Observing a Stroke from Within

25 responses to “Observing a Stroke from Within”

1. 

   Gwênlyn

   Mar 13, 2008 at 3:05 am

   "…and remembered every moment."

   Kind of a leap of faith there. Who knows how much detail was lost, whether memories were rearranged by the event…

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2. 

   Kevin Baird

   Mar 13, 2008 at 5:53 am

   Faith. Nice choice of words. 🙂 I wonder if someone had a similar experience a few thousand years ago and then invented religion. Nevertheless, this is an amazing and fortunate experience, well told.

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3. 

   sprklg

   Mar 13, 2008 at 8:20 pm

   quirky but interesting!

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4. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 13, 2008 at 10:58 pm

   @Gustavo: yes, not to mention the peculiarly recursive observer bias here…

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5. 

   Gwênlyn

   Mar 14, 2008 at 12:09 am

   Here’s another observer:

   

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6. 

   msamaclean ©

   Mar 14, 2008 at 4:15 am

   (kbaird-interesting take on this!)
   I can imagine the re-telling of that experience takes on a life of its own, & gleaning funny hindsights would be inevitable! Definitely a educated perspective. I’ll check out TED later.

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7. 

   biotron

   Mar 14, 2008 at 3:25 pm

   fascinating, thanks – especially the way she holds her arms out at the end as part of an almost messianic fervour…

   i wonder what the experience would be like for someone who had a clot on the other hemisphere, ie not up against the language centres? going by what she said, one might imagine some sort of super-contracting temporal singularity, approaching reduction to a monad – which would presumably be another kind of nirvana all of itself, though finally achieving the same unity of perception?

   …although as you say, the recursive bias going on here with her ability to reason through what was happening to her might suggest that intermittent communication between hemispheres in the alternative case could result in something like an enormously stressful (and surely less illuminating or enjoyable) sense that a discrete individual consciousness is witnessing the expansive, holisitic universal whole closing into a focal point…

   i’m off to take some aspirin *

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8. 

   restlessthought

   Mar 15, 2008 at 4:37 am

   thanks for posting this… the experience Dr. Taylor describes is kindred to many cultures, many traditions in respect to meditation. In 2006, the Stanford Neurology Department/ Med School hosted a conference with the Dalai Lama. Very few could understand what the Dalai Lama was trying to convey about the conscious expansion and experiential nature of compassion that can be achieved through training the mind.

   med.stanford.edu/events/dalailama/
   (the second session is the most interesting, on suffering and choice)

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9. 

   j_silla

   Mar 15, 2008 at 2:35 pm

   Thank you! Inspireing!! I would like to ask her: are animals also the life force of the universe or just humans?

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10. 

    WilliamBanzai7/Colonel Flick

    Apr 2, 2008 at 5:33 am

    Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Photography and the New Science of Neuro-Aesthetics, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

    Reply
11. 

    jurvetson

    Apr 2, 2008 at 4:23 pm

    @restlessthought: I went to one of those conferences a while back, and had lunch with Prof. Merzenich there, and became fascinated with neural plasticity in adults (controversial at the time), and the ability to reverse cognitive decline as we age.

    @biotron: fascinating thought experiment…. figuratively and literally, I suppose…. I just stumbled upon a couple of quotes I posted elsewhere on flickr from Steven Johnson’s book, Mind Wide Open:

    “The axons in the right brain are longer than in the left and this means they connect neurons that are, on average, farther away from one another… the left brain, by contrast, is more densely woven.” (p.225.)

    So, perhaps there would be interesting differences purely from the time-constant of the feedback loops that enable auto-associative memories.

    Oh, and it might also vary by who does the experiment:
    “Viewed with modern imaging technologies, men’s and women’s brains are nearly as distinct from each other as their bodies are. They have reliably different amounts of neurons and gray matter… the left and right hemispheres are more tightly integrated in women than in men.” (p.14)

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12. 

    biotron

    Apr 3, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    great – cheers! very interesting book, by the looks of it. i wonder if the length of the axons does actually have a perceptible effect on the power and speed of recall / associative memory, as feedback loops are generated "from scratch"…? i really ought to read more about the brain.

    so is Mr Johnson implying that these distances and densities are likely to result in left-brained women who are fastidiously superneurotic, and right-brained men who are poorly-centred space-cadets? *

    the whole issue of chirality is a major can of spiral worms…

    related article

    brief technical overview of same article

    provisional heavyweight jargontastic pdf of aforementioned article

    i can’t pretend to begin to understand the science behind the report, and all associated terminology, but there are some well funky pictures in Figure 5 (page 50) 🙂

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13. 

    biotron

    Apr 3, 2008 at 2:39 pm

    unintentionally amusing video report of brain surgery in the Ukraine – not for the faint-hearted…

    full Storyville documentary about Dr Henry Marsh – only available until Sunday 6th April – catch it if you can!

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14. 

    jurvetson

    Apr 3, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    whoa…. who knew that DIY neurosurgery could be done with a $120 cordless Bosch drill….

    Yikes – I hate to think what the trepanation folks will do with this democratization of their art…

    From BBC link:
    Igor Petrovich had been enduring constant threats and harassment as he tried to reform his department at the Military Hospital in Kiev.

    Petrovich combines a revolutionary zeal with a droll wit: "That is the problem with what we do," he has remarked to Henry, "We can often kill people."

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15. 

    biotron

    Apr 3, 2008 at 7:04 pm

    🙂

    – and now the note on your pic above suddenly seems so apt, so poignant…

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16. 

    biotron

    Apr 3, 2008 at 7:08 pm

    in response to posting this link elsewhere, Scottish dance wonderboy Mylo remarked :

    "i know a couple in their fifties who trepanned themselves using a black&decker"

    i’m sure he won’t mind me reposting that here… i just wonder who that couple are, and how they are doing…

    Reply
17. 

    angry shock

    Apr 5, 2008 at 3:28 am

    gotta see the video before saying something… i have several things in mind…

    the first thing i intuitively feel (words use on purpose) to say is that I find it normal that this might have happened to a woman, not a man as we seem to be more easily aware of our internal states than men -which allow us to be in general more "intuitive" because of this ability to listen to our insides more clearly and produce a more robust output than that constructed only by ordinary -neocortical- conciousness.- if that makes any sense. I guess this internal awareness must be related to sexual organs placement and functionality in women, all an internal department.

    Btw, have you ever felt, under extreme hot weather, that your brain swells? (and you can´t think properly) the real physical sensation, not an "idea" or a "feeling". Just like the same sensation you get in your legs, for example, when you are retaning fluid. (the day I realized that the sensation and thought interruption could be due to true "brain swelling" I tried and took an anti-inflamatory -ibuprofen- and abracadrabra I could get back to work every time ever since! -this happens in summer, +110Fº and no air conditioner, for example-)

    ¿¿??

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18. 

    angry shock

    Apr 5, 2008 at 4:47 am

    wow, it happens!… it´s "intracranial pressure" wtf, as I never talked with anyone about this before, this is also the first time I search
    (i found this close to "trepanation" results -arrgggh!-)
    http://www.steinergraphics.com/surgical/006_17.6.html

    -No, no head-holes for me thanks, the pills still work in extreme cases thinking impairment. :-O

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19. 

    biotron

    Apr 5, 2008 at 10:40 am

    interesting thoughts GG, but i don’t know if what you say about women listening to their body more clearly could apply in most cases during the massive trauma of a stroke…

    this is all reminding me of Terence McKenna and brother psychonaut – sorry – ethnopharmacologist Dennis, and other such mind-expanders who seem to be able to document the highly immersive experience of taking "megatonnage hallucinogens" (as Tez would call DMT, for example) and somehow preserve a sense of scientific observation, while simultaneously having a casual chat with the elves at the centre of the overmind etc etc…

    as for Figure 17.45 on that link page, well, i guess we can be grateful David Cronenberg doesn’t work for either Bosch or the WHO *

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20. 

    restlessthought

    Apr 5, 2008 at 5:41 pm

    Taylor’s experience of the stroke was especially interesting to me. Her description was very similar to the experience my son, Adam, had after a skateboard accident (head trauma.) He was 14 at the time, skating fast without helmet, hit his forehead mid-center on a square pole. The edge of the metal pole essentially slammed his head between brain hemispheres. He lost all auto-biographical memory for several months, no recognition of family (us), his pets, his friends, no cultural understandings like what a school was, or a post office or a grocery store. He didn’t know what foods he liked, or what music he listened to. He also switched handedness from left to right. He truly was the boy who fell to earth, trying to figure out what everything was about. He still had language, could tell us what he felt, how he was learning. During that time, he spoke easily of supreme happiness, a deep contentedness, often expressed his desire to love and be loved. He spoke of "oneness" with everything. (He never talked like that before!) He also studied everything around him with beginner’s mind, with undiminished wonderment. Every minute of the day was a source of profound joy.

    I do not doubt that my son was thrown through some "door of perception" as Aldous Huxley once described, experiencing like Taylor, an ultimate truth. "One in all, All in one." Joy and compassion seem to be aspects of their shared experience.

    As a parent having to "re-teach" my teenage child, I learned quickly… what dampens that transcendent understanding, what also destroys beginner’s mind, is judgment. Judgment becomes the cornerstone of almost every thought we have. Weeds vs. flowers, healthy vs. unhealthy, clean vs. dirty, safe vs. unsafe, friendly vs. unfriendly, beautiful vs. less beautiful, important vs. trivial, etc. Without the construct of "weed, for example, " the dandelion and the rose bring equal joy, equally regarded. And when you do not place conditions on relationship, family, friend, good guy versus bad guy, all people can be equally embraced. We tend to assign valence to everything around us, our thoughts, words …fact is, our constructs and preferences are inherently the processes of judgment. But when you approach the world with a clean slate, all memory erased, the world opens to new context, new possibilities… the unfathomable, the infinite. By approaching the world without bias, you can experience all around with a profound, unhindered joy. Beginner’s mind.

    Then there is the problem of coming back into this "smaller" world having experienced the possibility of a more expansive perspective. The dissonance is difficult.

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21. 

    biotron

    Apr 6, 2008 at 11:06 am

    amazing story restlessthought – thanks ever so much for sharing it 🙂

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22. 

    angry shock

    Apr 6, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    @restlessthoughts: indeed, thanks for sharing! And I agree very much on your last observation about judgement and how it undermines mental plasticity, what you call "the beginner´s mind", because it "solidifies" it. As Steve would probably agree with, your beginner´s mind is what he calls the childlike mind, and its brilliance comes from its neural plasticity, suspected to be lost gradually as we age. (I add the "suspected" word, because I personally don´t believe plasticity is lost when we grow up, neither I ever believed in the past that the brain didn´t regenerate itself with new neurons, and as far as I know, studies in these past years imply that new neurons do grow).

    I believe, tho, that neural prunning, the process which would cause our beginner´s plasticity to gradually vanish, just like judgement, is a very necessary thing. Those are like shortcuts of the mind to make it more "economic" more efficient overtime. A person cannot be eternally in a state of beginner´s mind for it would be no only utterly frustrating in the end, imo, but completely unbearable. As a person with a highly developed right brain or at least a very well developed interconnection between the two hemispheres (evidenced not only in that I am left handed, but that i use both hands in fact to write, also for my creative thinking, my "airy", non logical thoughts, my inclination to art and many heterodox forms of expresion… among other clues not necessary to add) Í can testify this is certainly maddening, overwhelming at some point and you can read something alike in the biographies of many "genius" that talk about similar experiences (and I don´t mean to compare myself with them; identifying with the internal processes doesn´t make me a genius).

    You may not need to suffer a stroke to have those feelings of oneness, perhaps with "just" a good brain interconnection is possible. Yet again, I don´t recommend it to anybody as a daily experience. Everything affects you, to everything you see multiple causes and effects, which makes focus almost an unattainable state of mind, a utopia, and leads several times, unless you discipline yoruself to the extreme, to indecision because you simply can´t handle all those variables coming from the interconnectedness/oneness feelings/thoughts at once to make a decision… which in most cases too leads to an overall feeling of frustration.

    It´s like in a way you are not in control of your mind. Certainly no-one is, but when you experience these feelings with so much awareness is challenging at best, a nighmare at worse. The moments of splendor are brief in comparison to the daily experience. And trying to live a "normal" life among "normal" people who don´t seem to understand you and regard you as an eccentric, is difficult, as we all have a need to belong, as a default setting, it´s our nature. That´s why biographies of many artists and geniuses are so dark in most cases.

    @Biot: I was just making a guess about a possibile difference of awareness between men and women, but it ultimately varies from person to person I think, even if it was true. You may have very "deaf" women and many males who might be "good listeners".

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23. 

    angry shock

    Apr 17, 2008 at 10:07 am

    A very interesting interview to a brain surgeon and the odd experiences of the brain / the mind / the spiritual (or whatever you want to call it) he can report from his experience (as a doc, and also as a patient he was):
    http://www.beliefnet.com/story/231/story_23183_1.html?WT.mc_id=NL44

    Reply
24. 

    Cornelia Kopp

    Aug 25, 2008 at 5:47 pm

    great !! – I saw it on youtube

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25. 

    lucymac

    May 30, 2010 at 5:08 pm

    Thank you so much for sharing this photo! It will soon be posted, with credit and a link at our new site, at Positive Attitude Quotes

    Reply