Drs. Kowar and Zelinsky talked over Dr. Kowar’s last round of tests. With the lenses they settled on, my visual “working space” was very clear in all quadrants, and just shy of the full 180 degrees wide, stretching from perpendicular outward near my left temple to the perpendicular near my right temple. The new space was also still tilted slightly up to the right, and down to the left. I was, as Dr. Kowar had joked, “slightly lopsided.” Neither Zelinsky nor Kowar had been happy with the tilting, but this was the only prescription that gave me the wide perspective, so we decided to live with it. Importantly, Zelinsky wanted to alter the way my visual target and visual background were balanced. She decided to push me to navigate and deal with space better by backing away from clarity in the prescription—in particular in my left eye (where I had the astigmatism)—and she made some other, minor changes as well. I believe that some aspect of this backing away from clarity in the center-focus prescription contributed to the sense of “mental fuzziness” I later experienced with these glasses.
This working space engendered by the Phase IV glasses was a marked change from my Phase III glasses, which, while less focused than my Phase II glasses, still clearly emphasized the right-hand side of my visual plane. With the new prescription it was a pleasure to get back the full use of the creative, left-hand side of my symbolic, spatial sense as well.
October 22nd, 2009: I got my Phase IV glasses today. They are immediately comfortable and do not have the challenging feel of the Phase III glasses.
February 5th, 2011: [Sixteen months later] These glasses continue to be very down-to-earth. I feel a peace with them that is from being in the world, rather than a peace engendered by escaping from it. I am also slightly fuzzy, and a little dull.
June 3rd, 2011: The Phase IV glasses have always been comfortable enough, but over the course of twenty months I have noticed that my thinking has been—or has grown—“fuzzy,” as though I were getting old. It is always five o’clock on a hot day in August, and I’m looking out from a room with dirty windows. I have also noticed that the area on my right-hand side is particularly “fuzzy” in an exteroceptive way, and that my hearing in the same quadrant is diminished and not sharply defined. I’ve also lost my “killer instinct” for taking on, and completing jobs.
On June 20th, 2011, I returned to Zelinsky to be assessed for my Phase V glasses. Things were going well, but I complained to her of my ongoing concern that I was “mentally fuzzy,” in particular in the right side of my vision. I could not “think” in that part of my space very well, could not form mental symbols well in the area about forty-five degrees to my right and front, even though that part of my world was still being emphasized.
On most of the tests I was close to normal. Interestingly, my right eye no longer needed as strong a prescription to see clearly. (That is, my actual eyesight had improved.)
Consistent with the intuition I had expressed in my diary, Zelinsky changed the focusing balance between my eyes by decreasing the prescription strength in my right eye, and increasing it in my left eye, along with a change in the axis value. My mental fuzziness immediately cleared up, and the right-hand side of my world became clearer and more concrete. This is an interesting result, because while my right-side vision got less clear, I was seeing better, mentally, on that side, presumably because I was better emphasizing the context in which my target vision was unfolding.
On June 9th, 2012, a year later, I returned for another checkup, and to see about getting my Phase VI glasses. My chief complaint was that although the right-hand side of my thinking space was clear with the Phase V glasses, it was still not “vibrant.” It was not alive in the way I would like it to be for solving hard academic problems, and, more generally, for experiencing enthusiasm in life, and for finding humor, and novelty, in the world. This may sound like a pretty esoteric complaint, but by that point I had come to know my cognitive space quite well.
Zelinsky said, “Tell me a little bit more about what you are after.”
I said, “I’m productive at work. I feel peaceful. I can reason fine in both hemispheres. I’m not at all fuzzy the way I was before. Nonetheless, there is a sixty-degree pie slice here [I held up my hands to the right side of my head, demonstrating], from the perpendicular leaving my right temple and extending forward, that is not too lively compared to the rest of the space forward of it, and to the left.”
Zelinsky asked, “Do you feel like you’re missing a vibrancy or creativity in that pie slice? Do you particularly notice it when you’re working on complex problems?”
“Yes!” I said. She was putting the right words in my mouth to describe it.
Zelinsky ran through all of her standard vision tests on the phoropter, and then finished tweaking the prescription she already had in mind with the Z-Bell™ Test. She focused only on the high bell in my upper left quadrant. She had a plan and knew what she was looking for. In a cursory way, she checked the upper right quadrant with the high bell, but this was right on—as she had expected—and she wasn’t further interested in it.*
She then ran me through the Visual Localization Test (“Look at the eraser on the end of this pencil. Close your eyes. Reach out and touch the eraser”) quite a few times with slightly different prescriptions before making her final decision.
Zelinsky found that by inserting small vertical directive yoked prisms (thick part on the bottom) into the lenses, and making some other small changes, she was able to perfectly increase my right-side awareness. The prescription also tilted my posture slightly backward (posture angle affects the central nervous system), and thus made me more comfortable.
When I got my Phase VI glasses back from the lab a week later, they immediately added back that spark I had been lacking with the Phase V glasses. This was the final tweak. It is these same glasses that I continue to wear today.
Donalee Markus’s plan and Deborah Zelinsky’s plan for me were now both complete. I was balanced, had clear logical thinking, was able to create mental images with clarity, and could feel that coveted mental vibrancy in all areas of my thinking. I felt normal.
My experience at the Mind-Eye Connection was far from unique. Dr. Deborah Zelinsky cares deeply about the well-being of the people she sees. She believes that the research data she has collected, the clinical case notes she has kept, and the continually refined techniques she uses can help thousands of people to lead better, happier, more productive lives. She has worked unceasingly for years because she is passionate about the work she does with her patients, and also about the vast potential for neuro-optometric rehabilitation in general. And, too, there is the constant battle in her own schedule to make time for her research when there are people who so often desperately need her help as a clinician. Like Dr. Donalee Markus, she is one of the heroes working on the leading edge of modern brain plasticity clinical research.
EPILOGUE
Wabash Avenue
As I write these closing paragraphs, I am, except in a few small ways, free from concussion symptoms. I can focus on complex problems again without pain or nausea. I can work for long periods of time. I can multitask, within reason. I can again say prayers and meditate. My balance problems are not significant. My sense of direction has returned, and I can make decisions without difficulty. And, too, because I have addressed dispositional attention difficulties as part of my treatment, many areas of my life have even improved over how I was prior to the crash: my house, my life, and my relationships are significantly less chaotic because I see my choices more clearly.
As I think back to how far I’ve come, I recall a concussion scene from winter quarter, late at night, after teaching an evening class at DePaul.
I had been sitting in my eleventh-floor Lewis Center classroom for an hour after class, staring at the wall. Now, I had trouble getting through the doorway, and also had to hold on to the wall to make it to the elevator foyer. Taking the elevators to the first floor would leave me unable to wal
k, or to stand, and I felt I couldn’t risk making a scene with the security guard. So I took the stairs, holding on to railings the whole way down, and guiding myself step-by-step along the wall. Several times I had to crawl, and several times I got stuck, unable to move at all.
About forty minutes later I left the building through the Jackson Street doors—headed for my office in a building on the next street. I was moving in slow motion, holding on to the building’s outer wall for balance.
The tracks for the Chicago El train ran along Wabash Avenue, and I had to pass under them when I crossed Wabash on the way back to my office. Several lines ran on those tracks, and trains also came around the turn at Van Buren to the south, so it was not always possible to know exactly when the trains were coming, or when a hidden train, stopped just a block north at the Adams station, might start up and head south over the Jackson intersection.
Because the tracks were perched on steel pillars (that is, you could look up and see the sky through the tracks), the sound of the trains could be very loud. The wheels sometimes emitted a loud squeal as the trains made their way down the tracks or came around the bend. If this caught me off guard, I would clap my hands over my ears and double over—the same as I did with Ramon’s disc brakes. Sometimes I would fall to the ground holding my head. As long as I was on the sidewalk this was merely embarrassing, but otherwise not so much trouble. On this evening, however, I miscalculated, and was under the tracks, in the middle of Wabash Avenue, when a squealing train came by. I felt an explosion go off in my head as I fell to the salty, wet pavement, and curled up on the street in fetal position, covering my ears.
The train passed, but my mind and body were moving in slow motion. Before I could get up, the traffic light changed. Cars traveling down the one-way slalom on Wabash—avoiding the steel support pillars for the El—started swerving past me on both sides, in the dark, their horns blaring only a few feet away from my head. Each time they did so, with their headlights also blinding me as they passed, another cognitive explosion went off, flooding me with a brain-piercing stream of unfiltered sensory information. Other cars came around the corner, making the turn south from Jackson. Startled, their drivers too honked impatiently as they rushed past.
It was a bizarre fantasy sequence out of a Hollywood nightmare scene—except that it was real.
But this had happened to me before. I thought that at some point the traffic would clear and I would make it to the far sidewalk. I would prop myself up next to the streetlight, hope that no one I knew was around at that late hour, and then go about the rest of my much-altered life.
Yet even then, amid the chaos of my life—but also within the larger mystery of compassion that can ever reach back and find us—the Ghost was there perched in the distance, still tethered to me by the merest thread of possibility, waiting for the miracle.
• • •
I dedicate this book to you, Dr. Donalee Markus, and to you, Dr. Deborah Zelinsky. Thank you for coming to get us.
APPENDIX
DOTS PUZZLES
Find all instances of the appropriate three shapes in each of the following two puzzles. Every dot will be used.
2D PAGE OF DOTS OVERLAID
Key
Puzzle
3D PAGE OF DOTS OVERLAID
Key
Puzzle
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people who were essential in bringing this manuscript to life. In chronological order: Donalee Markus, and Deborah Zelinsky, who agreed to painstakingly verify all of the notes on my recovery; my good friend the writer Pamela Janis, the catalyst who turned a collection of notes into a real book and has been the best champion for it from the start; Leslie Breed, who graciously gave her time early in this project; Howard Yoon, whose reputation as one of the finest agents in the business does not do justice to the breadth of his kindness and compassion as a human being; Melanie Tortoroli, who blessed us with her essential editing gifts and global patience in managing so many aspects of this large project; my daughter Nell Elliott, whose insight and skill are everywhere present through the six thousand edits she made in the manuscript, and the structural design she suggested; our copy editor, Michael Burke, who painstakingly cleaned up the text throughout with the logic and precision of a scientist; Georgia Bodnar, who managed all the art; and all of the other professionals at Viking who tolerated me as an academic used to fighting over every comma. I’d especially like to thank all of those in the DePaul community who were so supportive, including, but not limited to, my compassionate deans Helmut Epp, and David Miller, and my colleagues Gary Andrus, Adam Steele, and Greg Brewster.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
3D
dot exercises, 232–33, 235–37, 241
hearing, 158, 258–59
spatial world, 67, 223, 250, 255, 259
vision/visual world, 67, 121, 158, 255, 259
action initiation, 6, 9, 26, 61–63, 66–67, 79, 105, 146, 268, 278
arithmetic, 101, 127, 142–43, 157, 197, 224
attention difficulties, xx, 82, 228–29, 239–41, 245, 270, 278, 283, 295
audio
error correction, 177
input, 146–47, 159, 198–99
processing, 163–70, 259
slowness, 163–70, 176
aural processing, 91–93, 117, 132, 137–38, 142–43, 149, 164, 174, 272–73
balance, 54, 60, 72, 115, 244
and eyeglasses, xvii, 264–65, 269–70
and the eyes, xvi, 85–87, 89–90, 104, 158, 250
and hearing, 91–93
improvement in, 208, 223, 294–95
loss of, 4, 27, 31, 39, 45, 47, 49, 79, 86–88, 90, 92, 94, 119, 126, 183, 189, 296
system of, 84–89, 93–94, 119, 183
techniques for, 7, 14, 41, 88, 91–92, 98, 177, 184, 209, 279
and visual system, 79, 84–87, 89–92, 147
body-sense cognition, 183–85, 244
body-versus-surroundings sense, 88–91
brain
analogical processing of, 130–32, 138, 144
computational powers of, xix, xxii, 10–13, 109, 149, 163, 224
and conceptual information, 96–100
fatigue, 14, 17–18, 65, 67, 76, 78, 87, 97–98, 103–4, 119, 121–22, 140, 143–45, 154–55, 183, 199, 230, 248, 271
healthy/normal, 75–76, 96, 130, 132, 139, 151, 162
processing, 213, 244–46, 249
rebuilding of, xxiv, 13, 34
reconfiguring of, xiii, 262–63
recovery, 57–61, 65, 86, 91, 108, 215–16, 226, 229, 248
resources, 74, 79, 133, 135, 139–40, 142, 149, 239, 241
rest, 6–7, 18, 58–61, 65, 86, 99–100, 104, 106–7, 150, 177, 187, 267
seizures, xvii, 185–88, 215, 280
stress, 89, 117, 193–96, 208, 215, 252, 267
systems, 11–13, 55, 58, 132, 222
brain-body relationship, xv–xvi, xxii–xxiii, 181–83, 188–91, 257
brain-body states, 55, 245
brain-body system, xvii, 110, 191
brain injury
definition of, 10
diagnosing of, xii–xiii, 44–47, 192–93
life-altering changes from, 10, 53, 71–72, 84, 114, 159, 179–80, 193, 200, 209, 297
and permanent damage, 34, 48, 54–55, 61, 193–95
brain plasticity, 13, 130, 137, 211
and brain recovery, xiii
and cognitive treatment, xxiii
explanation of, xii, xx
and eyeg
lasses, 288
and eyesight, 247, 269, 277
principles of, 246–47
research in, xx, 200–201, 294
Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, The (Doidge), 201
calendars, 8, 115, 120–24
car accident, xi, xv, 3, 19–35, 39, 44, 84, 86, 180, 188, 229, 295
causality, concept of, 120
certainty, lack of, 67–69, 77, 151
Charles Bonnet syndrome, 264
children, 6, 37, 52–54, 58, 130–38, 141, 196, 224. See also parenting; specific names
cognition, xviii, xxii, 55, 84, 109, 130, 140–41, 180, 193–94, 266
cognitive
adaptability, xiii, 137
concepts, 140–41
difficulties, xi, xxii, 13, 15, 17, 20–35, 39–42, 45–49, 55–57, 69–71, 78, 94, 101, 109, 144–45, 152, 165, 184–85, 193, 209, 230, 240, 250, 255
disinhibition, 37
functions, 61, 69–70, 255
improvement, xv, 215–16, 222–24, 241, 262–63, 267, 269–71, 275–76, 285
input, 76, 154
interference, 148–49, 152
overload, 158–59, 177
patterns, 130
processing, 144
resources, 130, 142, 165, 177
rest, 7, 58–60
restructuring, xxi–xxii, 201, 205, 226–27, 241
science, 73, 110, 164
slowing, 6, 24, 29–30, 38, 45–46, 64, 79, 81, 125–28, 130, 207–8, 256, 297
stress, 47, 181
color, xvi, 11, 29, 97–98, 138, 148–49, 177, 183, 228, 233–35, 241, 243, 246
The Ghost in My Brain Page 25