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 wou
ld 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.
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.”
The Ghost in My Brain Page 12
