The Ghost in My Brain

by Clark Elliott

  Cognitive linguist George Lakoff at the University of California at Berkeley discusses such metaphors in his widely read article “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.”* For example, the following statements (in italics) from Lakoff’s article accurately describe pieces of our common conception of time, but have little to do with the actual physics of atomic motion that underlie the reality of time:

  “Times are things [in the physical world].” Okay, sure. But if 2:35 P.M. is a physical thing, how much does it weigh? Where is it? “The passing of time is motion.” “Future times are in front of the observer; past times are behind the observer.” Yes, but what does time actually have to do with being in front of us or behind us, or passing us by? (Hint: absolutely nothing, except if, for example, we are walking, and time is motion.) Our physical future might just as easily lie behind us to the east, or over our heads in the penthouse apartment above us. And doesn’t time also pass for a rock sitting in the desert? “He stayed there [e.g., in that stage of his life] a long time.” Where, exactly, on Earth is he staying?

  For a concussive who is struggling to understand something as simple as a friend saying, “I’ll see you next Tuesday at 4:30,” the ubiquitously metaphorical conceptions of time are both suspect and elusive. In my case I would experience rapid thought processes such as: Time is like motion. So it’s like a train passing. And if I’m standing on the platform, then 4:30 Tuesday is like where the train is headed to down the tracks—so there will be some billboard there as the train later passes it, and that is my future. And then, of course, I would struggle to visualize how some place I was supposed to be, such as my friend’s house next to the train tracks, relates to the square in a calendar with a number (day of the month) in it, and what the symbol 4:30 (four-colon-thirty) has to do with it.

  While all this thinking was going on under the hood, like Leonard in the movie I would smile and nod and say, “Sure, 4:30 on Tuesday,” knowing all the while that I had no idea what the phrase meant, that the effort to understand it was interfering with my balance, and that I was hoping to figure out how to get it into my simple calendar so I could better “deal with it later” before the nausea from the internal visualizing of the moving objects (such as the train) got too great to bear. And, of course, if my friend were to start saying something else, I might have a moment of internal desperation trying to process the “4:30 Tuesday” soon enough that I didn’t lose either the “4:30 Tuesday” or whatever the new spoken input was.

  For most of us, time is stored as a partially ordered collection of vignettes with a much stronger sense of before- and-after ordering than there is any sense of an immutable “continuous ether” in which these scenes are parked. To make sense of the narrative sequence, then, most of us will visualize not only the individual scenes themselves, but also a visual/spatial representation of them across a metaphorical “time” spectrum—from the earliest scene, through the present, and into the future. We can illustrate this by having you “point to” three scenes representing (1) when you got up this morning, (2) the present moment, and (3) tonight when you will go to bed. The chances are that you have some symbolic, highly spatial way of keeping these three scenes ordered (at least partially) according to time. You may have some kind of left-to-right ordering, a high-to-low ordering, or a foreground-to-background distinction. Or, you may have something much more abstract. The point is that you have some symbolic way to place such scenes in sequence. Ordinarily these will be located in three different areas in the physical space around you.

  Because of the visual nature of these representations, shifting through the indexes of all these ordered scenes that make up the flow of time may greatly tax the already overworked visual/spatial processing systems in a concussive’s brain. And as we are seeing in so many different ways, for concussives this visual processing is often the scarce resource that has to be jealously hoarded if they are to even minimally get through the day. Those dealing with concussives may, for this reason, find even the most naturally organized among them reluctant to make plans, to set dates, and to engage in activities such as scheduling their days.

  An additional problem that I myself had, and that other concussives may share, was that under brain stress I lost the basic concept of before and after—of ordering—because I lost about half of what numbers meant. The cardinality of a set of items (in this case, time-stamped events)—the quantity of them, a more basic concept—was still intact, but the ordinality of them—the ordering of them—was gone. These two concepts are quite elemental in our thinking. If we consider the number “five,” for example, it has both properties inherent in it: On the one hand it represents, say, the five children I have, the quantity of them, the set of five. On the other hand, it also represents the “fifth-ness” of my fifth child—after the fourth child—and thus implies an ordering. This loss of one’s natural ability to order events can be quite troubling when it comes to making sense of narrative and the metaphors of time.

  Imagine again the three scenes representing when you got up this morning, the current moment, and when you will go to bed tonight. The morning and evening scenes are very distinctly not now, and as such they live only as intellectual fabrications in your imagination. Compared with what is before your eyes and ears in this present moment, you can see that the this-morning and this-evening scenes are quite symbolic in nature—scenes filled with iconic representations of those parts of the real scene that are important: bed covers, sunlight or darkness, toothbrushes, clothes, what the floor looks like, and so on. It is also possible that, unlike the present moment, you have the perspective of looking at yourself—observing yourself in the narrative scene—rather than through the perspective of looking out from your own eyes. If so, this is de facto proof of the iconic nature of the images.

  But now imagine yourself as a concussive who has lost the ability to “see” these elaborate spatial relationships. Now, instead of a natural, innately ordered progression of events, time becomes a right-now chaotic jumble of randomly intermixed scenes. Most troubling is the mixing up of those future scenes, which have been imagined—for the purpose of setting goals and creating plans—and those past scenes, which have already occurred, and are being stored as data. (Though note, very specifically not in a delusional way—the problem is sequencing, not knowing what is real.)

  Lastly, an additional difficulty for a concussive may be in recognizing that a formerly future scene has now arrived. Consider that for most people, if their spouse has told them to be sure and mail a letter today, they’ll form a picture of mailing the letter. Their body will, sooner or later, be prompted by the letter-mailing daemon that has been hovering around since morning waiting to match reality with that future image they have formed. To wit: when they enter the kitchen later in the day, the scene reminds them of the letter-mailing goal, they will open the kitchen drawer, take out the letter, and go outside to put it in the mailbox for pickup.

  For a concussive, if the gestalt meaning, and context, of the current scene in the kitchen is missing because of visual system brain fatigue, the letter-mailing daemon may still sense some kind of match and try to break through to the drawer-opening mechanism, but ultimately can’t. But the concussive is meanwhile growing unsettled, because she knows there is something wrong. This processing breakdown requires additional resources to sort out, in a downward spiral, and the visual processing now also deteriorates as visual-symbolic resources are used up trying to make sense of the kitchen, the unsettled feeling, and the repeated attempts to retrieve “something” that just isn’t there. The balance system now gets affected, for the reasons we’ve discussed above, and nausea may set in because of it.

  In trying to figure out what to do, everything becomes right now for the concussive. Instead of triggering What was it I should be remembering?, processing might become Here are my hands in front of me; here is the floor; the ceiling is above the floor; it is late morning; there is light coming in the wind
ow, and so on, all the while knowing all this is important (the prompting from the letter-mailing daemon), but not knowing why.

  Sooner or later a concussive will sort it out, and probably get the letter mailed, but let us make no mistake: asking a concussive to do something as simple as mailing a letter may be an especially draining way for them to start their day.

  It was, of course, Nolan’s dissection of the structure of time that was so difficult for me to witness in Memento, and which caused me to identify so strongly with the experience of the main character: Leonard and I shared a sense of the literal, right-now nature of time, with all other temporal relationships being more or less a mystery that required intense intellectual effort to disentangle—a fictional portrayal that was yet truly evocative of my real-life experience.

  CALENDARS AND THE INABILITY TO PLAN. Prior to the crash I was a skilled internal planner. Despite an appearance of chaos in my life—caused by my tendency to take on many big projects at the same time—I had a strong sense of how long those projects would take, and how they should best be interleaved both with one another, and with the many short-term goals I was also pursuing. I was the ultimate multitasker.

  Within days of the crash, this intuitive planning skill disappeared completely. The way it disappeared, and my particular—and extreme—struggles with planning after the accident, are revealing. We can best understand my difficulties by first looking at four aspects of time, and also the way time relates to calendars: concepts that we typically take for granted, and which are crucial for planning.

  First, as discussed, we tend to think of time as being linear: there was a yesterday, there is a now, there is a future. An important extension of this idea, crucial to developing plans, is the concept of causality, which comes with the constraint that earlier events can cause later events, but never the reverse.* Because I could no longer see the relationship between events, I was also generally unable to form images of causality, and of causal chains.

  Second, in the modern world we associate geometry with blocks of sequenced time. Rectangles on a page—the days of a calendar—are associated with, for example, the rising and setting of the sun each day. But this is a complex relationship: the unseeable spinning motion of the earth; the interplay of shadows and light and dark; the memory that tells us this day is like one that came before, and the logic that predicts it is like the one that will come tomorrow. And the calendar-geometry gets more complex: the artificial grouping of a line of days into rectangular seven-day weeks, rectangular weeks into square months, and layered 2D square months into a depth of 3D years, each represented on the page symbolically. As a concussive, when my brain was fatigued, I couldn’t “see” the shapes in a calendar, nor could I conceptualize their link to events in the natural world. How do you draw a line from a one-inch square to an eight-thousand-mile diameter spinning rock traveling around the distant sun? The representation held no meaning for me.

  Third, we assume time sequences are universal. To wit: when it is four o’clock in the afternoon in the living room in my house, it is also four o’clock in my office at the university, and if it takes an hour to drive from my house to the university, it will be five o’clock when I get there. But when I am at home in my living room, it is not ordinarily possible to see, or feel, or otherwise physically sense my office. The idea that time unfolds identically as a sequence of parallel events in all locations at once is purely conceptual, having no experiential correlation in our here-and-now perception of the world. (That is, we are here, or there, but never both at the same time, so we must trust our imagined construct of what is happening, in parallel, in the other location.)

  And yet I came to understand that it is possible to be intelligent, and logical, and cogent, without having a concept of the universal nature of time, because when my brain grew fatigued I would lose it. Instead I would move down one level to a series of disconnected images: of time moving through the vehicle of a set of ordered images both at home, and differentially at the office, but without any intuitive sense that the events unfolding in each location were linked. To create time—to make it useful for planning where I needed to be, and when—I had to link the paired series of images together manually, consciously, using reasoning, and logic, and the memory that at one time I knew how it all fit together.

  Lastly, we use numbers to represent both quantities and sequences of time, and while these concepts are intertwined, they are not the same. For example, when we make an appointment to have a suit of wedding clothes tailored on the eighth, we will want to schedule this appointment before our wedding on the fifteenth, and we care primarily about the before-and-after ordering of the dates—not the fact that 15 minus 8 yields an intervening period of 7 days. But when we schedule a week’s vacation in California, we are primarily concerned that the start day and end day are seven days apart.

  After the crash I lost almost all reliable representation of the above concepts—especially the linking of the natural world to geometric shapes and numbers on a page, making the use of a normal calendar impossible.

  And yet I always had some memory of having known what a calendar was, and how to use it. So, in this way I was able to fake conversations about days, and weeks, and times, and even, in some cases, to successfully make an appointment without any real conceptual understanding of what I was doing. (As an analogy, consider that Google software is able to accurately translate the sentence “The dog is hungry” into German, but it has no more meaning to the software than does the sentence “Sewing is blue.”)

  In my daily life I had to very much stick to routines: For example, I would meet with a counselor, Dr. Miller, at 9:00 every other Wednesday for practical advice on how to manage life with brain damage. If I more-or-less figured that it was the right week, then I would go to see him. If it turned out to be the wrong Wednesday, then I would sit in his waiting room, he would not be there, and I would go home. This worked: I wasted quite a few mornings driving to a nonexistent appointment, but I almost never missed the appointments that I did have.

  But if Dr. Miller had to change the appointment to another day—say Thursday at 10:00—this was very difficult for me. I might, for example, find myself staring at a card in my hand that said, “Next appointment, Thursday, February 8th, 10:00 A.M.,” and I would be on the phone saying into his voicemail: “I see that I have an appointment on Thursday, February eighth, at ten A.M. I believe then that I am not coming on Wednesday, but I am not quite sure what that means. So, if this is not correct, please call me.” Then I would call back days later, again holding the card, and say, “Today is Thursday. It is nine o’clock. I will be coming to your office to arrive at ten o’clock. I have a card here that says I am supposed to come to your office at ten o’clock, but I am not sure what that means. If I should not be driving to your office now, please call me back.”

  Then I would arrive at his office at ten o’clock, holding the card in my hand that said this was the time for me to be at his office, and I still was not confident that I was in the right place at the right time. Ten o’clock meant very little to me. Thursday meant very little to me. The relationship between figures and dates written on a card, and my wristwatch (which gave both the date and time), meant little to me. The relationship between my wristwatch and the real world meant little to me.

  It was not until two years after the crash, after a concerted, intense, and debilitating monthlong effort, that I was able to come up with something I thought might work: a simple, printed, one-page-per-month calendar where I numbered the days myself by hand. With difficulty, I gradually taught myself to use it . . . sort of. But until my recovery years later, my rudimentary use of the calendar was almost purely through procedural pattern matching, and with no linking to the underlying concepts and metaphors we use to manipulate time in the modern world.

  I believe that many concussives have similar difficulties with calendars, dates, planning, and the conceptual building blocks
of time. For example, the famous linebacker Junior Seau was believed to have exhibited signs of brain injury after his retirement, prior to his suicide. In a San Diego Union-Tribune article that ran in late 2012, Seau’s family talked about how hard it was to schedule anything on the calendar with him. His wife is reported as saying, “His keeping appointments had gotten progressively worse. The kids and I would call him three, four, or five times a day to remind him about their games or events. We’d say, ‘Don’t forget about tonight.’ He’d say, ‘Where is it?’ And we’d say, ‘We’ve told you 50 times. Go back into your text messages and look.’ It got to the point where you couldn’t tell him the day before an event and expect him to remember.”

  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF COGNITION AND THE METACOGNITIVE VOICE

  COGNITIVE SLOWING. One of the recurring difficulties that would arise after the crash was cognitive slowing, as though my brain’s mainspring were simply winding down. I would increasingly experience both cognition, and the movement of my body, in super slow motion. My brother Will recently commented on noticing this when he visited about a year after the crash:

  I remember us sitting in a restaurant and I watched you reach for the salt shaker. You were concentrating intensely. First you looked at the salt shaker, then your hand, then the salt shaker again. As you slowly guided your hand across the table in this way, it was as though you were inventing—for the first time and from first principles—the whole idea of space, and movement through that space to pick up an object. Really striking. Really weird.

  This slow-motion effect could be extreme. During one test at a rehabilitation center several years after the crash, a specialist attempted to measure my reaction time, as I responded to visual displays on a computer screen by pressing keys on the keyboard. Despite our best efforts I was ultimately deemed untestable: under the visual/spatial demands of the test my reaction times to press a key would go from less than a second, to several seconds, to a minute, to five minutes. At that point the software would time out, assuming we had abandoned the test. Internally I was still going through the same procedures as I did for the one-second response—but it was now taking me three hundred times as long to manage the steps of moving my hand.