Free The Ghost in My Brain by Clark Elliott Page B

possibly give me a little push so I can get going down the Jetway here?” *
    Sometimes I only needed someone to
command me
to initiate the action. In the strangest of my workarounds I could literally tell someone exactly what to tell
me
to do. I could then follow their commands to initiate actions that I couldn’t manage on my own. In the most baroque of these scenarios, I would call my friend Jake on the phone to have him get me unstuck.
    Me: “Hi, Jake. Sorry. I’ve been here for twenty minutes. I need you to tell me to get up out my chair and walk into the kitchen.”
    Jake (in an authoritative voice): “Okay, Clark—GET UP OUT OF YOUR CHAIR NOW AND WALK ACROSS THE ROOM.”
    Me: “Thanks. I’m up now.”
    Jake: “No problem. Bye.”
    Getting stuck, unable to move at all, is an important symptom of concussion. Many different problems, such as those of pattern matching, cognitive slow motion, decision making, and sensory overload, lead to this elemental breakdown in motor control.
    THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE. Another troubling consequence of concussion may be the loss of the ability to make
decisions.
This has nothing to do with the ability to assess what a correct decision would be. Concussives have not become stupid or irrational. Rather it is the troubling loss of the
innate ability
to pull the trigger on a decision once the data has been collected and an analysis has been made.
    Even within the general population, the facility with which people make decisions falls on a spectrum, and a concussive’s loss of decision-making ability is best understood in context. We all know intelligent and organized people with good assessment skills who still, in the end—even after careful research—have trouble actually
deciding
what to do, whether it’s buying a car or ordering dinner from a menu. We also know people who have little interest in researching facts prior to making a decision, and yet they have no trouble deciding on a path. Thus we can see that the native ability to decide
—
to pull the trigger at the crucial moment—has little general relationship to the amount of knowledge one has collected about the circumstances. Analysis and decision are two distinct processes.
    If I hold up my hands and ask you to pick one, you’ll have no trouble doing so. But here is the question: how did you choose? If you look closely, you’ll realize that in all cases, independent of whether you do any preliminary work, at some point
magic happens
. A decision floats up from the ether insideyour brain and action follows: pointing, speaking, reaching, and so on. Yet some concussives—during periods of brain fatigue—are incapable of such a seemingly simple task: you could offer them a thousand dollars to choose a hand—any hand—but they still might not be able to do so, because they can’t
decide.
    This debilitating problem with decision making propagates throughout the whole system. The concussive’s arm will not go up to “just pick one” without a clear visual/spatial instruction from the tired brain about where the arm is to reach. Phrases such as “the hand on the left” will not form without an image of
the hand on the left
, which is used to retrieve the words that make up the phrase. When a concussive looks inside her head for an answer, there is only an emptiness—like something perched, waiting along
with
her for the next step to occur. Those who have age-related trouble recalling nouns will have some sense of what this is like: you
know
you know the name of the movie actor to whom you wish to refer, but when you look inside to retrieve the name, nothing is there.
    By January 2000—four months after the crash—I had grown increasingly brain-fatigued. My deep “cognitive batteries” were drained, and my life circumstances were such that I could not get the brain rest I needed for them to recover. I had