, and individual bricks on the buildings next to the sidewalk as I walked home.

This slowing was at the same time attended by a real-time ability to observe and record my experience through what Donalee Markus, Ph.D. (whom we will meet later), calls the
metacognitive voice.
This voice is very much part of what makes us human: it is the continual voice-over that offers commentary on our place in the world, allows us to be sympathetic to the experiences of others, and gives us the very human capability of self-reflection.

For example, as you are reading this passage, your metacognitive voice allows you to simultaneously
observe that you are sitting here reading
.

The metacognitive voice also allows us to change our narrative perspective: you can imagine yourself sitting at your kitchen table eating breakfast, with your hands and plate in front of you. Then, with a slight internal flick of a switch, you can again observe yourself sitting at the same table eating, only now from across the room.

We now find a unique juxtaposition of circumstances: On the one hand, my cognition slowed enough that I could reflect on individual processing steps that might ordinarily take place at subsecond speeds—well below the threshold of being able to discriminate them. On the other hand, my
recording
of these steps took place at the full speed of a strong intellect. Thus I had the rare opportunity to watch the unfolding of raw and stunningly complex human cognition in slow motion, and yet at the same time record it in normal speed as a trained observer who has knowledge of computational systems.

THE METACOGNITIVE OBSERVER.
Before we look at some of these extreme details of cognition I witnessed, there are two additional factors about me, and my individual brain makeup, that might be an important part of the record. For these we have to make a slight digression.

First, when I was a child my IQ was reportedly extremely high; I finished all of my district's high school math curriculum on my own, sitting out in the hall in the sixth grade as an eleven-year-old, and then began riding my bike up to the University of California at Berkeley to sit in on math and physics classes. Although I never made much use of these talents—spending the
first part of my life as a musician—I was always a natural at manipulating symbols, especially in geometric ways.

Second, I had a sort of transcendent experience when I was fourteen years old that may give clues to my ability to record my slow-motion concussion experiences:

After spending an afternoon lying on the fringes of a golf course with my friend Cathy, watching beautiful white cumulus clouds roll past, and near what later turned out to be thought of by some as a “spiritual focal point” in the Berkeley Hills, I had an odd sensation of splitting in two. The “me” that we typically think of, the locus of consciousness—perhaps a form of the metacognitive voice—was freed up to “stay in the clouds,” so to speak, and to observe the tiniest details of the experience of life unfolding. At the same time, the “me” part of my mind that intentionally got through the day—corresponding to the part of ourselves that thinks, and holds conversations, and goes to school, and sleeps—went about its business exactly as usual.

This was very much like what happens when we drive a car down the highway—it's not necessary for us attend to the details of the road, freeing us up to hold conversations with passengers or perhaps pay attention to what's on the radio. In this case my whole life, and me getting through it, was on autopilot, while the conscious me, the
real
me, was able to simply observe the true beauty of the whole system—with me in it—unfolding. I tried to explain my circumstances to others, but no one was much interested. None of them noticed anything different or “dreamy” about me. I completed my homework assignments in the usual way. I participated in classes at school. I had normal conversations with my family members. I thought up jokes and goofed around with my friends in the usual way. I was in all ways entirely
present
. Yet at the same time the
real
me
was simply watching all of this go on, attending not only to the temporal me working through my life, but also to the most minute details of the interplay of light on leaves, of the choreography of motion in the world around me, the many scents that we almost universally ignore, the sound and smell and essential grace of people with whom I was interacting, and so on. I watched myself fall asleep at night, and I watched myself wake up in the morning.

I felt as though I had chanced on some kind of enlightenment. This marvelous experience lasted for three days, and then gradually went away over the next two. I longed to recapture this dual nature, and tried for many years, but it only returned once, three years later, and then only for a day.

It's not important to determine whether this was a minor mystical gift to an impressionable young man, or a small perturbation in the posterior parietal cortex (the part of the brain to which neuroscience sometimes attributes such experiences). The point is that one way or another this youthful adventure in transcendent metacognition was de facto proof that we really are capable of observing ourselves in great detail without necessarily interfering with what we ordinarily think of as consciousness. It might also suggest some oddity in my own brain that later allowed me to take the detailed notes that are the basis of this book, even while suffering from sometimes quite striking concussion symptoms.

WHO ARE MY CHILDREN? THE ANALOGICAL BRAIN.
Let's fast-forward now to the fall of 2007—eight years after the crash. Largely because of an inability to filter out the continual chatter of my highly verbal three-year-old—who was almost exclusively in my care by this time—I was nearing the end. To
maintain my life as a full-time professor and full-time single parent, I needed to be very crafty about using what few cognitive resources I had left with maximum efficiency. So I devised an assessment test that I gave to myself every morning before heading off to work. I would sit in the living room and ask myself, “What are the names of my children?” On normal brain days, I could list the names of my five children in six seconds, and I knew that I could take on some challenges that day. On bad brain days it would take me more than three minutes, and even then I was not quite certain of the answer. On those days I knew to avoid any kinds of demands other than those of being a father, and teaching my classes.

Even on bad days, I was completely
logical
. I knew exactly what was going on. I was simply experiencing the physical breakdown of my brain resulting in an extreme slowing of cognition. And yet, at the same time, as noted above,
I could observe the process in the normal way.

What follows are selections from a much longer composite record based on a number of different days; every one of the mental processes otherwise took place exactly as given here. This record gives us a window into both the building blocks of cognition and the stunning analogical processing capabilities of the human brain that I believe go on under the hood at blazing speed, without our noticing, twenty-four hours a day. It also lays the groundwork for understanding how Donalee Markus's analogical mental puzzles (which we'll see later) can help a plastic brain to recover from traumatic injury—even after eight years.

Two themes developed. First, it is my strong intuition that for the most part, the
substance
of my train of thought was following normal cognitive patterns, albeit in extreme slow motion. It is true that there were occasional cognitive-symbolic
deficits from the TBI that required alternate problem-solving paths: occasionally I would search for an answer, or try to retrieve a concept, and nothing would come to mind, so I would have to try something else. But I believe these to be the exception, and not the rule.

Second, when working on the problem, and developing partial results that had to be saved for later, I had the most tangible feeling of a limited “working memory” space, which would automatically empty itself to make room for new thinking results.
*
Thus, if I didn't want to lose the bigger picture surrounding my current train of thought, I would have to regularly leave off my ongoing computations, go back to the beginning, and refresh all of my intermediate results and problem-solving paths. In the example below I would have to refresh every eight to thirty seconds. As the speed of my processing increased, so did the frequency and speed of my refreshes. On six-second days, when my impairment was at a minimum, I had the sense that I would refresh just as many times as in the example below, but so rapidly that I couldn't perceive it. For the sake of brevity I'll only give the details of the first refresh below, then leave out the other (ultimately eighteen) refreshes that occurred during the following composite episode.

This passage contains only a fifth of the notes I have extant for what would amount to a full, single event. In the unabridged passage from which this excerpt is drawn—in what I strongly believe to be a relatively normal path to determining who my children are—I introduce several hundred concepts, make
analogical jumps among many of them, generate images for most of the concepts, and backtrack numerous times—abandoning those particular paths as fruitless. As mentioned, on a normal day, this will have taken six seconds—much too fast for us to observe; on a bad brain day, such as in the exposition below, more than three minutes. It is this latter that gives us our unique window into how the analogical brain works. We might wonder how we can “ordinarily” fit such a staggering number of reasoning steps into six seconds, but this is understandable if we consider that humans are well capable of
perceiving
information at a minimum of something like twenty-four frames a second. (Below this
critical flicker fusion threshold,
for example, we begin to have problems with flicker detection in video streams.) Neural signals can propagate through brain networks in thousandths of a second.
*

Here, then, is an excerpted, composite record of my sample brain-assessment test:

I come downstairs in the early morning and sit in front of the coffee table in my living room. I start the timer on my wristwatch and ask the question,

“What are the names of my children?”

Blank.
Nothing comes to mind. I simply
hear
the sound of the question. I wait for a while, but then instead of an answer I get a different question, represented visually in front of my eyes, black font on a white rectangular background:

“Do I have children?”

There is no answer to this question either. But this is related, and simpler, because it is . . .
binary—yes or no
. I see the word “Binary,” also black on a white background. But I am cloudy on what it means. I try to recall the geometric
shape
of a binary question. It takes me a while, but finally I see what a binary question is, the shape of it: upper right—
yes
, stretching diagonally to the lower left—
no
, and the whole image sitting just to the upper left of my internal center visual field. Because I can
see binary,
I can now also
feel binary
.

O.K.,
I think to myself, I've got:
binary question
.

I am not sure of the answer to this new question, but it seems that if I do not have children it will become obvious anyway, so there is no sense in choosing that I do not. Thus I can
assume
that I have children, and if this is not right then something else will take care of that other path. But I am cloudy on exactly what the other path is and what will take care of it.

I now must grasp enough of the concept of
assumption
to allow me to continue. This takes a while. Then . . .

Got (sort of):
assumption
.

I can feel a daemon being created to attend to what happens if the assumption turns out to be false, but I resist it: I don't want to waste precious resources in case the assumption turns out to be true.