The Ghost in My Brain

by Clark Elliott

  RAMON’S BRAKES. One day, I was playing baseball with my son in the front yard. Predicting the visual path of the white baseball—against a backdrop of bright green leaves shimmering in the sunlight—was fatiguing. My cognitive and sensory filters were breaking down. But my son had just started playing in Little League, and I knew it was very important to him to practice, so I forced myself to push through my discomfort.

  As we were playing, Ramon, an older man from the neighborhood—a casual friend of mine who would sometimes come by to talk about politics and neighborhood concerns—pulled his car up next to me to tell me that he wanted me to trim my bushes at the corner of the alley. His eyesight was starting to decline, and my bushes further impaired his view when he made the turn into the street. Unfortunately, his old car had terribly squeaky disc brakes. Because of my phonosensitivity I keeled over onto the street in fetal position, covering my ears to shield them from the painful screeching sound, before I could hear what he had to say. He got mad and drove off. Variations of this same difficult episode happened twice more that same week, and the last two times Ramon was yelling at me as he drove off. I made a mental note to go over to his house on the weekend and ask him what had been on his mind.

  But I was too late. Ramon got up early on Saturday morning and cut down all of the young trees I had been cultivating for five years along the side of my yard, which had nothing to do with the bushes at the end of the alley. When I noticed what he was doing, and leaned out the window to ask him to stop, he shouted insults at me at the top of his lungs for my children and neighbors to hear.

  I later went to his house to talk to him. After getting him to calm down, and apologizing about the bushes, I asked him why he was so angry—surely those bushes, which we both agreed hadn’t reached a sight-impairing point yet, couldn’t have been enough to make him cut down my trees and scream obscenities at me!

  His face got red. You could see he was getting mad all over again, though he kept it in check because his wife was there.

  “You started it!” he accused. “Why did you have to be so rude? I kept my cool that first time you made such a big deal of not listening to me, covering your ears, and lying in the street like a big baby, in front of your boy. I never saw such a thing! The second time you did it I couldn’t believe it. Who the hell acts like that, like a spoiled little kid, closing your eyes, covering your ears? What did I ever do to you that it is so important you can’t take three minutes to listen to what I have to say? The third time on Friday was too much. I decided to teach you a lesson. You’re an asshole, is the thing. I guess, what did you expect?”

  Even though he listened—suspiciously—as I tried to explain about the brain damage and the squealing brakes, he didn’t really get it. He pointed out that I seemed fine when I was tossing the baseball to my son, and although in the end he apologized about the trees, it was obvious he didn’t quite believe me. By now I could easily recognize the half-glazed, half-skeptical look that meant I was being given a little leeway, but no real understanding. Despite the mutual apologies, after that he was no longer friendly toward me when we’d see each other around the neighborhood.

  Ramon was a grumpy old guy, sure. But in many ways he was a good man, and someone that I respected for his life of both conviction and action, which I knew about from the chats we used to have. It was not pleasant for either of us to have this friendship end so badly—another casualty of the concussion.

  SCANNER BEEP. At Food 4 Less, a local grocery store, I often had trouble with the loud beep from the checkout scanners after the difficult visual pattern matching required when shopping for food. When I asked clerks to turn down the volume, they would generally look at me like I was nuts, and refuse. The problem was that I could not load my groceries on the belt when the clerk was scanning other items, because I had to use my hands to cover my ears. I also could not bag my groceries if the clerk started scanning the groceries of the person after me in line, using the alternate bagging area.*

  One evening—after I’d gone without food for several days because I’d had to abort two previous shopping trips due to debilitating concussion problems—I was in the checkout line at Food 4 Less and again having trouble with the scanner beep. I was getting desperate, and because I just couldn’t make the clerk understand my situation, I finally refused to swipe my credit card until I had my groceries bagged: if the clerk started scanning the groceries of the next customer I would not be able to finish bagging my own. Each beep! caused me to double over with pain. My motor coordination had deteriorated, and I was on edge because I knew everyone was waiting as I labored in slow motion with my groceries.

  When I finally got outside—it was hard to move my feet—I could make no sense of the parking lot. While I was standing there wondering where my car might be, and how I could find it, Bang! My shoulder exploded in pain. I spun around to see the very angry face of the man who had waited behind me in line—he had punched me in the shoulder. His fist was cocked again, and it looked as though he was now going to hit me in the head. Instead he yelled something in Spanish, then walked away.

  One afternoon the following August, I was again debilitated from food shopping, and had given up after buying just a few essential items that I was now carrying with me. I was walking in slow motion back to my car in the parking lot: left foot, right foot, trying to make sense of the visual scene around me. A young professional woman walked briskly past me and got in her big SUV, parked a short way down the parking aisle. She jerked back two feet, the way people do when they are in a hurry, moving her SUV out to get a better view and to alert others that she was backing up, before finishing the arc of her backward turn into the aisle. But I was now directly opposite her car. She looked me in the eye in her large side-view mirror. When she saw that I was walking slowly she glared at me, then started mouthing angry words—I guess thinking I was “slow-walking” on purpose, just to be annoying. She jammed on the accelerator pedal and as the car shot toward me, I just managed to jump out of the way, sprawling on the hot pavement, with my groceries flying in all directions. She then sped away, tires screeching. This was yet another case of “brain tax,” the social penalty of concussion: A woman got mad because I was not acting normal. She assumed I was being aggressive and adversarial, and responded in kind.*

  LECTURES. There were social aspects of my job that were troublesome as well. For example, attending academic lectures was a necessary part of my work as a professor but quite treacherous for me.

  In a typical scene, several years after the crash, I attended a job talk for a vacant faculty position. I was following PowerPoint slides along with twenty-five of my colleagues. Ten minutes into the talk, audio slowness set in, and I began to lose my ability to filter out unwanted sensory information. In addition to forming the complex mental images representing the new research being presented, I was also constructing the judgment that for technical reasons this lecture was not very well formed—and this was important because it was a job talk, and I’d later be called on to decide whether this candidate would be a good teacher.

  Taken all together, my limited cognitive resources were rapidly draining away. I had to time this just right. I needed to stay as long as I could manage, because assessing these candidates was part of my job. But if I stayed too long, I’d be unable to get out of the room without causing a disturbance—an uncomfortable faux pas given how important this talk would be for the candidate. It would be bad if I had to stop the lecture and ask someone to help me from the room. It would be almost as bad if I had to cover my ears and stagger out on my own.

  The problem was the cognitive overload from my having to manage so many independent symbolic streams of thought, and my inability to filter out the unwanted sensory input. I’d hear words from the speaker; I’d hear words the speaker had already said but which were still queued up for processing; I’d hear the squeak of a chair next to me; I’d see candidate words for audio error correction in front
of my eyes; I’d hear myself judging the candidate’s teaching abilities; I’d be rewriting the slides the way I would have done it for clarity; I’d see shadows on the floor; I’d see color patches of clothes; I’d hear the tick of the wall clock, and so on. I’d soon be managing head pain, and nausea, and trying to keep my balance in my chair. But I couldn’t stop any of the processing, or shut out any of the raw input.

  Over time I grew crafty at managing such lectures. I’d sit in the back where I could surreptitiously put in industrial earplugs, and close my eyes, to get a break from the sensory input. I’d make sure to be near a wall so that I could hold on to it for balance as I snuck out. If a video was available I could watch it later. I’d try to let the speaker know ahead of time that I would not be able to stay for the whole lecture.

  In general, if I was rested I could manage about twenty-five minutes of a lecture before reaching the danger zone when I could no longer walk.

  ODD JUXTAPOSITIONS. Besides the constant worry that I’d have to explain myself to others or risk seriously offending them, there was the added concern that some malicious person would use this information to take advantage of my defenselessness. And I did encounter such people in my life. I had to be always alert, though I often could not understand exactly how I was being exploited, and could not form any real plan to protect myself. At the same time, the only way for me to survive in general was to give in, and, at those times of almost childlike helplessness, blindly trust others to help me get by. This juxtaposition was complex for me emotionally as well as cerebrally: a mixture of trusting, acceptance, and a hoped-for recovery on the one hand; and of watchfulness, unrelenting vigilance, and helplessness on the other.

  Additionally, everyone, including me, had trouble figuring out my place when I was to cooperate with others: could I be trusted to get the job done? As a high-functioning concussive I had this strange aspect to my life: On the one hand I was helpless and rather stupid—unable, for example, to manage even the simplest kind of planning. On the other hand, I was performing brilliantly, and with stunning creativity, from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep—just to find a way to get through a normal day. In the end I became reluctant to make commitments, something that may be common among concussives.

  STUCK IN THE MOMENT OF IMPACT. When visiting Jake in San Diego, I happened to read a book by John Conroy that he had on his shelf, about victims of torture in the seventies and eighties. Among other topics, the book raises the issue of the long-term effects of torture, based on interviews with victims. Our cultures and our lives were very different, yet I felt a strong, elemental kinship with those victims on a human level that led to an arresting epiphany.

  Although my experience was certainly nothing like what these survivors had had to endure, it struck me how much we nonetheless shared in one very particular aspect of our lives: in one important way, the voices in this book spoke for me as well. In the cases covered in the book, the torture had been exposed, and those responsible had been found accountable, at least by the public. The story had come out.

  This was, of course, important and cathartic for the survivors, after all the years of living with public denials of their horrific experience. But then a strange thing happened. The hubbub died down. Everyone seemed to agree that the problem had at last been handled. Everyone else moved on, including the torturers themselves.

  But the survivors did not.

  Despite the social acknowledgment of their suffering, and a resultant lessening of their outrage, the neurological trauma was still with them just as strongly as before, and something they had to deal with every hour, and every minute, of both their waking and sleeping lives.

  I often felt that way too: the rest of the world had wrapped my brain damage up in a neat little explainable package and moved on . . . but very deep down, in the lowest level of my neural programming, I hadn’t. Neurologically, traumatically, I was still stuck back in that moment of impact in September 1999.

  The fact of my much later stunning recovery, which included being freed from the imprint of the original trauma, suggests to me that such dual treatments as I underwent—each of which, as we’ll soon see, addresses deeply elemental features of cognition—might similarly help victims of deep emotional trauma, which can itself cause physical and neurological traumatic injury to the brain. Perhaps they could then move on too.

  PHYSICAL CHANGES

  SENSORY FILTERS. All input and output from our brains takes place through the medium of our bodies, and thus the two are highly integrated. In some views they are inseparable. But with concussion the relationship between the brain and the body can change, and for the concussive there may be many unusual and disconcerting experiences as a result.

  One common experience I had was that under cognitive stress my sensory filters would change. These filters have two main jobs. First, they operate to exclude most of the potential input because it is not of interest to us. Second, they chunk together pieces of the remaining input into meaning. Additionally, these two processes work together: In a greatly simplified version we might imagine there are twenty layers of such filters. At each level the filtered and concentrated input signal is passed upward toward the rest of the brain—gathering meaning along the way. But at the same time signals are also sent back downward (toward the original body sensors) to further bias the way the previous layer applies its filtering. In this way we get raw input from the bottom up, but also, at the same time, a continuous stream of biasing information helping us to “know what to look for or listen to” that is passed back from the top down. In this way we eliminate increasing portions of the incoming signal as irrelevant to the context and meaning we have now partially determined.*

  The brain also works with the extended body to control the process of gathering input information by changing our posture orientation, by changing the properties of our eyes (including, e.g., the balance between the different retinal systems), by affecting the level of our physical arousal, of our hormone balance, and so on, each of which affects how we appraise the world.

  Consider, for example, the following “London in the rain” exercise. I wrote it on the whiteboard in one of my undergraduate AI classrooms before the students arrived, then asked them during the lecture what it said:

  Figure 1: London in the rain!

  Naturally they told me that it said “London in the rain.” When I asked them again to tell me what it really said, they replied, “London in the rain.” At the end of fifteen minutes of this, my forty students were ready to lynch me, and to avoid a mutiny I had to manually explain their mistake. (Carefully count the words in the illustration, pointing to them with your finger.) They literally couldn’t see the words in front of them.

  In this case, subliminal error correction in the students’ brains altered their perception, and probably yours as well—a sensory filter. This is an example of our brains chunking together small bits of information to form meaning under control of what our brains are expecting to see.

  After suffering the concussion, at times of brain fatigue, I often lost efficacy in my sensory filters. As we have seen, I would, instead, get a flood of sensory information—bits and pieces of the world—with no gestalt meaning attached. I had to construct meaning manually, putting together raw pieces of information, such as shapes and colors and the sounds that came with them, to make sense of the world around me.

  BODY-SENSE COGNITION AND BRAIN FLU. At other times, because of impoverished visual and balance systems, I would need to rely on my body feelings partly as a way of constructing the internal symbols of thought. When I couldn’t see meaning in the input, I would feel it instead. This is difficult to describe, because it is not normally something we think about, and understanding it is also not intuitive. Yet it was an important mechanism that helped me reason about the world, and a capability that we all probably use to a lesser degree without realizing it.

  Let’s
imagine that I ordinarily have a visual/geometric representation of the concept conflict: say (for simplicity’s sake) The Blue Team on the left, pushing and tugging against The Red Team on the right, one side against the other. But on this day, because of visual system fatigue I’ve lost the ability to see this concept. But my body and emotion system are functioning as normal. Now, to make up for my internal visual deficits I substitute the much more abstract emotion concepts of pathos, desire, feeling of accomplishment, and so on, which I can still clearly experience as felt emotions in my body. These can be combined in various ways to represent conflict: if Blue and Red both desire the goal G, and Blue feels pathos when Red gets (accomplishes) the goal G . . . then they are in conflict. In this way I could use body representations to manipulate the logic relative to conflict in place of the internal visual symbols that had deserted me. In the general case, I could use body information to reason about the world.

  As a concussive, I used this sense of my body all day long—to check my surroundings, to arrange for remedial help with balance, to substitute for other kinds of symbolic representations that I could no longer map to problems in the real world, and so on. But when I got a cold, or was fatigued and sore from a hard run, my body sense changed, and this presented cognitive difficulties.

  To illustrate, let’s further imagine that I am grading papers for class, but on this day I have a cold. After finishing a few papers, I am losing the ability to visualize internal concepts, including conflict. But now, because of the cold, my body already feels feverish, which is similar to the feeling for pathos, and I am no longer able to feel the emotion in the usual way. But having lost pathos, I have also lost conflict, and without conflict I can’t understand the phrase “. . . the conflict between using the most efficient algorithm, and the one that is least susceptible to failure” in some graduate student’s homework.