The Ghost in My Brain (13 page)

So now, assuming that I
do
have children, how does one go about figuring out who they are?

No answer.
So I have to think about it.

It seems that a typical way would be to figure out
how many
. If I can recall how many children I have, then I know I have them.

What would an answer to “how many?” look like?
Not sure.
I have to think about this. I wait.

Then:
A number.
If I can answer how many, it will be a number.

No number comes to mind, and while I am waiting for one, I feel the pressure to recall the context of my thinking, so that I don't lose my place. So . . .

[Refresh number one] I place a marker where I am, and go back to the beginning of the problem to recut the routes so that I can recall what I am trying to answer. Refresh:
Who are my children?
Refresh:
Do I have children?
Refresh:
Binary question.
Refresh:
Assumption.
Refresh:
Stop the false-assumption daemon.
Refresh:
How many children?
Refresh:
Answer will be a number.
Refresh:
No number is coming to mind.

Now, back to the current problem. Something about
numbers
is important. I need some numbers, and I need to retrieve something about how numbers work.

Numbers have
order
. I'm not sure what order is (or sequence), but I know that numbers have it. I get that numbers have cardinality—naming a quantity—and this seems loosely related to numeracy, but what is ordinality?

Nothing comes to mind.

[Refresh number two (hereafter, etc.)]

[Skipping ahead . . . ]

I have formed a vague idea of what
order
is: something about
bigger and smaller
. But while (a) I do not remember what bigger and smaller are, or what they have to do with one another, and (b) I do not recall what bigger and smaller have to do with numbers, or order, I
do
know that (c) there are answers to these questions, that (d) the answers are important, and that (e) I have known these answers before. I work on this for a while.

[Skipping far ahead . . . ]

Even though, to save resources, I have managed to suppress starting an “Assumption Daemon” to know what to do if my assumption (that I do have children, as opposed to the binary opposite option that I don't) turns out to be false, a different daemon springs to life: one that
worries that I have not started such an Assumption Daemon.
This annoying “Worry Daemon” gets more insistent, popping into my consciousness from time to time, until I finally give in and formulate the clear thought:
assumption
means that I might be wrong; this whole exercise might be for nothing; I've assumed that I have children; if I don't have children, then I cannot name them, and I am done. The
Worry Daemon
now goes away. It is replaced by the
Assumption Daemon
I was trying to avoid triggering, which lingers around looking for
an instance of me realizing that I don't have children, in which case it will leap into consciousness to remind me that this whole line of reasoning is invalid.

[Skipping ahead . . . ]

I'm still struggling with
order
. Because it is such a low-level, elemental concept, it is hard for me to reconstruct. I am on the verge of getting it though, and am unwilling to risk losing everything by going to refresh. So I postpone the refresh. Instead, I fire off a “Refresh Reminder Daemon” so I can, literally, “deal with that later.” Then I immediately get back to the problem at hand.

As I continue to work, the
Refresh Reminder Daemon
continually makes me anxious in an undifferentiated way (I can feel this anxiety in the muscles of my upper back, and in my breathing), and periodically it also intrudes into consciousness to say, “Refresh! We HAVE to refresh!”

[Skipping ahead . . . ]

I've finally made progress: from
order
, to
numbers
, to
ordinality
[if objects can be represented by numbers, they can be ordered], to
precedence
[a number can be greater, or “more important,” than another number based on its qualities of
numberness
], to
relationship
[between two adjacent numbers], to
sequence
[a collection of relationships]
,
to list [the instantiation of a sequence by actual objects]. I form the substantial concept that if I can make an
ordered list
of symbolic placeholders, then replace the placeholders with my children, I'll know who they are.

This is a
chunking
point—where a master concept replaces all its constituent smaller ones: having gotten to
ordered list
, and the concept of filling it in with my children, I no longer need to keep track of
order, numbers, ordinality, precedence, relationship,
and
sequence.
The
Refresh Reminder Daemon
now seizes its chance. I've reached a breathing point. I clear out the unneeded intermediate concepts and refresh the remaining context. The daemon, having completed its mission, dies off. [That is, I now go back to normal periodic refreshes.]

 • • • 

Over the next ninety seconds I cover a lot of ground. In trying to instantiate the ordered list with my children, I begin to associate the numbers that will [far in the future] be associated with their ages. I see these numbers as black symbols floating around over a white background, but I have a problem getting them to settle into an order: because of my concussion-induced
hemispatial neglect
I have once again lost the right-hand side of my world. Thus I am trying to create a list with a left side, but no right side. I realize this can't work, and in a marvel of plastic cognitive adaptability automatically begin my search for an alternate representation. The question arises:
how do I represent a left-to-right sequence/list when there is no right-hand side to my world?

In an episode of synesthesia I start replacing numbers with sounds, and then mix the sounds with colors. In the context of
sound-color
I am able to revisit the idea of a
sequence
now as a sequence of colors: cool colors on the left blending toward hot colors on the right (like the sequence in a color wheel). This frees me from the
left-is-less
and
right-is-more
number-line rule. I don't understand quite what
smaller
and
bigger
are, but I nonetheless manage to tease out that
smaller on the left
and
bigger on the right
is part of my problem. Ultimately, after numerous steps I come up with the following: I use
weightiness
on the left (because my left side is substantial) and
ephemeralness
on the right (because my right-hand side is cloudy, fuzzy) as the relationship between elements of my list. I am using sound-color, like musical sequences from low to high, and like having the big bass strings of a piano on the left, and the smaller high-pitched strings on the right, to form my ordered list of elements. I know that I have
reversed
my number-ordered list so that smaller is now on the right. I don't really know what
reversed
means, and have to work this out after the fact, keeping this parallel representation—
reversed
—active the whole time I am using the list. Gradually, the music/sound/color representation recedes (though it was essential in creating the initial reversed list), and I solidify the concept of a
reversed number list.
I still can't see the right side of my world, including the right side of the list, but I've been clever in using this to mean “less on the right.”

After another long sequence I now wrestle with the concept of
two
lists: a symbolic one in my head, a
real
one in the outside world, and the relational linking of the two together. I struggle with the concept of mapping analogue symbols for items in the real world—my children—into the empty list I've created in my head.
Inside
I am creating, dreaming, making things up;
outside
I am seeing, recalling, perceiving. I move my
visual/spatial representation back and forth between the two, and as I do so, my eyes actually move, and refocus, following my thoughts.

This difference in perspective between two such lists is significant. You can see it with the following exercise: Imagine, in your head, a word list—the names of places you have lived; now imagine those same places on the grid of the earth and mentally point in the direction of each of them as you work through the list. These are two entirely different representations. The first is purely symbolic, but the second is a real-world corollary of the first, with spatial sense, and direction, and geometric relationships between each of the cities and your current location on Earth. And once we have established the two lists, we can link them together: the city-name words in the internal list each to a real city on the face of the earth in the external list.

This linking between the real, physical world and our internal, symbolic representation of it is something that we ordinarily manage with intuitive grace. We move elegantly along the mappings from one to the other, and switch with ease between the quite different representations. But here we see that I've lost that ability. Instead, I must explicitly define the relationship between the two.

At this point we come to an interesting revelation, and I want to call special attention to it. I had, by this time in my life, come to believe that I had no hope of ever recovering from the brain damage. Instead, I focused on trying to improve my effectiveness by being clever with the limited brain resources I retained. As part of my efforts, I had decided it was important to recognize when to
give up.
This was an entirely foreign concept to me, but under the circumstances was appropriate, and
necessary. The mantra went something like,
You have brain damage, Clark. There are things that you simply can no longer manage, so don't try to. Don't push yourself too far!
I had practiced “giving up” for several years now—letting go of some of my responsibility—but it was contrary to my nature and never came naturally. At this point in the exercise, the intensity of my mental work is grinding my tired brain down, and I start to experience head pain and nausea. I'm perspiring from the effort. Several times I am reminded of the rule:

Clark, you are in pain, so now YOU MUST STOP.

This is annoying. I know intuitively that it will take up precious resources to figure out what
stopping
means, and how to integrate
stopping
with reaching my goal. I don't have time for that. But as I continue, and my distress level rises, my need to address the rule becomes overwhelming. I finally pause to briefly mull this over.

But now something really interesting happens: in considering “Should I stop now?” another absolutely clear, elemental rule pops up:

Clark NEVER GIVES UP.

So who am I?
I ask myself.

I can't get it.
I have two conflicting rules.
It's too much work to figure out, and is draining too much energy from the problem at hand. In the end I stop trying to be someone I don't understand, and just continue instead with solving the problem. The increasing pain, and the well-intentioned new rules, are nothing next to
who I am
.

But what are the implications here? This core identity—the guy who just never gives up—is integrated into my being at the lowest level of cognition—the same level at which the concepts of
left and right
and
inside and outside
are stored. This is not part
of some narrative personal story, nor is it some high-level learned trait. It is a most basic, elemental,
cognitive
part of me.
*

Over the next sixty seconds I work through—among other concepts—the idea that I have a
set
of children that will be mapped one-to-one into the slots in my internal list; that sets have cardinality (the countable number of items in the set); that children have ages; and so on. I get stymied waiting for a number to rise up out of the ether that will set an upper limit on the
range
of elements in my list. I get tied up with the idea of a
zero-length list,
and the
Assumption Daemon
leaps out to claim this as an instance of the failed assumption that I have children.

At one point I simply wait, perched, doing nothing at all except letting the mysterious cauldron of my brain boil away. After a while, and after I've clearly formed my question, some hidden process takes place, and the number “5” floats up out of the ether: I have five children. There is no association to be made. The process is atomic: one moment there is nothing, the next moment the visual image of the number “5” is floating across my internal field of vision.

I don't fully know what “5” means, but five is like the five fingers on my left hand, facing me. Fingertips, like ovals, like faces, people, the history of primitive people, tribes, families, parents, children, oldest children,
first
children, biggest, oldest on the left. Reversed list. Oldest child, oval face, flesh-colored, like the thumb on my left hand facing me. I see the face of my oldest daughter, superimposed. I can't access her name, but I do
know
that I know her name.

I've gone back to refresh sixteen times at this point.

I release many items, partial results that I have stored in working memory. The
Assumption Daemon
dies off, because having seen one child, I know that I have children: I no longer have to consider taking an alternate path that would have been necessary had my assumption turned out to be false. I release the marker that I am still unclear about what
binary
means (yes/no—do I have children?). I let go of the ordinality and cardinality properties of numbers, because I need only the one number: five. My refresh list gets much shorter. I feel tangibly energized as my cognitive resources are freed up.