Brain

A problematic question central to my dilemma is "how does one detect problems of the brain?" This might seem a trivial task, but it is not. Sure, one could easily detect drastic changes of the sort that grossly distort sensory experience, and it would not be that hard to notice severe malfunctioning of the peripheral nervous system. But if one needs to be in the business of detecting any of these problems before they become lifestyle altering, personality-changing, all-consuming paths to misery, the question becomes frighteningly more difficult to answer. If one needed to detect changes to any other observable body part, this would not be so bad. You could look at your feet, detect pain from them, compile this information and raise an alert when it seems to change markedly. Whether in the normal or deviant state of affairs, the information is detected with the same equipment, the same eyes, the same brain. The problem, which Oliver Sacks identifes correctly in his book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", is that as concerns matters of the brain, both the subject of investigation and the equipment used to observe it are altered.

Recently, on a tear towards recovery, I began a grueling practice schedule. What started as a few things that I committed to practice every day grew into a daily allocation of the hours between 11AM and 6PM to a rigorous ritual, pushing the limits of my fragile brain. I even expanded this methodology into other aspects of my life, dealing more methodically with recovering my skills in math and computer science, committing to daily exercise, putting social encounters on the schedule, and altogether blocking distractions like television from my life. The motivation for this sudden and drastic lifestyle change was entirely born of my desire to return forcefully to the things that I love and used to do well. I wanted to make up for lost time, and I had a new appreciation for the scarce, fragile time we have on this planet. To these ends, the ritual has been a life-changing experience. But it has also had an unanticipated but wondrous side-effect.

In the past, relapses were never easy to detect. At first I would begin to susptect that something was amiss. Then I might have a good day, or merely a better one, and doubt myself. A twitch might seem to reemerge, but then it would subside. Gradually as my abilities shifted, I would make correlated shifts to decrease the afflicted activities in my lifestyle. After a couple weeks of this insidious creep, I would no longer be playing music or reading, and then suddenly a moment of disorientation would hit me so profoundly that I could no longer compensate by living differently. I knew then that something was horribly awry. By then, weeks into a relapse, I faced weeks before I could substantially recover.

This week, however the cycle was broken. The schedule to which I have comitted pushed me to the limits of my current abilities, and as I improve, the schedule becomes more rigorous, more complex. And from day to day, many aspects of the schedule are religiously consistent. Last week I began to notice a twitch remerging. It waxed and waned over the better part of a week. By yesteday, however it had clearly waxed more than waned. I attempted the ritual, but was rebuked, unable to concentrate for more than a couple hours and then only with great labor. I found myself struggling, albeit not as mightily as when I have spotted a relapse in the past, to concentrate, and quickly pounced, responding appropriately.

Probably more accurately then any other test that could be devised, my practice schedule provided a reasonably objective guage of my cognitive state, sparing me the misery that normally accompanies a lengthy plunge into the abyss. My intuition is that any unanticipated effects of living well should be expected to be positive in the same way that one would not be surprised to discover yet another disease strongly correlated with smoking.

Where have I been?
What happened to me?
What am I?
Where am I?
How long will I be here?

In my experience, most people are anxious, primarily, about what will come after this life.
My existential angst concerns my existence, not its loss.

Descartes in the absence of religion?
The evil demon has already presented itself.

Religion and Rationality.

While clearly religion can be shown to oppose rationality, no proof can show a strict adherence to only rational beliefs to be in anyone's best interest. The two greatest logical minds that our civilization ever produced found ways to be miserable and off themselves.

Perhaps any answers to my questions, even if baseless, would be better than none. However, I know not how one might go about fooling oneself.

Excerpted from Newsweek interview of Woody Allen:

So why go on? "I can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death," he says. "Except that I'm too scared." Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—"I need to be focused on something so I don't see the big picture"

Music as distraction:

Is the value of great art simply its ability to lure us away from morbid thoughts? To temporarily put off consideration of the 'meaningless flicker' of life?

I wish that I could conceive of life as a game. At various points I have. Becoming the best musician, earning the most money, these sorts of things offered a metric by which success could be measured. Thus flattened, life was easier to take, comprehensible.

Is honesty to be found only in uncertainty?

About four years ago, my friend Joshua Herman introduced me to the idea that we only consider things that do not work as they should. Take computers for instance. A typical computer user with modest computing needs seldom considers the inner workings of a computer in the absence of some sort of technological bugaboo. In the presence of such a snag, however, such a user suddenly develops an unprecedented interest in memory, networking etc. On the other hand, consider gravity. We know of no reason why gravity should exist, but it operates so flawlessly and consistently that most of us waste relatively little time considering what its nature might be.

This idea isn't a hard and fast rule. My own mother expressed to me how intriguing she finds even technology that always works as it ought. That opens up just one class of exceptions to this idea. Things that consistently work as they should but came into being partly through someone's life. Still, its an idea that I find myself returning to periodically over the years.

In light of my recent experiences, the idea is prominent in my thoughts. The world that our conscious mind sees, interacts with, is the perceived world, not the 'real world'. For all we know, the world is simply a sufficiently competent set of computer generated stimuli. These thoughts are nothing new - anyone who has seen The Matrix has encountered them - but they inform the point I am trying to make. Having my experience altered by these recent cognitive malfunctions, in a sense, from my perspective, it is as if the entire world became broken.

For most of my life, I took for granted that the world worked in a sort of equilibrium. Bureaucracies manage, if somewhat incompetently, to regulate most human activity. The very existence of an economy that can achieve employment well over ninety percent is an astonishing fact that seemed unremarkable when, from my perspective, it had always been. When all of reality went haywire for me, however, I gained a new appreciation for just how precarious our situation on this planet is.

We are ants, crawling around a moldy piece of cheese that is orbiting a fireball in the middle of nowhere at a speed of 3.0x10^4m/s (relative to the fireball). There is nothing more than physics keeping our minds from decaying into thoughtless balls of mulch. Our memories, thoughts, identities, hold on by a thread, and even then, only temporarily. Still, as I recover, I am consistently amazed at how well things that I convinced myself while sick are impossible really do exist. When I became sufficiently weak that I could not take care of myself, I became convinced that no one would. I was unable to conceive of being able to take care of anyone, so it seemed impossible that anyone should be able to take care of me. Miraculously, however, that was not the case. Often, now, I find myself working to reestablish the sorts of faith in the world's workings that will allow me to get on with life. Perhaps I am more religious, in an abstract sense, than I care to admit.

I had hoped not to return so soon to the topic of my changing brain. Interfering with my ability to write about anything else, it had other ideas.

Yesterday I was bombarded by the sorts of sensations I described in my last post. The experience was overwhelming and somewhat incapacitating. Since these odd feelings initially appeared as I began to improve, I took the correlation for granted. While there is a basis for this idea, I should probably be less of a zealot.

Ideally, in a healthy, stable, inflammation-less brain, I wouldn’t have any of these sensations. So, while I have reason to believe they are associated with my recovery, in contrast to the very different sensations that preceded them - accompanying my decline -, I probably ought to be more cautious in assuming that everything is in order when these new sensations are coursing through my brain.

The deluge yesterday was sufficiently overwhelming as to distract me from being able to concentrate on reading, practicing, or writing. While I doubt it be the case, I ought not blind myself to the possibility that these feelings too could be masking a relapse of my symptoms. Knowledge of an indicator of progress could conceivably lure me into a dangerous level of complacency.

I’m roughly four months into my recovery. Several weeks ago I created this site so that I could write about my experiences both suffering and recovering from an autoimmune encephalopathy. As I got better, I thought, this would become a forum for other thoughts and essays, even those unrelated to brain disease. But the initial goal was to capture some artifact of my experience.

The first piece I wrote described what happened as it might appear to someone else. I described dates, circumstances, events. I enumerated specific cognitive tasks that became difficult or impossible. But what I failed to provide is the sensation. How exactly it felt to lose my mind as well as all the sensory phenomena that have accompanied recovery.

I always had difficulty with more personal writing. My talent as a writer, since childhood, has been a mechanical efficiency best suited to describing facts, details and relationships of the mathematical variety. Capturing an emotion or sensation, subjective experience, never agreed with my sensibilities. The logic in my brain insists that such a task is impossible. The lack of any real measure of success leaves me clueless as to how to approach it. Nevertheless, I find myself saddled with experiences whose nature I am compelled to describe. Ironically, it is only now, with impaired cognition, that I can attack the challenge posed by this sort of task.

Cognitive Decline

At first, all the changes were subtle. My sense of smell mostly disappeared, but I never knew for sure when it happened. If I put food up to my nose, I could smell it, but the smells of people, rooms, places, these were gone.

I remember being in a subway station during my senior year of college, noticing a sort of unreality about everything around me. At first I attributed this to my higher thought processes conducting an exercise on the limitations of human perception. I thought that this existential angst might be causing me to feel that everything was somehow low-res, flat, lacking in depth. The word ‘cartoony’ came to mind. The feeling never quite went away.

Later, in the summer of 2007, working memory became the first disabling casualty to my cognition. I remember losing the ability to practice music. Playing long-tones, I forgot what note I had just played when it came time to play the next note. Sight-reading music was never my strong suit. It was easy to attribute to this my sudden inability to read at all. But something else was afoot. Keeping track of beats in a bar became a chore, playing in any meter besides common time or three four became impossible.

I moved into my apartment in Washington Heights in the fall. My struggles to practice became more pronounced. I hardly listened to music, or even thought to. But I could still read, program. Time slipped by, I applied to Juilliard, a process that required more effort than it would have taken when I was seventeen. By the time the application was in the mail, I had ceased to be a saxophonist, and began working at the New York Observer.

Then began the first of a series of sensations that corresponded to a tangible feeling. When experiencing the world, assuming it is the same for everyone, we have the sensation of existing in a ‘headspace’. Thoughts, imagined actions, the perception of where it is that ‘I’ exists gets mapped into this headspace. I remember sitting at my friend Sebastian’s Brooklyn apartment, awakening to an eerily new sensation. Somehow, I was only in the left side of my head. I know of no other way to communicate how it felt. I had visual input from both eyes, could move all my limbs, I hadn’t had a stroke. But I felt a though I only existed on the left side. There was a big thick cloudy nebulous feeling in the right side of my headspace. I tried unsuccessfully to force my consciousness into the sensation of being in the right side. I tried futilely to picture objects in the right side. In what later became ritual, I tried to picture a rope, one end affixed to my nose, the other to the back of my head, and swing it around my head. I couldn’t picture it on the right side. As soon as I managed to place its center at the very top of my head, it became stuck, I could not force it any further.

Weeks rolled on and I failed to improve. Sometimes, the feeling, which neurologists have later told me is referred to as ‘neglect’, persisted in the right side of my head, but occasionally it migrated to the left. Additionally, a new feeling emerged, a continuous, dull pressure on the right side of my head starting at the temple and extending behind my right eye.

While doctors stumbled, trying to find answers, my consciousness was altered further. The headspace problems grew worse. I dedicated hours of every day to trying to focus on a line on a wall, I was not always able to do it. I tried to imagine a line moving along a wall, orthogonal to the floor. It required the entirety of my concentration to maintain the exercise for more than a couple seconds.

A new problem emerged, I lost language. I could still speak, and hear. Many people, principally those who had not known me before, were unable to detect that something was horribly wrong. But there was no longer in my mind that I made a horrible transformation. While, I could still speak, even articulating complex ideas, finding the words, sentences and organizing ideas into language became a monumental task. You could think of it as being extremely resourceful in a randomly half-stocked kitchen. The paprika was there, but I lacked salt. Forming sentences required mental gymnastics, replacing missing words, lines of thought with others that could be rigged together to produce the proper result.

The pressure grew, the language faded, and disturbances in visual cognition entered the picture. Things seemed to be shaking, slightly blurry. Also, I could only focus on one small part of the picture at a time. Often, it seemed as though the world was scrunched together, collapsed in on itself. All the right sensory input was there, but my mind didn’t know what to do with it. I constantly shook my head to the side violently, trying to see what was there before I lost what was in front of me. Friends and family were convinced that I had developed a twitch. But the act was voluntary. It was the only way I could respond to my diminishing cognition. By refusing to accept it.

At my worst, I was incapable of a real conversation, barely able to play a video game, disoriented even when driving locally. I felt less than alive; unsure what I was or what my life had become. The inability to think made me feel incomplete in a way I doubt even the loss of a limb could. I had become dependent, feeble, able to hold fear in check only by clinging fiercely to a stoic philosophy. The remains of the logical center of my brain, once built for math and music, worked tirelessly to produce assurances that I had nothing to gain by worrying about events outside of my control.

Recovery

The path to recovery began in May. My newest doctor, suspicious of an autoimmune basis for my encephalopathy, started me on a course of high dose steroids and immunosuppressive therapy. Within a couple weeks, improvement was drastic. I had fallen so far that I didn’t know what recovery meant. the earliest initial improvements concerned my vision. Suddenly I could see normally. Before, to make the world stand still long enough to allow me to drive, I had to place one hand firmly on my forehead, applying pressure in a way that somehow made it easier for me to focus, stabilizing the shifting visual to render the world temporarily comprehensible. After two weeks of treatment, everything slowed down, incomparably more intelligible.

The feeling of pressure that had plagued the right side of my head began to fade, replaced by a strange tingling. As I continued treatment the tingling expanded, reaching beyond isolated areas to form what felt like spider webs shooting through my brain. A disagreement between doctors led to a temporary weaning of my treatment, bringing about a complete relapse of my symptoms. Then, in July, treatment was reintroduced in full. The effect was gradual but dramatic. At times the experience of healing has been more jarring than the feeling of losing my mind ever was. I had rarely been aware that I had been losing my mind before suddenly losing the ability to do things that had always been routine. Getting better so quickly, after being compromised for so long, I felt each day to be waking into a new state of being.

Nights have been particularly strange. The tingling, weblike sensations erupt at night. Often it feels as though there is a fireworks show in my brain. The webs feel as though they coalesce, forming thicker, more liquid bodies, rolling rather than shooting. Early on these feelings were accompanied by dramatic changes. Even now, occasional lurches forward in lucidity are not uncommon. Suddenly I would feel as though in a different part of my head. An old, forgotten part of my head. An emotion would surface that I had not experienced in recent memory. Smells would come rushing back, some stirring deep childhood memories. Still, other times, either as part of some manner of flashback, or due to the waxing and waning nature of the healing process, I experience momentary disturbances in visual cognition, pockets of time in which I cannot follow relatively uncomplicated conversation.

The path continues to be significant, challenging me to function in an inconsistent environment, not knowing what the world will look or feel like next week. I know that this is an unsatisfying place to end this installment, but more shall follow when there is more to tell.

The ‘Singularity’ is in vogue. Now that computers can beat us at chess, recognize characters, and do more mathematical calculations than the entire human species armed with graphing calculators, the idea of intelligent technology has ballooned as a topic of conversation. Most articles don’t talk about machines of equal intelligence, instead showcasing their deep understanding by discussing machines that dwarf human intelligence.

I’m not saying that computers will not become conscious, or intelligent. And I’m pretty sure that if they do, the rapid pace of technological development will probably lead them to dwarf human intelligence shortly after they equal it. But few of these articles - usually written by non-computer scientists with no real knowledge of how artificial intelligence technology works - acknowledge how far away we are from having a robust idea of how ‘thinking’ works.

The brain isn’t optimized for crunching numbers. Sure, a computer can perform a quadrillion operations in a second, each of which might take a human brain one second to perform. But consider how many seconds… rephrase: Consider how many quadrillions of operations it takes a computer to perform tasks that the human brain performs easily. My Cuisinart can chop celery far faster than my hands can, but I’d hold off on labeling the Cuisinart a superior piece of machinery to the human hand.

Imagine your brain was suddenly and neatly partitioned into two separate minds, neither of which could communicate with the other. Each contained aspects of ‘you’ - that is to say, the ‘you’ of present. One half possessed your visual cognition, empathy, and human emotions. The other contained your capacity to reason, the better part of your access to past memories, and perhaps your love of chocolate. Which half would be ‘you’? If they were later reunified, which half would the recombined ‘you’ identify with, remember having been? In the process of reunification would something of the individuality of each half be destroyed?

It doesn’t really matter how one imagines such a division. The important feature of this proposition is that a chunk of your consciousness has been cleaved off from the rest. While this might appear to be little more than a silly thought experiment with little application to reality, it isn’t. If we let go of our naiveté and embrace the physicality of the mind for just a moment, it is readily obvious that consciousness is not a binary quantity like ‘on-ness’ or ‘off-ness’. It is possible to become less conscious or more conscious. People with neurological disorders like Alzheimers experience some cleaving of their consciousness, usually irreversibly, every day.

Returning to our thought experiment, we are immediately confronted with many questions concerning the nature of consciousness. For one, does it exist only in moments or does it exist continuously through time? Both possibilities present serious problems. The problem with a consciousness that exists only in moments should be obvious. Nothing happens instantaneously in the brain. Memory retrieval, thought processes, all take time and for a sufficiently short period of time can’t accomplish anything. The problems with a continuous consciousness, one which remains intact in some way from birth until death, seem equally insurmountable. Over the course of one’s life, almost all the physical matter in one’s body changes several times over. Any such consciousness would then not be a function of the material in the body but only of the information in it. Consciousness becomes an abstraction, comprised only of information and processing capabilities.

Now, say instead of splitting the brain into halves A and B, which operate simultaneously, one turns of A, leaving B running, in control of the body. Is B the same person as the whole? Our society tends to side with this interpretation. An Alzheimer’s patient is generally treated as though they are the same consciousness that always interfaced with the world through their body. They are acknowledged to be sick, but seldom are they considered to be truly different people. Unable to perceive directly anything besides one’s actions, our social interaction is almost entirely built upon a strictly behaviorist notion of who someone is - one which anchors a ‘person’ to his corporeal form.

The truth, however, is likely very hazy and unsatisfying. There is probably no discernible point at which one is officially a different person. And there is probably no way to say that the same ‘person’ at two separate points in time is actually the ’same person’. Something about this strikes me as profoundly wrong, although I am quite assured of its truth. We all like to imagine that there is an actual thing called ‘I’. That it has more concreteness than, say, the terms ‘America’ or ‘Coca-Cola Company’. But it probably doesn’t.

The implications of this interpretation on the mandate with which we can talk about consciousness, and therefore ‘human life’ are far-reaching. For one, if consciousness can never be more than a nebulous abstraction with no clear boundaries or corporeal form, nothing can ever be said concerning consciousness that isn’t similarly nebulous and devoid of concrete meaning.

Many philosophers, it seems, make the undeniably foolish move of substituting society’s pragmatic behaviorist simplification of reality for an actual notion of what consciousness is. Some people actually go so far as to consider the Turing test a true measure of having created a thinking machine. The problems with this sort of behaviorist thinking should be apparent to anyone with even minor exposure to computer science. Implementation details and performance exist on different layers of abstraction. For example, a computer program that sorts a list can be implemented in many radically different ways. Some of these ways, while wildly different from each other, exhibit identical performance. Similarly, behaviorist thinking sheds no light on what consciousness is. Even if one continues to act consistently throughout his life, it can never be assumed that this represents one consciousness acting over the entire duration.

Returning to our consciousness fragment B, what would he experience upon reunification with the formerly severed parts contained in A? Acknowledging that I - whatever ‘I means’ - am limited in answering this question by the meaninglessness of ‘consciousness’, I can comment authoritatively on what B would experience, to the extent that anyone can.

Recently, I suffered an immune-mediated freakout in which my brain was attacked, severely altering my memory, ability to reason, visual/spatial cognition, and emotional capacity. Gradually, since subduing my immune system, I have ascended back towards something that increasingly resembles my former cognitive capabilities. Several questions concerning my metamorphoses have plagued me.

As I get better, am I surrendering something of what ‘I’ am now, to the whole that I am becoming? As a thought experiment, imagine two separate people who merge to become one. Each would surrender his individuality to that combined existence. To the extent that ’survive’ is a term that means anything, would either person ’survive’ in such a fusion? Apply that logic to our split brain, A and B. Does B losing anything in the requisition of A? I’m reminded of the Borg in Star Trek, who surrender their individuality to collective mind. While I instinctively want more than anything to continue to get better, intellectually I actually find it far more difficult to make a case for getting better than I do for either not caring nor not wanting to get better.

I have wanted, for some time, to write about my experience with brain disease and altered consciousness. The question I inevitably pose to myself is ‘when?’ Since commencing high-dose steroid treatment and immune system suppression, the ascent towards lucidity has been startling rapid. The following trade-off emerges: should I wait longer to express my thoughts, exchanging their timeliness and authenticity for greater fluidity of expression?

Having decided to write now, I have perhaps lost many of my memories, keeping no artifact to preserve them. Yet, I still lack the organization of thought to express the totality of my experience in one well-structured narrative. While my thoughts are vivid, they are scattered and I can only summon them contextually. I’ll try to post here a collection of the thoughts and experiences that have emerged from my experience.

One year ago I was 21 years old, on the verge of turning 22. I had just graduated from an Ivy League university and was about ready to delve back into the music career I had long pushed aside.

I was always an obsessive personality. Generally, I threw myself into things with a manic sense of urgency and was able to compensate with natural ability and force of will for whatever obstacles I had created for myself

In school, balancing gigs with schoolwork, friends, random side projects, girlfriends, I could always summon some extra burst of energy to recover from any hole I dug myself into. I was the sort of student that would enroll for a class without completing any of the prerequisite coursework, would go see a concert the night before a test I hadn’t studied for, but would then pull an all-niter and set the curve.

As I rounded through the my senior year en route to graduation, I lost the ability to focus in class, get better at the saxophone or stay up all night studying. It didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out my problem: I had a raging case of senioritis (inflamation of the senior). I had plenty of justification to be distracted. For one, I was in love. Some degree of my neglect for all things I formerly considered holy must be attributed the relationship I was engrossed in. Additionally, I was graduating. It's normal to spaz out to some degree. So I spazzed. When I really had to pull it together I still could.

The summer of 2007 came. I hopped a plane to Israel, so did my girlfriend. I intended to get away, focus on music again, get some serious practicing in. I had some extremely intense emotional experiences, but the focus never came. Weirder yet, I had some difficult with things that had always come very easily. I couldn’t focus when practicing to save my life. As a high schooler I could have practiced while the building I was in burned to the ground. But suddenly I would get lost counting the sixteen beats I intended to hold long-tones during sound exercises. Clearly I was out of practice, or lazy, or … maybe just not meant to play music after all.

I came back from Israel in July. Some time whiled away. I’m not sure where it went. I intended to practice, attend jam sessions, same as I had my whole life. Instead I slept fourteen hours a day. I also watched some Star Trek. Eventually I stopped watching Star Trek, I couldn’t maintain focus throughout an entire episode. I got a Blackberry. I played “BrickAttack” a lot. I wasn’t proud of it. I had always been obsessive, but never addictive. Neither drugs nor video games ever had that sort of hold on me. Only once, driven by escapism resulting from the worst summer internship in the history of the world, I succumbed to the soul-leeching allures of cell phone Tetris, sacrificing entire train rides, lunch breaks and even trips to the toilet to its irresistibly captivating repetition.

Then I got a call to play a gig on a cruise ship. That’s a whole story in itself. After realizing that Norwegian Cruise Lines had little to offer me besides first-hand knowledge of life as a third-class citizen, I jumped ship in Ketchikan Alaska, caught a flight to Anchorage and then to New York, and tried once again to get my life together.

I still couldn’t practice. The problem, I decided this time, was my parent’s house. I needed to get out. There’s no way I could focus while suffocated by the expectations and demands of my well-meaning parents. So I got an apartment.

Rent was hard to make, but between a few gigs and a steady engagement tutoring Math, it was almost doable. I lived in a modest apartment and the rent was moderate (by Manhattan standards). I wanted to go to grad school. That would make me get my life in order. The process of applying would make me get it together now. Once I had gotten in to school, I would have school to solve my problems for me in the coming years.

The application deadlines approached. Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory. I read the audition requirements and began to prepare. A month went by, I didn’t really practice anything. I hadn’t been to a jam session in many months. But I went into the studio with some friends and recorded my audition tape. I sounded terrible. Out of tune. No technique. I didn’t even really care anymore either.

I sent off the tapes, and didn’t touch the saxophone again. Maybe music wasn’t the path. And why the hell should I force myself to be a musician? The only reason to suffer as a musician is because one has no choice, because some inner voice will haunt you eternally if you forsake music. But suddenly I had a choice.

So fuck jazz. A shitty way to make a living. I still had a brain. An easier life would appear the moment I asked for it. I had a degree in Mathematics and Economics. In spite of myself, I was devastatingly employable. I still had confidence in my ability to acquire skills, even as I was losing them faster that I could gain them.

I always loved computer science. I hadn’t really given it the time of day since a bold foray into the field during my junior year in college. Still, I had always gotten As, professors inquired into my future plans in the field, and peers of mine from those classes were now working at companies like Microsoft and Google. Surely I could get some job as a computer programmer somewhere. I taught myself a few popular languages for programming for the web and within a week of posting my resume, found myself employed
developing back-end features for the website of a prominent New York City newspaper.

It was January. I finished my first week at work and went out to dine with my new colleagues. Everyone was really nice. We went out to Brooklyn for sandwiches the Friday after my first week was completed. Something was wrong. Really wrong. It was my mind. I couldn’t follow the conversation I was having. After 22 years of packing hidden meaning and spoonfuls of sarcasm into every exchange I had, I was unable keep up with a simple conversation with my project manager about the sort of run of the mill stuff you share over beers and a turkey club.

Maybe a few beers would make it go away. I had a few beers. I felt a little better.

A few weeks went by. I went with my mother to Carnegie Hall. She told me of plans she had on Tuesday and Thursday. I didn’t know what Tuesday and Thursday meant. I could have told you that they were days of the week. But I couldn’t visualize where Tuesday came in proximity to Thursday. I could recite a definition, but it lacked meaning. All the imagery associated with language vanished. I could remember sentences, but I couldn’t paint the picture in my head, even with all the pieces laid out before me.

I still had a little lucidity left. If I dedicated that which remained to finding out what was wrong with me, maybe I’d still make it through this intact. Reading became arduous, work near impossible, but I slogged through pages upon pages of internet medical content, hoping to find some clue to explain the decline of my cognition.

I don’t remember enough from the time between late February and July. My memory of the time is two-dimensional, a collection of images, dates, facts. Sometime in February a strong sensation of pressure behind my right eye became a regular part of my life. In March I went on a work trip to Boston. While on the trip I hit rock bottom. I was incapable of following a basketball game on the television. The pressure expanded, occupying much of the right side of my head and occasionally punching through to my forehead, about an inch above my nose. When I got back to New York, my life devolved into a series of Doctor’s visits punctuated by feeble attempts to keep working despite my veiled affliction.

My girlfriend didn’t understand why I stopped talking to her. My friends didn’t know why I never picked up my phone.

With the few wits I had left I planned a catch-all strategy to salvage what was left of my life. I developed a diet/treatment plan to cure me of any disease, real or fictitious, that could be responsible. I had antibodies to gluten: wheat barley and rye were out. Dairy supposedly causes some mild brain fog in some people: away with it. According to a slew of obviously disreputable web sites, illnesses like mine could be caused by strange fungi that could be killed by depriving the body of sugar. I was desperate. Away with sugar. If real medicine had no answers, perhaps voodoo did.

April came and I could no longer drive. I tried, but I probably shouldn’t have. I found myself at the Vitamin Shoppe one day unable to figure out how to ask the employee behind the counter where the vitamins I wanted were kept. Following the plot of an episode of Law and Order was beyond my capacity.

Finally, in May, five months after losing any semblance of a normal life, one doctor found an answer. Treatment was drastic and started right away. Where the world had seemed in fast-forward, lurching ahead of my ability to comprehend, it began to slow down.

More to come.