Free The Ghost in My Brain by Clark Elliott Page A

“You won’t get any better—after two years, no one ever does. But you’ll get better at figuring out ways to live with your brain damage.” He was right about the last part. I grew quite crafty about avoiding cognitive and sensory activities that drained my batteries. In this way I sometimes appeared socially odd (“Goddammit, Elliott, why isn’t your voicemail turned on!”), but was otherwise able to present a reasonably normal façade to the outer world.
    I suspect that many concussives use similar techniques in their lives. So, while their brains may not have recovered, with time they have nonetheless become more adept at compensating for their impairments by avoiding debilitating activities. And, yes, this avoidance behavior will often make them seem irritable, or touchy, or just plain
weird.
    GETTING STUCK AND THE MAGIC OF INITIATION. One great thing that our bodies do for us, and which we never think about, is to
initiate action
. An important element of this is the concept of our spatial sense—our knowledge of who we are within the space around us. * The way this works is: we want to look at an item, or pick it up, or walk over to where it is, and the next thing we know we are turning our head to look at it, or reaching for it, or moving our legs to walk to it. But, as we have seen from my adventure getting home from work that winter night, there is a moment we never think about when“magic” happens, when thought is translated into action, and we make the almost instantaneous transition from being still to being in motion.
    Concussives often lose the ability to make that transition.
    It is easy to imagine yourself in such circumstances: You are completely comfortable. You are not physically tired. You really, actually, want to rise up out of your chair, and you might even say the words, “Okay, let’s go now.” But as you stare off into space wondering why this is happening . . . nothing moves. It is an odd sensation. It is not at all like being numb—you can feel every part of your body, the same as always. It is not scary, the way you would feel if you were paralyzed. Instead it is like being so globally lazy that you just can’t get yourself to
feel
like moving. It’s like watching yourself sitting there doing nothing from the outside in.
    There is a haziness about it too, as though you can’t quite “get” what it would mean to actually move. You can’t
see
it. In some strange and subtle way it’s as though moving, and the comprehension of moving, belongs to an alternate, unknowable universe.
    For someone who studies the implementation of artificial intelligence, this can spark a marvelous moment of insight: if you can’t “see” where you are going, or the thing you want to reach for—see your target’s place, and
your
place, within the visual/spatial representation of the world around us that we all keep in our heads—then your muscles simply will not move. Your low-level motor-control system doesn’t respond to words; it responds to
spatial images.
It is all very elemental, complex, useful, pragmatic . . . and it all happens for us without thought, in the blink of an eye.
    Being unable to move can be embarrassing, and socially difficult. I learned to plan ahead. Sometimes I’d just avoid walkingdown stairs (which were particularly problematic), attending meetings, and making decisions, any of which might get me stuck. Other times, I’d tell a trusted colleague or student of mine that “I’m going to likely have a little trouble after [the meeting/class],” and ask him or her, “Would you be kind enough to pull me up out of my chair and push me out of the room when we are done?” Fortunately, once I
got
moving I was usually okay.
    I learned to be humble enough to simply ask strangers, “I’m working around a brain injury—could you