The Ghost in My Brain

by Clark Elliott

  *Surprisingly, modern research has shown that there are significantly more neural pathways dedicated to top-down feedback control than there are for the actual bottom-up feed-forward input signal that they are filtering.

  *Atul Gawande, “The Itch,” New Yorker, June 30, 2008 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande).

  *W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance (Random House, 1974).

  *You can see the strong link between the brain’s visual/spatial processing and locomotion in the following way: Next time you are able to go running (or some equivalent), push yourself to where you can just keep up the pace—you are working hard. Now, try solving simple arithmetic or logic problems in your head. You’ll find it is really hard to do both at the same time. You’ll want to stop running, or drop into a more automatic pace, so that you can work out the problem in your head, because each of these tasks is competing for the same visual/spatial resources.

  *The race was aborted because of the extreme heat, and my path thus cut short, but I ran for an hour in Grant Park afterward and completed thirty miles.

  *Another difficulty that concussives may encounter is that there is no accounting for the interaction between independent tests: For example, a concussive is given a pattern matching test on which she scores almost perfectly, but which leaves her incapacitated after only a few minutes. Following this she is given an independent test of memory on which she scores poorly because she is worn out from the first test, but which would ordinarily be no problem at all. In the classic case she’ll try to explain this to the neurologist administering the tests and be dismissed because it “is not part of the tests.”

  *This passage was actually recorded when Erin was slightly older, but it is representative of the earlier time.

  *A scheme we worked out together was the only thing that allowed me to keep going during this period: Each morning, for more than two years, we would put on music—symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, jazz, operas—and dance for forty minutes. Then we’d listen for another two hours during which time I would work on my computer and Erin would either continue to dance or sit quietly at her own desk and paint.

  *It was the fascinating book by Norman Doidge, M.D., The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Penguin, 2007), that started us looking for those connected with brain plasticity research. Dr. Doidge very graciously wrote back to my inquiry—the only one. He was, understandably, somewhat overwhelmed by the flood of e-mail he was receiving, and did not have any immediate ideas, though he kindly suggested writing to him again if I still was at a dead end. By then we had found Dr. Donalee Markus.

  *These can be cheaply purchased. Search for “Color Therapy Glasses” on eBay, though I recommend a healthy skepticism when reading the various therapeutic claims, which have nothing to do with Donalee’s application.

  *Optometry Doctor; Fellow, Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association; Fellow, College of Visual Development.

  *It is typical that an initial appointment with an optometrist emphasizing neuro-optometric rehabilitation will take one and a half to three hours because of the extensive testing needed.

  *That is, it was as though I were actually sitting ten feet closer to the performers, with the sound tending to wrap around me, instead of being in front of me.

  *In the original, the colors blue, red, and yellow are used for shading, and there are many more items.

  *And as we’ll see later, it also reinforced a correct working balance between my central eyesight, which I was using to focus on the object, and my peripheral eyesight, which I was using to set the context that allowed me to filter out all the extraneous dots.

  *For high-functioning people, this brain weakness is often disguised by the very real problem of spending long hours in school on group tasks that are moving too slowly—a mismatch where anyone would understandably grow restless.

  *We now know, from contemporary research, that this chromatic response is not just in the cone cells in the center of the eye, but also extends out to the periphery of the retina as well, thus extending the effect of colored filters on brain processing.

  *Donalee addresses this problem by starting out with the very simplest forms of rudimentary cognition, and working up only very slowly from there—recall the analogy of the broken leg.

  *It later turned out that the style of my handwriting was as important to Zelinsky as were my answers: Did I slant up or down at the ends of lines? Under certain cognitive loads did I change the spacing between my words? What was the relationship between my writing on the left-hand side of the page and my writing on the right-hand side?

  *Padula’s ambient visual process can be described as having two parts: First, and fastest, one of the non-image-forming pathways specifically linked to posture mechanisms—where am I? Second, and slower, the part we’ve already referred to as the peripheral vision—where is it?

  *William V. Padula and Stephanie Argyris, “Post Trauma Vision Syndrome and Visual Midline Shift Syndrome,” NeuroRehabilitation 6 (1996): 165–71.

  *Deborah Zelinsky, “Neuro-optometric Diagnosis, Treatment and Rehabilitation Following Traumatic Brain Injuries: A Brief Overview,” Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America, Elsevier, 18 (2007): 87–107.

  *My notes are clear on this point, that I had to place myself on the left-hand side when running and also that I would lose the right-hand side of internal visual structures. But because the temporary hemispatial neglect I experienced from time to time was so pervasive when it occurred, I have no direct notes at all on being unable to turn right; it was not possible for me to take notes on something about which I had no comprehension. I knew only that I had to turn in circles.

  *Doctor of Optometry, Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, Doctor of Philosophy.

  *Selwin Super, “The Clinical Testing of Fixation Disparity,” http://www.professorselwynsuper.com/pdf/educator/jbofdarticle.pdf.

  *As a result of the concussion I got floaters (roughly, translucent occlusions in the viscous fluid behind the lens) in both of my eyes. One of my concussion-induced floaters is often situated in the central focus point of my right eye, making it hard to read with that eye.

  *A syndrome in which mentally healthy people—usually with significant visual loss, and advanced in age—experience purely visual hallucinations, suggested by Grace Yoon, O.D.

  *A special picture used by Richard Gregory to illustrate the top-down guiding of human cognition in vision.

  *Zelinsky later commented that this calming was a direct result of the lessening of the activation of my fight-flight-or-fright (sympathetic) nervous system, effecting a better balance with my rest-digest (parasympathetic) nervous system.

  *This preference for calm, and avoiding chaos—which affected whom I chose to spend my time with—ultimately led to quite profound changes in my life.

  *This is a form of what contemporary brain-plasticity researcher Michael Merzenich, M.D., refers to as “use it or lose it,” the principle by which the plastic brain reconfigures itself. In this case, the bad pathways had become less dominant from disuse, such that even when switching back to having light enter from the front, I should still be able to find the new pathways that had been created.

  *Now, years later, I find that my brain has rewired itself through habituation, and I am not nearly so dependent on my glasses.

  *Over the years of working with Zelinsky I found this to be a common experience: that she often made complex predictions about what she was going to later find with her instruments. So many times I heard her say, “Now watch what happens when we . . .” and she was then proven exactly right in her prediction.

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