Clone War

Rendering again. Plenty of time to digg around. Found an article that briefly covers the 5 biggest neuroscience developments in the past X years.

One of the discoveries looks at brain damage and how the condition of your brain may influence your morality. My attraction to neuroscience (and just about anything science recently) is largely due to my ongoing struggle with my own brain. It be jacked up. Many factors are involved, brain damage being one of them.

93-94 was not a good year for my noggin. I was knocked out twice that year. The first time it was pretty standard. Wake up groggy, headache, sleep, headache the next day, sleep, all better.

5 months later I slipped on an icy driveway and hit my head on the pavement. This one was more serious. It's actually something I don't remember. Nor am I able to recall a significant time before and after. Pretty much everything I know about this I learned from my family.**

So anyway, I fall and somehow land on my head. My sister was at a neighbors house talking to some friends when she noticed me laying in the snow. She ran over to find me unconscious and face down in a puddle of water. They rolled me over and I regained consciousness after about a minute.

Only "regained" isn't entirely accurate. After my sister rolled me out of the water, the Alex that slipped on the ice didn't wake up. He was gone. A new and slightly altered Alex woke up.

They had to carry me home because I couldn't/wouldn't walk. I was awake but completely out of it. Once inside, I began to really freak my family out. I did nothing but ball up in a chair and cry and repeat over and over, "I make bad grades. I'm a bad person, I make bad grades."*** Over and over and over. And apparently, I wasn't just crying, it was more like inconsolable "my child just died" crying. They called my dad at work and asked him to come home immediately. My family had seen me cry before, but this was different, I had lost control and they couldn't reason with me at all.

They took me to hospital (notice I left "the" out of "the hospital"...I'm cool-British like that) and I had some MRI's and what not. By this point, I think I had calmed down, no longer screaming and crying. The MRI's showed no signs of serious injury and the docs told my parents I had a concussion and everything should be fine.

Again, I have zero memory of the weeks that followed my head trauma, so I don't have much detail here, but everyone in my family agrees that after that day I clearly wasn't the same person. I was irritable, easily confused and disconnected. They felt that in general I always seemed slightly dazed. I thought, and was told, that my brain was bruised and things like confusion and clouded thought would go away.

Well, turns out that stuff never went away. Things were just going to be different.

Aside from personality change, I needed a new set of tools to navigate memory. I noticed that much myself. Before the accident, information felt "sticky". Things were in sync. I processed input without thinking about how I'm going to store it.

After my head trauma, sometimes things went in and immediately disappeared forever. Comprehension became slippery, even the things I wanted to retain. I noticed that I had to add an extra step into the whole process. Once I placed something in my head, I had to immediately double check to see if it was still there...even though I just put it in there. I had a black hole swirling around in my head.

I remember being able to actually sense when things were slipping into the black hole. Sometimes it would happen while I was in a discussion. I wouldn't be able to recall what was just being said and there wasn't anything that I could do to bring it back. I constantly found myself without a clue. It felt like walking down a well-lit hallway and making an accidental turn into a pitch black room. In complete darkness, I'd fumble around looking for a light switch, but it was pointless. There are rooms in my mind that no longer have a light switch and will remain dark.

The transition wasn't so easy. It was hard accepting the fact that I'm an inferior version of myself. I feel like a clone. Or a bad photocopy. Not as good as the original.

I feel bad for my family. I know it was sad for them. I could tell they missed the old Alex. Heck, I missed the old Alex. They had to learn to accept this new guy. Some guy that just showed up one day and replaced the person they had lived with and loved for 17 years.

Looking at the spectrum, it's not that bad. I could have been brain dead or forever disabled. My family and I could have dealt with something much worse.

Yeah, brains. Friggin' fragile.


** Hey fam, if some of this is off or I'm leaving some things out, write me and let me know so I can modify or add.

*** True. I was barely hanging on in AP Chemistry. I literally had never studied before I moved to NJ so I was struggling with the transition from NC public schools. The bump on the head was the final straw and I dropped down to regular Chemistry.


"Once technology manipulates ethics, ethics can no longer judge technology. Nor can human nature discredit the mentality that shapes human nature. In a utilitarian world, what's neurologically fit is utilitarianism."