The Ghost in My Brain (14 page)

I retrieve the concept of male children (boys) and female children (girls). I bind my daughter, Nell, to my left thumb, palm facing me, which is hard because this is backward—the
reversed list,
with the
oldest
(biggest) on the
left.
I have to physically “look” her into this binding by staring intently at my thumb. I speak her name:

“Um. My oldest child is Nell.”

It has been two and a half minutes of intense concentration and I've just named my first child.

I get the sentence out, but the effort of translating thought into speech causes all of my visual memory of the problem I am working on to disappear. I have to go back and retrieve many of the markers again, and recut the channels. I get back the image of Nell, and then, over time, in sequence, the images of my other four children appear. There are two additional difficulties, one primarily linguistic and the other arithmetical: My boys are named
Peter
and
Paul
, they are often together—they are very close—and the alliteration of the “P” sound at the beginning of their names further binds them to each other. Because Peter is the second oldest, Lucy the third, and Paul the fourth, I have to slip Lucy in between the
two boys. But she is a girl, and she has an “L” sound in her name, so I have to fight against the “P” symmetry, and the “boy” symmetry, to get her into the right place. In struggling with this problem I again lose Nell, and have to go back quite a ways to retrieve her. I have even more trouble with my youngest, Erin. It takes significant time to add her to the list. The children are aged
18
,
16
,
14
,
12
, and Erin—
3
. She is not an even-numbered age. She acts differently from the rest because she is so much younger. There is a gap to get to her. Each of these factors upsets the symmetry of the structures I am building to hold my children—to hold the symbols of them in my mind's eye—so that I can name them.

My retrieval of the children as I fill in the list also involves partially seeing a visual montage of their life activities—which is part of who they are, like their names.

I say aloud, “My son, Peter.”

As I do so the visual images of Peter, and Nell, fly off like startled birds. Translating the image of Peter into a physical utterance requires so much cognitive “horsepower” that I cannot maintain the imagery at the same time.

Finally I get to “Erin, age
3
.”

I'm exhausted. I've named my five children—maybe. I can't see them all at once, and by the time I've named Erin, I can no longer really conceive of having named Nell. I am not able to speak their names and see their faces at the same time. I look at my watch: three and a half minutes. It's not a good day for taking on challenges.

The assessment test might take me anywhere from 6 to 210 seconds. Because the range of time covered such a spectrum, and because I went through the exercise so many times, I observed the process in many different ways. My strongest intuition is that, except for some of the deficits that coincidentally came with brain
fatigue (e.g., the hemispatial neglect, and the synesthesia),
the process was the same
no matter how long it took, and that this record gives us a unique window into the massive low-level cognitive processing that goes on inside all of us throughout the day, beneath our consciousness—even for what appear to be simple mental tasks.

GETTING HOME / THE DOG THAT WASN'T.
At times the juxtaposition of my internal and external lives was startling. An episode that occurred eight years after the crash illustrates how little my surface life—in which I was pursuing such normal activities as going to the movies—reflected the complex processing going on under the hood, which by this time was occasionally so bizarre as to be almost unreal.

At first glance, it might appear that I was finally losing touch with reality. In fact, on closer examination, the case can be made that while I was clearly impaired, I was actually operating
closer
to the true nature of raw, unfiltered “reality” than normals, doing my best to navigate our world without the powerful cognitive filters that do so much of the work for us by excluding most of our sensory input
before
it enters consciousness. Within this context, I was entirely lucid and logical.

The following episode illustrates more than a dozen distinct cognitive failures and workarounds, including some interesting
ideaesthesia
oddities (ideas mixing with senses), and difficulties mapping mental symbols to their real-world analogues, and then ends in a truly strange sequence that highlights an aspect of our inherent
linguistic
intelligence.

On this particular spring afternoon in 2007, Qianwei happened to be home between business trips—and she could stay with our daughter Erin. I took advantage of the rare opportunity and went to the movies to let the images roll past, with no
requirement that I need make sense of them. My “deep batteries” were depleted from the grind of the long school year, and from being a virtual single parent. Going to the movies usually afforded me a little mental break, but for some reason this time the processing of dialogue and the visual input made things worse.

I left the theater's parking lot as the sun was setting, in the classic Toyota Supra cult-car I was considering restoring, to make the seven-minute, two-mile drive home. I had no trouble managing the car, but soon found that I did not recognize any of the visual landmarks around me. As had occasionally happened to me in the past, neither the streets nor the neighborhoods looked familiar, as though I were experiencing some kind of “building prosopagnosia”—face blindness for buildings. I could read the words on the street signs, but they too were simply empty patterns of letters. I could not figure out how to get home.

I thought that if I drove for a while I would start to recognize where I was. The problem was that I already
did
have a clear visual appraisal of my surroundings, and in one sense I knew
exactly
where I was—I just could not access that knowledge in any way that was useful. For example, I could have told you, “That's the YMCA where Paul plays basketball, and where my friend Liam saved a girl from drowning,” but I could not
recognize
the Y or any other building, or place any of them in a larger visual context in a way that gave me a sense of having seen them before—I couldn't make a meaningful whole from the various pieces. And, the pieces were useless to me for navigation because without the “thingness” of them I didn't have any way to place them in the larger geography that made up my local world. When I read the names on the street signs, waiting for the meaning of the streets in the real world to come to me (their placement on the grid of the city, their usefulness in getting me home), nothing happened.

Very strange!

Over the course of the next hour I drove in slowly expanding circles around the downtown area. Finally, to at least get some NSEW grounding I drove (downhill) over to the shore of Lake Michigan, half a mile away, because I knew the lake formed the eastern boundary of the city, giving me a point of reference. Then, because of a 9:00
P.M
. curfew along the lakeshore, I drove several blocks west and parked there on a side street. As I did so, I fired up a daemon charged with preserving my geometric orientation relative to the lake. Over the course of the succeeding hour, this
Orientation Daemon
slowly drained away at my remaining cognitive batteries. Roughly speaking, it was like an annoying voice in my head, interrupting every three or four seconds, quietly reminding me,
Lake Michigan is behind you, to the east, so you are now headed west. Don't forget!

Using speed-dial six on my cell phone, I called Jake in San Diego to ask for help. He was in the middle of a challenging project at work, and impatient to get back to it.

“I don't get it,” he said curtly. “You've never had trouble getting home before. Where are you?”

“I don't know, Jake,” I said. “I don't recognize any of the streets or any of the buildings. I've driven in circles for an hour and am now facing west, away from the lake, which is several blocks behind me.”

“Okay,” he said, “we can work with that. Get out of the car. Walk to a street corner. Look around at what you see. Memorize the names on the street signs, then call me back.”

It was ten minutes before I could initiate getting out of the car. Once out on the street, I had to hold on to the car, a parking-sign pole, and some hedges, to walk to the corner—seventy-five feet away. Visual, olfactory, auditory, and proprioceptive information
was flooding in, but because my sensory filters were not working, I was getting everything all the time, and all at once, in one giant, flattened collection of small features from the environment. I couldn't form meaningful interpretations of what I was seeing. I was also having trouble extracting visual balance information from the environment, as twilight settled in, making it hard to walk.

So I did my best to simply keep all the objects I encountered in memory. After twenty minutes, exhausted, I got back to the car and reported the data to Jake. “I am next to a big house that has fourteen lights turned on in many rooms with no people, which I can see through the windows, so we know I am in a wealthy neighborhood. The curb has a circle and some orange letters spray-painted on it, probably from a previous street, gas, or water repair. There are tall hedges with thin branches and lots of small leaves.”

Jake said, “Okay. Hedges. Paint. A big house by the lake. That doesn't help us much. Anything from the corner, where the street signs are?”

I told him, “I could make out what looked like an explosion of green leaves, and some white flowers. Putting them all together, I'm guessing it was a big bush, or a tree. Next to the tree there were signs on a pole.”

“Okay. Good job,” said Jake. “Were they street signs? Were there names?”

“I can't really say,” I told him. “I am trying to tell you, but I can't. It is very difficult for me. Yes, there were two street signs. One of them was, well . . . it was . . .
Michigan
.”

There were two immediate problems that had begun to plague me. The first was that the drain from the Lake Michigan Orientation Daemon (used to remember
east
) became significantly worse because I now had to disambiguate the internal visual symbol for
Lake Michigan
(i.e., starting with a capital
M
)
from the nearly identical symbol for
Michigan
Avenue
—the cross-street up at the corner to which I had just walked. Sorting out the cognitive interference between the two was wearing me down.

The second problem was even more disconcerting, and illustrates a form of
ideaesthesia
(not to be confused with the less accurate
synesthesia
in this case) that would sometimes crop up.
*
The street on which I was parked—corresponding to the other sign at the corner—was “Greenleaf.” But I was having trouble discriminating the street name not only from the sight of the
green leaves
that were fluttering in the glow from the streetlight, but also from the
green spring
scent
of the (green) leaves themselves and of the flowers, and even from the internal raw
shape
of
greenness
in my mind.

Nonetheless, with Jake's encouragement I might have been able to form the vocalization for “Greenleaf Street” if he had not, ironically, picked the one helping tactic that would put me over the edge. He asked, “Can you tell me what the color of the sign is, and what color the letters are? If you can describe the signs I'll at least know what city you're in.”
*

At this point a giant cognitive bell was lowered over my head and concussion-sprites began beating on it with hammers. Such cognitive pain from sensory and semantic flooding is difficult to describe, but it is quite real, and sometimes excruciating, nonetheless. Every part of my psyche wanted only to get away from it, but it is a spigot that cannot be turned off. I could not get away from Jake's question about the lettering on the sign—the answer to
which was:
white
letters on a
green
background
.
I couldn't escape the now echoing images of the green tree leaves blowing in the wind, or the scent of those leaves and their white flowers bleeding scent into the visual images, or the white letters forming the street name “Greenleaf,” with its attendant aural image also bleeding into the sight and smell of the whole green and white chaotic jumble.

I struggled to keep from throwing up. I dropped the phone and put my hands over my ears to shut out all sound. I clamped my eyes closed as firmly as my face muscles would allow.

After a while, the hammer/bell pain subsided. I picked up the phone again. I very much wanted to answer Jake's question so he could get me home. I
knew
that I knew the answer to his question, but I also knew I was not going to be able to untangle the cognitive interference.

“I can't tell you about the signs,” I said, “because of the tree.”

“You mean the tree is covering the signs up?”

“No,” I said, “I can see the signs fine, but I can't tell you what they say, or what color they are.” (I meant, of course, that I literally could not
tell
Jake about the signs, even though I wanted to, and even though I knew the answers to his questions.)

“Okay,” he said. “We aren't getting anywhere. Think about it, and call me back. I'll be here.” Then he hung up.

Jake was clearly annoyed. He had asked me a straightforward question, to which I knew the answer, but which for my own baroque reasons I wasn't telling him. Understandably, a serious Guilt Daemon now started up, and began its own additional drain on the now dangerously diminished resources I was doing my best to conserve. This was a strong emotion, and repeatedly demanded a further slice of my brain's processing power every few seconds in an opportunistic way, competing with the other daemons still operating:
Did you correct your inexcusable and weird social action yet?
Then two seconds later,
How about now? Did you finally decide to give Jake his answer?
Then,
Don't forget that Lake Michigan is behind you, to the east.
Then,
Lake Michigan is not the same as Michigan Avenue and you have to remember both . . . ,
and so on.