It seems like everyone has a book for me to read these days. And the problem with that is that I have books everywhere right now. Every one of them is saying "read me". For example, I had a good conversation with my neighbor the other day about the effects of vaccines on children and learning disorders. She mentioned to me that the theory was that there were some bad batches of vaccine. Not that all vaccines were detrimental (But some people would say "Why take the risk?") She indicated that from the looks of educational testing that was done on my own kids that whatever "issues" they might have (And I would NEVER think of them as disabilities) are most likely genetic.
Anyway, she brought over a book yesterday entitled Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and It's Aftermath by Michael Mason. It is about stories of people with brain injuries and what they have to tell us about brains and about the human mind and maybe even about that aspect of us that may not be just brain tissue.
"Head Cases takes us into the dark side of the brain in an astonishing sequence of stories, at once true and strange, from the world of brain injury.
Michael Paul Mason is one of an elite group of experts who appear in the wake of tragic accidents and coordinate care that can last a lifetime. On the road with Mason, we encounter survivors of brain injuries as they struggle to map and make sense of the new worlds they inhabit. We meet a snowboarder whose life became permanently surreal after an errant jump; an "ultraviolent" child who has lost the brain's instinctive check on the impulse to strike out at others; a young man who cannot cry; and an Iraq war veteran whose odd maladies suggest that brain injury will be the war's most conspicuous legacy.
Underlying each of their stories is an exploration into the brain and its mysteries. When injured, the brain must figure out how to heal itself, reorganizing its physiology in order to do the job, and Mason gives us a series of vivid glimpses into brain science, the last frontier of medicine. We come away in awe of the miracles of the brain's workings and astonished at the fragility of the brain and the sense of self, life, and order that resides there. Head Cases echoes both Oliver Sacks and Raymond Carver, and is at once illuminating and deeply affecting."
I wish I had a big fat grant that I could draw from to pay my son, Skyler to read books for me as I am finding myself overwhelmed with curiosity about everything right now. And I have one book that I have set in the middle of the floor so that I can't forget it that I finished and have to write a report on. Grin.
They say that the human brain only functions at a fraction of its capacity. That has always mystified me. I have wondered how a human brain could evolve way more capacity than it used ... or conversely why a creator would give it way more capacity than He made available to us? And it makes me wonder if the human brain sustained some sort of ... I don't know ... brain injury at some point in time in our history? And what would it have been like to think with such a brain before the injury? What would it be like if I were to slowly "recover" from such a brain injury and begin to use more of my brain that I had ever used.? Would that be fun? would it be scary? Would it feel like craziness? Would it make me lonely?
I saw a preview for a movie last night. The movie was called Blindness. And I think the tagline goes something like this "The only thing scarier than going blind is finding out that you are the only one who can see." I wonder what it would be like to be seeing out of a healed brain ... or even a healing brain. Would a person feel incredibly lonely?
I mean one can imagine having a sibling ... someone you have grown up with and someone you love who just isn't seeing the world the way you can because your brain is healing but theirs for some reason isn't?
It all sounds like Science Fiction but it seems like it would make for a great story if someone had time to write it. Has anyone with a good background in brain science ever written a novel that played with what it would be like to think with a totally functioning brain?
For years, I have wondered just what it would be like to "see" out of a catamount's head. I mean, physiologically and neurologically, you KNOW that they are seeing things that you or I do not see. How would it change our perception of the world if just briefly, we could look out of a head like a catamount or a falcon? I am just speculating here but it seems like if I woke up with a catamount's brain and eyes and sense ... I would find myself overwhelmed with the additional data that my brain was being fed. Just overwhelmed. Like I would just be getting WAY more visual input than I was used to and it would exaust me just trying to manage it all.
How does a catamount prioritize its information I ask myself? How does it know what to screen out? (And this reminds me of a book my son keeps telling me I HAVE to read. It is called Feed.
"In this chilling novel, Anderson (Burger Wuss; Thirsty) imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies' attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School." Review at Amazon.com
I wonder ... if we ever figure out what happened to our brains, if something did in fact happen to them ... what the process of healing it will be? And what schools would look like in a world where the healing of that brain and the use of that healed brain was the central mission?
My son Sim's book recommendation to me today was The Cat Who Brought Down the House
Question for Comment: What do you think? Have we humans come to think of life with a brain injury as normal? Would we regard people with "healed" fully functional brains as crazy? What would be going on in their heads that would not be going on in ours? All sorts of good questions today.
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