I was fortunate to learn in 2018, at a relatively young age, that my mental faculties are the most precious thing I have in life (after my wife ofcourse). It was a very simple accident; chasing a high I let my bike get too fast going downhill on a wet road, a car on the other side was oncoming, I break, the back wheel slips out from under me, I hit my head on the road (with a helmet on). A bruised knee, elbow and shoulder, bit of pain, no damage to the bike, so I get up and continue. 15 minutes later I get home, a sharp migraine sets in, and suddenly, I realize, I can't remember how I got home. In fact, I can't remember most of last week. Luckily an MRI, an OK from a doctor and a couple of weeks later my memory returns and I'm no worse for the wear.
In that moment, when I realized I couldn't recall how I got home, the worst panic I have ever had set in. I've had two close calls with drowning and was in a car crash in the past, and have never felt the panic I had felt in that moment, just sitting comfortably at home, realizing my brain no longer works. I wasn't scared I had a brain bleed or something and would die, I was scared I would lose my mental faculties.
Since then my outlook on life has taken a complete turn. I've become a lot more cognizant of how I spend my time and what issues I engage with mentally.
What we have is precious, it can dissapear in a second, on an otherwise perfect day.
Coming to terms with the fallibility of your own mind is a valuable experience. I think it has helped me to be more rational. Once you accept that your mind can be dysfunctional, it becomes trivial to accept that your mind can be wrong. The way I see it, being wrong is also a temporary dysfunction of the mind.
- a slight odd taste (this is my "early warning sign"), - then the vision loss (which is so hard to describe, because the missing portion doesn't become black/white/blurry/etc, it's just gone), - and sometimes the tingling fingers.
The worst one, which happened while I was in Spanish class at school, began with those symptoms, but then I noticed I couldn't understand the Spanish instructions on the worksheet we'd just been given, even though I'm usually good with languages. I went to read the English "cheater" instructions on the other side, and my ability to read & understand English drained away while I was in the middle of reading. I felt that something was very wrong at that point, and stood up to tell my teacher that I needed to go to the nurse, but as soon as I stood up, I realized I no longer knew how to transfer my thought into my teacher's mind (not only the ability, but even the concept of spoken language had vanished!) ...So I just sat back down and waited it out.
It is quite the experience...
Interesting
Seems the dysfunction could be either intrinsic, as in mis-processing data/information that is present, or extrinsic, as in not having or failing to obtain a suitable set of data/information on the topic.
Does this match your model?
My friends will buy ergonomic keyboards, standing desks, monitor arms, etc. to keep them healthy and productive (which is important), but not wear a helmet because "they look dumb". Without a working brain, none of that other stuff will matter! I always ask them, 'Are you expecting to find a partner while you're on the bike? Who are you trying to impress?'
I just got off my bike in London, no helmet but typical speeds of 10 mph or so. Most cycle deaths here are crushed by trucks where a helmet doesn't help much.
Family friend was an accountant in NYC that used to ride around on a scooter with no helmet. Fell and hit his head one day and literally lost the ability to do complex math, permanently.
We may be only in the tiniest of corners (for now), but probably nothing beats it in complexity (... for now).
Spend a little while seriously watching an octopus, and you may move that needle.
So is it really you realizing your brain no longer works, or part of the brain with ownership of the rest realizing its brain no longer works?
P>S> To get still a full spectrum, let's not forget (rather rare) cases when people with 80%< of the brain filled with cerebrospinal fluid due to hydrocephaly were able to do uni math or work as accountants.
- Very smart guy
- Had some kind of blood circulatory issue so reduced oxygen to the brain
- BUT was a very active cyclist so has very good cardio
- due to both of the above, he was getting enough O2 to be functional but effectively had a lower IQ
- circulatory issue was eventually identified and then corrected
His comments (paraphrased):
"Being less smart was kind of a blessing. Instead of getting frustrated when things weren't working when there were obvious solutions, my attitude changed to just accepting things.
As soon as my circulatory issues where resolved, I went right back to being frustrated."
This almost feels personal to me because of how well written her account is. I’ve had terrible chronic migraines for as long as i can remember. Apparently they can be associated with brain lesions, too. I’ll clearly never know how they’ve impacted my personality.
Also the joke about opening a spa where she whacks stressed people with a bat so they find respite from our busy world: we already do that ourselves when we reach mental burnout. I did, and in some ways, I feel that years later, my mental sharpness is still not what it used to be. Perhaps burnout is as traumatic to the brain as a massive brain injury; certainly takes as long to heal from.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
I had a massive psychotic break 5 years ago. I’m pretty sure it came with physical brain damage. My memory isn’t what it used to be. There are holes in it. Apparently some of it is so completely gone, I don’t know I’ve forgotten it. Usually I know if I forgot something because there is a dangling pointer to it.
Brain damage feels distinctly different. The problems from being bipolar has very sharp lines in my brain. It’s known territory. Damage is foggy, indistinct.
Things have definitely healed and I’m getting function and a few memories back. The foggy areas have mostly cleared up. It’s been an odd experience.
Which all makes sense, but I don't think is part of the general awareness of these conditions. I get the feeling that most people think of them as "only" mental experiences.
Either that or the memories are treated no differently by the brain. Because one remembers the time as being so significant it seems disproportionate for it to be forgotten. But this could just be what happens to all memories.
> When we return to New York I take the subway to doctor appointments. I don’t take out my phone, I just sit. My brain is quiet, which I find suspicious, but also soothing. Before the accident I went to yoga retreats and tried meditation. I said things like “I just need to unplug.” Apparently what I needed was to get hit by a truck. Perhaps I have discovered the secret to a peaceful mind, and it is traumatic brain injury. I fantasize about opening an expensive spa where busy people pay me money to whack them on the head with a baseball bat.
Levity aside, I’ve never seen a master meditator discuss “quieting the mind” as a downside.
"But did you know that you can eat whole grains and still get hit by a truck?"
That's my take at least. During winter I'd probably have a more depressing perspective but the sun has been out lately.
Living healthy is extrinsically rewarding in itself. You better your odds at least. Maintaining this latent chip on your shoulders towards the unhealthy is weird.
EDIT: I wonder if there is a (channeling Nixon) silent majority of health-“nuts” who just live healthy without advertising it (beyond their inherent health and vitality!). We naturally mostly notice those who make it part of their persona.
Of course, the chance of death is always 100% in the end :^)
I am absolutely less smart (however you want to phrase that) on the days I have a migraine. I can't quantify it, but I can say that on normal days I can do advanced math, etc. and on migraine days I just... can't understand it. It's like it just doesn't "click".
It's fascinating and gives me profound empathy for those who don't have the mental faculties I do (on my good days).
The first year was especially tough, with a lot of suicidal thoughts and constant self-doubt.
Everything she says about feeling like its important to tell people that you did nothing wrong, that it wasn't an 'accident' (oopsie, I almost killed your entire family!), that somehow you have to just keep on living your same life again and driving like this couldn't happen any minute ever again - I feel in my bones and don't think I will every be comfortable on the road or around cars ever again.
The person that hit us fled and was not pursued or found. Sometimes I wonder if they ever get curious about what happened to us. Also, turns out uninsured motorist coverage only applies if you can prove they didn't have insurance, hah.
Hope you’re doing better.
It baffles me often how distracted drivers just pull out somewhere and hit a car that would be impossible to miss if the driver bothered to look at all.
Why does a two lane rural road, often without a shoulder, often cutting through large swaths of unpredictable wildlife need to be rated for 70mph?
I'm a cyclist and love walking. I've seen way too many drivers simply not give two fucks about pedestrians, cyclists or even other cars. I've seen way too many drivers pull out their phones at stoplights or on freeways where "nothing is going on". I've seen way too many drivers drive 30mph+ through parking lot spots thinking nothing of it.
Meanwhile, public transportation initiatives and city landscapes get shot down and destroyed constantly in favor of adding "just one more lane" because people can't be arsed to drive 30mph and NEED 45mph stroads they can blast through at 60mph.
Driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do on a daily basis and so many people treat it like absolutely nothing bad can happen. I hate it.
This type of injury terrifies me though, and from what I read about the long-term effects of Covid, I can't believe people are just going along with it as if it was a common cold. To lose my mental faculties, long-term, is prospect beyond depressing.
She seems to be doing well and her writing and snark are on point. After reading her posts I'd wager 50% of you will think she's still brain-damaged and 50% will say she's never been in better shape -- such is the contemporary zeitgeist.
Found out later the VW Atlas essentially has armor plating in the side, which spread the side impact out from the door into the frame. Didn’t know that when we bought it, but we sure bought another one quick.
One of my daughters also had weekly migraines, lost a day at work each time.
I got a Daith piercing in my right ear - my migraines originated on the right side of my head. Yes the piercing stung, but the next day I had no migraine. The constant pain had just stopped. This was maybe 7-8 years ago. I very rarely get odd migraine symptoms - vision feels off, head feels woolly - but no pain at all.
I convinced my daughter to have a Daith. She now doesn't even get regular headaches.
Anecdotal though this is, I would suggest looking into getting this piercing. It is discreet. There is no formal research I am aware of but for this sample of two it was a huge positive.
Ie when the pain shoots up through/along the side of the traps, along the backside of the ear, to the forehead and back of the eye.
Reminds me of pinching the ear lobes during a migraine. That seemed to sort of help but not terribly.
Nowadays nurtec/the cgrp protein inhibitors work wonders. But I’ll consider the piercings too.
I'm not looking to pick apart your story, just curious.
Then I moved to another state, and haven't had an allergy attack since, and my migraines have mostly gone away. I get probably one real migraine a year, with smaller headaches maybe once a month. Nothing debilitating like before though. For me I think it was all allergy related, but specific allergies. The state I moved to is rated as having the same allergy levels, but yet I don't have these attacks or as many migraines anymore.
Neither medication nor moods have affected the brain fog that I was referring to, only time.
It's not about looking dumb. It's about ergonomics. Sure, helmets make cycling marginally safer, but they also make it considerably more tedious, which results in people simply deciding not to cycle at all, which results in decrease of both public health, and safety of cyclists.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/26subr/til_t...
I don’t do that : I just know a lot of extremes and it seems that it is moving toward that more but that might be my bubble. If you eat healthy, move, no smoking or drinking and don’t mention your marathons or weird diet every 5 minutes, it seems healthy to me, but people around me seem to not find that healthy since covid. It has to be more extreme, especially diet and especially the telling me how much they move per day as if it’s something to be proud of. So yes your EDIT exactly; their persona.
I don’t care if people are unhealthy or not and I don’t think it matters too much from personal experience; do what you like but don’t tell me about it. I live healthy but not extremely so that I have a diet or am so skinny that my wrists are the size of my calves (I have honest to god people who have that and say they are in superior health; smart people with doctorates too I might add); I don’t believe it but I definitely don’t care how much they bicycle, run, swim or whatever.
There are many studies that prove that having a healthy body (like not very obese) improves your lifespan.
But going 5x to the gym a week, or a 6-pack has very little impact.
So make sure you touch grass, have sometime to take care of your body but don't go extreme, it's a waste of time
I can still recognize people even though I can't see their face fully. It's like my subconscious is still seeing the full face.
Very interesting; that reminds me of a phenomena I learned about in a college neuroscience class, from studies of people who are cortically blind, as in their visual cortex is dead/nonfunctional, but their eyes and the rest of their brain work (e.g., from a brain injury localized to the back of their head where the visual cortex is located).
You can also present them with a forced choice test, such as a panel with big stripes either horizontal or vertical, and require them to say if it is horizontal or vertical. Of course the initial response is "I can't see it, so I can't say". But with a forced choice, they get it right something like 85% of the time — obviously far better than the chance results we'd get with blindfolded subjects.
It turns out that (at least the working understanding at the time) is that the brain has different circuits that use info from the optic nerve to tell the eyes where to track and look. E.g., this will get the eyes to track moving objects, or focus along the edges, etc. When those are still working, the brina can still somehow subconsciously access some of that knowledge from those different brain areas.
I wonder if this is relevant to the phenomena you described?
Watch the president of the NTHSA talk about how his M5 saved his life.
Porsche is the safest of all as it is statistically the least likely to get in an accident by a significant margin (even accounting for per mile driven)
… that being said VW is likely much safer than your average American cost-cutter econobox crossover made of plywood and newspaper.
I would not describe a daith as an aesthetic piercing. It is very discreet so not a 'showing off' type. The placement also does not lend itself to changing the usual steel ball closure ring which is initially placed. I did not think through what I would do if it did not work because I am visibily modified and this extra was a nothing.
My daughter has no bodyart. Standard ear-gun piercing, one in each ear. She took some convincing, but all I could say was "This worked for me, I'll pay, there is nothing to lose and much to gain". And it worked.
What I do not know is "If I removed the metal, would I get migraines back?" and I'm not about to try.
Here is something to try: My late wife would have bad headaches. If I squeezed the web between her big toe and the next one the pain would fade after a few minutes and if I continued the pain would stop.
I know two people who had brain damage (like, serious damage that persists years later) from low speed falls - one was literally standing still, and the fall sent them to the hospital for a week. The other one was low speed, just starting off after stopping at the bottom of an uphill section. Not sure the exact details of what happened, but same story - fall -> hospital -> permanent loss of cognitive abilities and some change to personality.
Totally agree that if a truck runs you over, helmet probably won't do much. But a helmet will totally be the difference between an embarassing fall with a few minor scrapes, and one of the most (negatively) impactful moments of your life.
Especially given low cost and low risk.
But there is also much anecdotal evidence it helps.
But the "hard" science generally needs a spark of intuition to help someone decide "maybe I should look into this", whether it's naive citizens positing that a certain practice/diet/supplement seems to help one of their conditions, or doctors noticing a pattern with a handful of their own cases, or researchers noticing something interesting but unexpected in vitro.
Again, most of these anecdotes don't pan out, but many do, and still today often against best-practice medical wisdom for systems we know less about.
The human body is massively complicated, and we're still just dipping our toes in a lot of new frontiers, and there are some areas which are very difficult to formally study.
However, almost all people I know that are over the top healthy (measuring everything, doing some sort of ‘du-jour’ diet (all meat, no meat, all protein, no protein, extreme fasting, no fasting; etc; ‘the best way to live’ changes more often than JavaScript frameworks), a lot of sports) are addicts to it or do it because they believe they will get a lot older than others (weird to me as many spend a of time doing stuff they don’t like; why would you want to lengthen your life in that case, but ok).
I'd hate to hear your winter perspective :)
Crows are also quite smart too.
If that's true, I'd expect they just perceive time more slowly than we do which is why they're able to appear so much more quick. I still agree they've got a lot going on in those brains I just think this aspect of it is interesting!
With that in mind, it would make a lot of sense if time perception scaled with body size. If you are a big elephant signals need to travel very far, and your muscles have to overcome a lot of inertia. If you can't react quickly anyways you don't need to perceive time as quickly. A fly has little inertia, fast signal times because of the short distances, fast processing because there just are fewer neurons, so there is more advantage to perceiving time more quickly
The secret to killing flies is that they have to fly up first before they can fly away, so you (slowly) put your hands in front and behind them and "clap" them. They feel the air and lift off, right into the center of your oncoming hands.
Don’t know about you, but over the years I’ve met a lot of humans that can’t obviously outthink a higher-end chicken.
As for the written word… I’d call that a running experiment. It’s capable of beauty, certainly… but it’s also capable of Meta (née Facebook) and X (née Twitter). Of course the fact that we can readily coin new terms for new situations — I hereby dub the use of X by its current owner _muskturbation_ — is intrinsically complex, but I’m not sure it isn’t also a direct pathway to both babble and Babble and, ultimately, species-ending atrocity.
The same way, people who have suffered a lot in the past might be now more happy than you are, maybe you’re objectively better but you might not perceive it that way, which is what matters in the end.
This is what I'm responding to. I don't know how to reconcile your two sentences, but no problem.