Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  Tommy described his brain as having gone into overdrive. “If I go for a walk inside my brain, I see all this information,” he said. “Angles, languages, structures, mathematics, wild colorful pictures. Everything I look at sparks six memories or emotions or smells, they’re each spinning in my mind—just for a moment—and then it’s like one of those thoughts crashes against another and that sparks six different thoughts, and then the corners of those thoughts touch and create six more. I’m constantly bombarded with patterns and details and information and faces. It’s like walking inside a corridor of endless, endless information.

  “My brain is like bees in a hive,” he said, barely taking a breath. “In the middle, all you see are honeycomb cells covered in plastic wrap. When you stroke those little honeycomb cells, lots of other cells break out from it, like a lightning flash touching a brain cell. And from that cell comes a volcano, emitting Fairy Liquid bubbles with billions and billions of images. They’re pouring out like Mount Etna, they never stop. Each of these bubbles contains another million images. That’s a split second in my mind. I feel like I’ve been shown just how endless the brain is. It’s inconceivable, we use such a tiny percentage of it.”

  I tried to interrupt, but he went on.

  “My brain is filled with endless details but I’m too uneducated to understand all the information that’s popping up inside there. It’s telling me there are all these different languages, all this knowledge, pinpricks of it, microscopic hints of it all, so that if I wanted to use it, it would be there for me to use. I feel like I could talk Italian if the right thing triggered it: it’s all within me. I feel like we’ve all got sweeping talents in our brain but we don’t know they are there because we’ve never been forced to use them. That’s my vision of what I see in my brain.”

  More explanations followed. I was having trouble getting a word in edgewise. As had become clear within five minutes of speaking with him, this constant bombardment of thoughts and associations was reflected in Tommy’s speech. His mind traveled rapidly from one concept to the next, his thoughts turned on a dime.

  Tommy would often send me pages of emails with things that he had forgotten to tell me in our telephone conversations. Some of them were written normally, some were written as verse.

  The descriptions that he would weave into his speech were sometimes fanciful, sometimes insightful. He regularly came across as wise, yet when I listened back to recordings of our conversations, his metaphors were often ambiguous and disjointed.

  “I feel like I’ve been unplugged from the Matrix,” he said, one day. “Suddenly I’ve been disconnected from the old life that was showing me things just as someone in charge wanted me to see them.

  “I’m glad I’m a bit stupid, Helen,” he said. “Otherwise I would see reality far too much.”

  Understandably, Tommy’s family was finding his endless prose, philosophical musings and gentler manner a little difficult to get used to.

  “He was incredibly different,” says Shillo. “His whole world was tipped upside down.”

  Everyone assumed that, given enough time to recover, he would change back to the person he had once been, that they’d see a glimpse of the darkness again, but it never happened.

  Not everyone welcomed the new Tommy. Some people wanted him to be the person he was before, some embraced the person he had become but drifted away, finding they had little in common, others feared it was just an act.

  “A lot of his brothers wanted him to turn back to who he was,” Shillo says. “One in particular always tried to pull him back into trouble.”

  Tommy’s first wife, Shillo’s mum, also found it hard to accept the new Tommy. “Even ten years after the strokes, my mum still didn’t believe he could really have changed,” says Shillo. “She still believed that bad person was in there somewhere.”

  * * *

  How is it then that our personality can change so dramatically? To understand that, first we have to drop a notion consistently repeated in popular culture, that we are either left- or right-brained. This theory was born in the winter of 1962, when William Jenkins, a military veteran, was being prepped for surgery at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles.

  The renowned neuroscientist Roger Sperry was preparing to split Jenkins’s brain in half. Jenkins had been hurt in an explosion during the Second World War, and ever since had experienced up to ten seizures a day. Sperry believed that by cutting through the corpus callosum—the structure that connects the two sides of the brain—he could relieve Jenkins of his seizures. Experiments in animals suggested that this would not damage his cognition, that each side of the brain could work independently from the other.

  The surgery was a success and Jenkins’s cognition was, on the surface, unchanged. But further experiments on him and other split-brain patients were revealing. They proved, for instance, that the left-hand side of the brain controls the right-hand side of the body and vice versa. The studies also demonstrated for the first time that the left and right hemispheres specialize in different tasks. For example, the left side of the brain is much more talkative than the right, which can produce only rudimentary words and phrases. It is more analytical and is better at math. The right-hand side deals with space, directions and music. It is much better at recognizing faces and allows you to understand the emotional content of language.

  The work earned Sperry a Nobel Prize in 1981, and soon afterward a new theory of personality was born. It proposed that whichever side of your brain dominated determined whether you were logical and analytical, or creative and emotional. Even today, it is common to see the theory referred to in the popular press.

  In fact, while the brain does indeed have discrete regions, each with a specific role, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any side dominates in the healthy brain. Think about language, for instance. Although the left side of the brain helps us to generate complex speech, the right-hand side gives it some finesse. Take the phrase “I’ll show you the ropes.” The left side of the brain is needed to produce the correct word order, but the right side of the brain provides you with the ability to understand and produce the verbal metaphor.

  Rather than think about ourselves as being left- or right-brained, says Stephen Kosslyn, an emeritus professor at Harvard University, we should be thinking about ourselves in terms of our top and bottom brain, specifically how the two interact.

  The top parts of the brain include most of the frontal cortex and the parietal lobes. The bottom parts involve some of the frontal cortex, but mostly the temporal and occipital lobes. When we split the brain up in this way, we can generalize about their roles, says Kosslyn. “The top brain formulates plans and puts them into action, while the bottom brain interprets incoming information about the world and gives it meaning.”

  It’s vital to remember that we use both parts of the brain all of the time, says Kosslyn. “They are a single system—it’s how they interact that’s important.”

  For example, when I see my dad across the pub, I recognize him because the bottom parts of my brain interpret the sensory input I’m getting from my eyes, and give it context, which unlocks a memory of my dad. As we discovered in Bob’s chapter, that memory is connected to other memories, which enables me to bring to mind the fact that he enjoys playing tennis, drinks Harvey’s Best Bitter, and has a soft spot for Camilla Parker Bowles.

  But that’s not all I need from my dad. I might want to invite him to a quiz night, or ask his advice as an accountant. This is where my top brain speaks up. Devising and carrying out plans is its job—but it can’t do this alone. It needs to receive information from the bottom brain about the thing I’m going to speak to him about and how I feel about it, in order to figure out a plan of action and then execute it. If that plan isn’t quite working, my top brain will check in with the bottom brain again and adjust its actions to correct any mistakes.

  The key to Kosslyn’s theory is that, in some situations, we rely on the top or bottom to
a greater or lesser degree. Which one dominates characterizes our personality.

  For instance, if we thoroughly utilize both our top and bottom brain, we’re inclined to carry out plans and think about the consequences in detail. But if the bottom brain system dominates, we’re more likely to think about what we see around us in a lot of depth, interpreting the minutiae of an experience or the consequences of an event. Someone working in this mode is less likely to act on all this information and execute a plan. On the other hand, if your top brain system dominates you’re more likely to be a go-getter, a person who may be seen as creative and proactive, but you’re less likely to think about the consequences. Kosslyn calls it “the bull in the china shop” mode.

  When neither top nor bottom brain dominates, a person doesn’t get caught up in the detail of an experience nor initiate future plans. Instead they’re very much “of the moment,” says Kosslyn—they let external events dictate their actions. “They’re a team player—not everyone can be president. You need people who are like soldiers, not looking beneath the surface of their actions, just getting on and doing what needs to be done at that precise moment.”

  If you want to find out which mode dominates in your brain, Kosslyn has devised a test you can take online at http://bit.do/topbrain.

  In his book Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think,5 Kosslyn says that his theory can explain why we see sudden changes in personality. Take Phineas Gage as an example. As we discovered earlier, Gage suffered a terrible accident when a tamping iron shot through his skull. Historical notes suggest that before the accident Gage was unusually resourceful, that he was a good planner who learned from his experiences. It allowed him to work his way up the construction trade after barely any formal education. After his accident, there were profound changes in his personality. He would utter gross profanities and devise numerous plans that would immediately be abandoned for others.

  After Gage passed away, his skull was donated to science and is now sitting in a small glass box at Harvard Medical School’s Warren Anatomical Museum. Using the skull, researchers reconstructed the damage that occurred to his brain. They discovered that around 11 percent of the axons—the longest part of the nerve through which electrical impulses propagate—in his frontal cortex had been destroyed. This meant that a number of connections were severed between his frontal cortex high up in the brain and areas lower down.

  It was not just that the trauma damaged specific behaviors, such as his ability to suppress verbal profanities, writes Kesslyn; the damage also impaired how his top and bottom brain worked together.

  Whereas Gage previously had been strategic and thoughtful, he now was impulsive and unstable. His bottom brain apparently interrupted his top brain inappropriately, impairing his ability to stick to plans or revise them after receiving new feedback on their effects. He was left awash in a sea of fluctuating emotions and was incapable of responding appropriately.

  I wondered whether this theory could also explain what was going on in Tommy’s brain.

  TO FIND OUT, I decided to speak to somebody else who had developed a close relationship with Tommy after his accident—Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

  Tommy had written to Flaherty soon after recovering from his operation to ask whether she could tell him anything more about his new personality. “He was such an attractive person,” said Flaherty, when I asked her about their initial correspondence. “His letters were incredibly charming.”

  Flaherty tried to get Tommy over to her lab in the United States, but he couldn’t get a visa due to his previous criminal convictions. In the end, she traveled to Liverpool for a few days. “I just loved him,” she said. “He had this inability to hurt anyone, he was like a Jain monk who sweeps the ground ahead as he walks to avoid injuring bugs. He took care of every stray cat in the neighborhood. He used to have this tough-guy mask and suddenly he was a softie—in a lovely way.”

  Flaherty isn’t keen on using Kosslyn’s top-and-bottom-brain theories to hypothesize about what happened to Tommy. Instead she has made inferences based on what we know about where the areas of damage occurred. “In Tommy’s case, we know that his stroke occurred in the middle cerebral artery, which supplies a portion of the frontal and temporal lobes,” says Flaherty.

  Although it is a matter of conjecture, the damage to his temporal lobes is the most likely explanation for his sudden obsession with the detail in the world. To understand why, we have to look at how the brain deals with the bewildering amount of sensory information around us. We see shapes, and colors and movement and hear sounds and smells all the time, yet rarely pay much attention to them. When I walk into the pub to meet my dad, I might notice the smell from the kitchen or the football on the TV at first, but within seconds these stimuli disappear. We filter out familiar and irrelevant information. If we didn’t, our senses would be bombarded with too much information and we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the job at hand.

  In order to do this, sensory data passes into the temporal lobes, which perform an emotional surveillance of sorts, telling other parts of the cerebral cortex whether the information is worth thinking about or not. Only the most relevant of data is sent up to the frontal lobes, which are then able to formulate plans, execute actions and initiate speech based on that information.

  Tommy’s behavior suggested that his brain had stopped filtering the irrelevant stimuli that are usually screened out of our conscious awareness. His temporal lobes were no longer judging all of his sensory data or ideas critically enough, says Flaherty, “so they all pass muster and float into his consciousness.”

  “We often see people with lesions in their temporal lobes losing their understanding of speech but talking loads more than normal,” says Flaherty. “They’ve basically become less judgmental about what they’re saying. We call it politician talk—lots of words but no content.”

  In contrast, Tommy’s new emotional compass was more likely due to damage to the frontal lobes. These regions form connections with, and inhibit, emotional areas toward the lower and middle areas of the brain. The level of activity in the frontal lobes can affect our personality in many ways. In the 1960s, the German psychologist Hans Eysenck proposed that introverts may have more self-control than extroverts because their cortex is higher in arousal—meaning it is more sensitive and responsive to incoming information. This higher level of arousal keeps in check their emotional areas underneath.

  You can test for yourself whether you are more introverted or extroverted. Place one end of a cotton swab on your tongue for twenty seconds. Next put a few drops of lemon onto your tongue before placing the other end of the cotton swab on your tongue for another twenty seconds. Tie a piece of thread around the middle of the cotton swab and see whether the lemon juice end is lower due to being heavier from excess saliva. If so, you may be more introverted—your higher arousal state meant that you reacted more strongly to the lemon, which made you salivate more than usual. Eysenck used a version of this test to support his theory by showing that people who score higher on other measures of introversion also produce more saliva.

  A similar thing happens when you try to knock out an introvert with anesthetic—they need more to send them to sleep than an extrovert would. If you’re still not convinced, think about how stimulants like Ritalin are given to children with ADHD to calm them down, and how sedatives like alcohol make people briefly more chatty and emotional.

  Although it is a matter of conjecture, it seems that communication between Tommy’s frontal lobes and lower brain areas had become impaired. Like Gage, damage to the frontal lobes seemed to have lifted the brake on his emotional brain areas below. Overnight, he gained access to emotions he said he “hadn’t previously known existed.”

  * * *

  Tommy’s wife, Jan, thought that all these words, thoughts and emotions might be best placed on paper, so a few weeks after Tommy had been discharged from the hospital, she
encouraged him to pick up a paintbrush. Maybe drawing what was in his mind might help him focus his thoughts. But once Tommy started painting, he couldn’t stop.

  “At first it was just lots of A4 pieces of paper taped to the wall,” says Shillo. “We encouraged it because we all just thought it was part of his recovery. It was really helping.” But soon Tommy ran out of canvases. First he bought more, but then that started getting too expensive, so he took to painting directly onto the walls of his house. Once he had covered all the walls in one room, he’d move on to the next. Once those were done, he’d move on to the floor, the tables and the chairs. Then he’d start all over again.

  “We didn’t live with him so didn’t see it daily, but you’d go around and pretty much every month the house had completely changed, all the walls, the floor, everything,” says Shillo. “The paint on the chimney breast was about two inches thick because he’d just paint layer upon layer of art over the top of each other.”

  “What’s in my brain is painted on these walls,” Tommy said. “The tables, the ceiling, the doors, in sculptures, in metal, in stone. Everything is poured out of my brain. I empty it on to my canvases with the color and pictures and scenes and I never stop.”6

  Tommy was painting for twenty-one hours a day. “We had to remind him to eat and sleep,” Shillo says. “As long as he could paint and sculpt, nothing else seemed to matter much.”

  Tommy sent some pictures of his artwork to me. One was of two faces with images pouring out of them. “That painting was what he felt,” says Shillo, when I describe it to her. “This drive, this desire, it was uncontainable, it was like looking at all these things that were firing in his brain that he couldn’t control.”