My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (8 page)

Without the linearity associated with the constant brain directives of my left brain, I struggled to maintain a cognitive connection to my external reality. Instead of a continuous flow of experience that could be divided into past, present, and future, every moment seemed to exist in perfect isolation. In this emptiness of verbal cues, I felt devoid of my worldly wisdom and I was desperate to maintain a cognitive link between my moments. Repetitively, I obsessed the only message my brain could sustain:
What am I trying to do? Get help. I'm trying to make a plan and get help. What am I doing? I have to come up with a plan to get help. Okay. I have to get help.

My information processing for normal access to my brain's information, prior to this morning's episode, went something like this: I visualize myself sitting in the middle of my brain, which is completely lined with filing cabinets. When I am looking for a thought or an idea or a memory, I scan the cabinets and identify the correct drawer. Once I find the appropriate file, I then have access to all of the information in that file. If I don't immediately find what I'm looking for, then I put my brain back on scan and eventually I access the right data.

But this morning, my information processing was completely aberrant. Even though my brain remained lined with filing cabinets, it was as if all the drawers had been slammed shut and the cabinets pushed just beyond my reach. I was aware that I knew all this stuff, that my brain held a wealth of information. But where was it? If the information was still there, I could no longer retrieve it. I wondered if I would ever reconnect with linguistic thought or retrieve the mental images of my life. I was saddened that perhaps those portions of my mind were now lost forever.

Devoid of language and linear processing, I felt disconnected from the life I had lived, and in the absence of my cognitive pictures and expansive ideas, time escaped me. The memories from my past were no longer available for recollection, leaving me cloaked from the bigger picture of who I was and what I was doing here as a life form. Focused completely in the present moment, my pulsing brain felt like it was gripped in a vice. And here, deep within the absence of earthly temporality, the boundaries of my earthly body dissolved and I melted into the universe.

As the hemorrhaging blood interrupted the normal functioning of my left mind, my perception was released from its attachment to categorization and detail. As the dominating fibers of my left hemisphere shut down, they no longer inhibited my right hemisphere, and my perception was free to shift such that my consciousness could embody the tranquility of my right mind. Swathed in an enfolding sense of liberation and transformation, the essence of my consciousness shifted into a state that felt amazingly similar to my experience in Thetaville. I'm no authority, but I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call Nirvana.

In the absence of my left hemisphere's analytical judgment, I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience. A piece of me yearned to be released completely from the captivity of this physical form, which throbbed with pain. But providentially, in spite of the attraction of this unremitting temptation, something inside of me remained committed to the task of orchestrating my rescue, and it persevered to ultimately save my life.

Stumbling into my office space, I turned the lights down low because the light stimulation burned my brain like wildfire. The harder I tried to stay focused and concentrate on what I was doing in the here and now, the more intense the throbbing in my head reverberated. It took great effort just to stay attentive and my mind groped to hold on, to remember,
What is it I'm doing? What am I doing? Call for help, I'm trying to call for help!
I vacillated between moments of being able to think clearly (I call these "waves of clarity"), and the lack of ability to think at all.

Feeling cast out of synchrony with the life I had known, I was concurrently disturbed and fascinated by what I was witnessing as the systematic breakdown of my cognitive mind. Time stood still because that clock that would sit and tick in the back of my left brain, that clock that helped me establish linearity between my thoughts, was now silent. Without the internal concept of relativity or the complementary brain activity that helped me navigate myself linearly, I found myself floating from isolated moment to isolated moment. "A" no longer had any relationship to "B" and "one" was no longer relative to "two." These types of sequences required an intellectual connection that my mind could no longer perform. Even the simplest of calculations, by definition, requires recognition of the relationship between different entities, and my mind was no longer capable of creating combinations. So again, I sat befuddled, waiting for the next intermittent thought or wave of clarity. In anticipation of the eventual arrival of an idea that would connect me to something in objective reality, my mind kept repeating,
What is it I'm trying to do?

Why didn't I just call 9-1-1? The hemorrhage growing in my cranium was positioned directly over the portion of my left brain that understood what a number was. The neurons that coded 9-1-1 were now swimming in a pool of blood, so the concept simply didn't exist for me anymore. Why didn't I just skip downstairs and ask my landlady for help? She was home on maternity leave and would have been happy to give me a lift. But her file, again, a detail in the big picture of my life in relation to those around me, didn't exist anymore. Why didn't I walk out into the street and flag down a stranger for help? It never crossed my mind. In this incapacitation, the only option I had was the one I was desperate to remember - which was how to call for help!

All I could do was sit and wait; sit patiently with the phone by my side and wait in the silence. So there I sat, home alone with these transient thoughts that evaded me, almost teasing me as they flitted in and out of my mind. I sat waiting for a wave of clarity that would permit my mind to connect two thoughts and give me a chance at forming an idea, a chance to execute a plan. I sat silently intoning,
What am I doing? Call for help. Call for help. I'm trying to call for help
.

In the hope that I might consciously evoke another wave of clarity, I placed the phone on the desk in front of me and stared at its keypad. Searching for some recollection of a number to dial, my wandering brain felt empty and sore as I forced it to concentrate and pay attention. Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing. Gosh my brain hurt. In an instant a number flashed through my mind's eye. It was my mother's number. How thrilling that I could remember! How wonderful that I could not only recall a number but that I knew whose number it was! And how remarkable, though unfortunate, that even in this precarious condition, I realized that my mother lived over a thousand miles away and how inappropriate it would be to call her now. I thought to myself,
No way, I can't call Mama and tell her I'm having a stroke! That would be horrible. She would freak out! I've got to come up with a plan.

In a moment of clarity, I knew that if I called work, my colleagues at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center would get me help.
If only I could remember the number at work.
And how ironic it was that I had spent the previous two years singing the Brain Bank jingle to audiences all around the country, including the lyrics, "Just dial 1-800-BrainBank for information please!" But on this morning, with all those memories set beyond my reach, I retained only a vague idea of who I was and what I was trying to accomplish. Posed at my desk in a bizarre mental fog, I continued to coax my mind by obsessing,
What is the number at work? Where do I work? The Brain Bank. I work at the Brain Bank. What is the number at the Brain Bank? What am I doing? I'm calling for help. I'm calling work. Okay, what is the number at work?

My normal perception of this external world had been successfully established by the constant exchange of information between my right and left hemispheres. Because of cortical laterality, each half of my brain specialized in slightly varied functions, and when put together, my brain could precisely manufacture a realistic perception of the external world. Although I had been a very bright child with tremendous potential for learning, my two hemispheres had never been equal in their natural abilities. My right hemisphere excelled at understanding the big picture of ideas and concepts, but my left hemisphere had to work extremely hard to memorize random facts and details. As a result, I was one of those people who rarely chose to cognitively code a phone number as a random sequence of numbers. Instead, my mind automatically created some sort of pattern, most often a visual pattern, to which I attached the sequence. In the case of phone numbers, I generally memorized the pattern as it dialed on a touch-tone keypad. Privately, I always wondered how I would have survived in a world of rotary telephones where such schematic ploys would have been much more challenging!

Throughout my youth, my mind had been much more interested in how things were intuitively related (right hemisphere) than how they were categorically different (left hemisphere). My mind preferred thinking in pictures (right hemisphere), as opposed to language (left hemisphere). It wasn't until my graduate school years and fascination with anatomy that my mind excelled in detail memorization and retrieval. After a childhood of information processing through sensory, visual, and pattern association strategies, the tapestry of my knowledge was all intimately inter-linked.

The downfall to this type of a learning system, of course, is that it only works when all the pieces of the network are functioning and interacting properly. On this morning, as I sat and contemplated the phone number for work, I remembered that there was something unique about the patterning of our office codes. Something like, my number ended in 1-0; which was the exact opposite of my boss's number which ended in 0-1; and my colleague's number fell right in the middle. But because my left hemisphere was drowning in a puddle of blood, I could not access the specifics of my mental inquiry, and the linearity of mathematics befuddled me. I kept thinking,
What's in the middle between 01 and 10?
I decided that looking at the phone keypad might be helpful.

Sitting at my desk, I placed the phone directly in front of me and sat patiently for a few moments awaiting the next wave of clarity. Again I intoned,
What is the number at work? What is the number at work?
After several minutes of holding the phone and drawing a blank, a list of four digits suddenly appeared in my mind...2405! 2405! I repeated it over and over to myself.
2405!
In order to not forget it, I picked up a pen and with my non-dominant left hand, I quickly jotted down the image I saw in my mind. A "2" was no longer a "2" but rather a squiggle that looked like a "2." Fortunately, the "2" on the phone pad looked just like the "2" in my mind's eye, so I drew the squiggles that represented what I saw. .2405. Somehow I understood that this was only part of the number, what was the rest? There was a prefix -something came first. So, again, I started intoning,
What is the prefix? What is the prefix at work?

Faced with this dilemma, it occurred to me that it was not necessarily an advantage that, when we are at work, we merely have to dial extension numbers. Because of this lack of routine use, the pattern for my prefix recognition was not coded in the exact same file in my brain as the rest of the extension numbers. So back I went on a mission to retrieve information and I questioned,
What is the prefix? What is the prefix at work?

For my entire life, I had been exposed to phone numbers with very low prefixes: 232, 234, 332, 335, etc. But grasping at anything flitting through my mind, any possibility at all, the code 855 flashed as a visual. Initially, I thought that this was the most absurd prefix I had ever heard, because the numbers seemed so high. But at this point, anything was worth a try. In anticipation of the next wave of clarity, I cleared the desk in front of me. Because it was only 9:15 am, and I was only 15 minutes late for work, no one would really be missing me yet. With a plan in mind, I plodded on.

I felt tired. I felt vulnerable and completely fragmented as I sat there waiting. Although I was consistently distracted by an enveloping sense of being at
one
with the universe, I was desperate to carry out my plan to get help. Within my mind, I rehearsed over and over again what I needed to do, and what I would say. But keeping my mind tuned in to what I was trying to do was like struggling to hang on to a slippery fish. Task one, hold the thought in mind; task two, execute the internal perception in the external world. Pay attention. Hold on to the fish. Hold on to the understanding that this is a phone. Hold on. Hold on for the next functional moment of clarity! I kept rehearsing in my mind,
This is Jill. I need help! This is Jill. I need help!

This process had already taken 45 minutes for me to figure out who and how to call for help. During the next wave of clarity, I dialed the number by matching the squiggles on the paper to the squiggles on the phone pad. To my great fortune, my colleague and good friend, Dr. Stephen

Vincent, was sitting at his desk. As he picked up the receiver, I could hear him speak, but my mind could not decipher his words. I thought,
Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!
I realized that my left hemisphere was so garbled that I could no longer understand speech. Yet, I was so relieved to be connected to another human being that I blurted out, "This is Jill. I need help!" Well, at least that's what I tried to say. What exactly came out of my mouth was more akin to grunts and groans, but fortunately Steve recognized my voice. It was clear to him that I was in some sort of trouble. (Apparently all those years of hollering up and down the halls at work had earned me a recognizable squawk!)