A key aspect of brain injury derives from the fact each victim represents a unique persona, one with a highly developed personal understanding of the world. We each share some degree of common understanding – we all know the difference between whales and Wales. But ask people their first thought on hearing the word and some will say Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, while others will start whaling and make a big splash in their drink, or ask you to call them Ishmael. The world is odd in that way. Brain injury makes it odder.
Brain injury forces the victim into the study of neuroscience. If the same impact force results in differing modes of injury unique to the victim, and if each individual victim maintains their own personal interpretation of the world, it is clear that great complexity arises with an absolute thump of suddenness.
Humans, being what they are, wish for control over nature, hence over themselves. For some professions it becomes an affront to not to know, to be forced into pleading ignorance. The medical profession is one of these. Its solution to this state of affairs is to seek to ignore it entirely. Or blame the victim for not having the approved form of brain injury.
But I digress. In this series of posts I have been examining my errors of understanding in regard to mTBI. The first error was a belief in absolute recovery. The second was a belief in stair step remediation as opposed to accepting the fact of the injury and attempting to develop appropriate management routines. A third error has to do with my beliefs about normalcy.
Human beings do not pay much attention to the function of their cognitive apparatus. They pay close attention to various systems of reward. Money, food, sex, and power, represent four common rewards. Persons concerned with obtaining more of these rewards are unlikely to devote much time to questioning why the rewards are desired, or the ethics of over-consumption. Any concern with the cognitive behaviours associated with reward acquisition is likely to be instrumental in nature rather than reflective. The issue becomes how can I obtain more money, food, sex and power, not why I seek more, and yet more again.
My earliest interests were philosophical; I wanted to understand knowledge, how it was manufactured, how it was proved true. I studied various systems of thought but did not think to spend much time investigating how my own mind articulated basic concepts. It was possible to observe and critique other people’s mode of thinking; it was much more difficult to observe and critique my own.
In the prior post, I detail my attempt to return to normalcy. The problem I faced was that I had limited understanding of what “normalcy” might be. I lacked understanding of the target state of mind. I had never tried to shape my cognitive processes in this exact way. I had never previously attempted recovery from brain injury.
I have since realized that my target for “cognitive normalcy” is in many respects congruent with the psychological concept of Flow. Flow “is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.” Flow is understood to exhibit the following six factors:
- Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
- Merging of action and awareness
- A loss of reflective self-consciousness
- A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
- A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
- Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
My experience of brain injury involves a disruption of all of these factors. It was only during creation of my Work Experiment post that I wrote what I later realized was a description of a flow state:
Stuck with sense of struggle and a longing to return to ordinary events, the time during which I could experience my world thoughtlessly, carelessly, and feel absolutely confident that I was properly enmeshed in my experience, that I was one with my world and it was one with me, part of me, immersed in me, merged with me. All of this to the point that the “me” ness did not really factor into the equation.
Now there is a forced me, a contrivance that I have actuated to guide and protect me from myself.
I am in some respects my own Ahab, whaling away in an endless search for a great white apparition, the hidden mystery of a lost reality.