Change Your Mind the Hard Way

And uh, something came up in the research so we didn't really go into was was how the more modern medical science analyzed how damage to the brain changes the expression of who we are. Um that that that initially caused a lot of concern with people over over how we would continue to view the soul or or or even who we are, because the idea of you know, hey, if if I am my soul, I am this person. And then if something can just like if I get kicked in the head by a horse, that can change

who I am? Does that change who what my soul is? Uh? You know, you get into a lot of tricky area there and and uh and it's interesting that that we have the little turn of phrase, change your mind. We're always changing our mind about something and our mind is continually changing. Uh. The person we are a year ago again is different than the person we are now, and the person we're going to be tomorrow is different than

the person talking right now. And certainly things act upon us at times to change our minds for us right right, Our mind is a complicated system, and uh, every day something changes, something upgrades. You know how your computer is constantly needing to reboot because it just got new upgrades and updates have been applied. Well, updates are always being applied.

And occasionally your mind, like a computer can uh can something can spill some coffee in it, or um or it'll get a virus, or name any conceivable computer related catastrophe, and it could also happen to your brain. So it's really illuminating to look at some examples of catastrophe happening

to the human brain and what the effects are. How um external or internal stimuli alters the form of the mind and then therefore alters the uh if if you want to say it this way, the expression of our soul, right, and and uh, and then going back to like the neuroscience of it too. We've talked about neural plasticity, but how your mind changes in that way, how it may take up for one part of the other or you know,

how it might be completely changed forever. Um. So yeah, it's kind of like, you know, it's like a new car and then it gets sideswiped or something, and uh, but we gotta keep driving this car, so let's find out ways to make it work. Oh, I can't nobody can set in the passenger side seat anymore because it's caved in. That means more people have to go into

back seat. Thanks, like the same things of that nature, except with the brain X channel isn't working anymore, so we're gonna have to send more data through Y channel. That's overly simplified, but that's kind of what happens. So we're gonna look at a couple of example examples of how this is played out in specific cases, um, particularly with a guy, a very unfortunate guy I should say, named Phineas Gauge. Yes, Phineas Gauge is this is this

is pretty awesome stuff. And I say that because right now I'm I'm playing the new Mortal Kombat game at home when I can, when I can squirrel away a few moments here and there, and there are these moments in the game where you'll you'll build up this bonus meter and then you'll the you know everything, I'll go into an X ray mode and you'll see like your character like stabbing another character in the face or something, and like, you know, something entering one side of the

school and going out the other. And that's exactly what happens with Phineas Gauge back in all right. This guy's a twenty five year old foreman for a New England railroad. He's land track in Vermont, and each day he goes through this particular job. It's like, you know, day in day out. He drills a hole in a large rock, he boares in, he pours in blasting powder, he lays the fuse, and then he assistant covers the explosives with sand.

All right. Then he takes this uh three and a half foot long inch quarter thick um camp what's called a camping rod, the steel rod uh or iron nut, and he uh he tamps the explosives down and then he lights the fuse and he runs for cover. Alright. So you know, like any act that you do over and over again, you're your mind stunar to wander and uh and and it's easy to make mistakes. It's that whole like the more vegetables I cut, the more possible it does. It will cut off my fingers sort of thing.

You should always tuck your fingers in, by the way, you'll never cut yourself if you touch your fingers in the interesting. I will try that next time, avoid mutilation. But so he gets distracted, Old Phineas Gage and he begins camping the blasting powder before his assistant adds the sand.

So there's an suddenly there's an explosion, all right, and it fires that like the explosion blast this rod straight up, all right, and it it connects with his face, uh, just under his left cheek, all right, and it skewers up behind his left eye, destroying it both the eye and the entire front portion of his left brain hemisphere. And then the rod goes through the top of his skull, eggs to the top of his skull and continues to fly on through the air and land several yards away.

And so then there, so here's Gauge standing with this uh, this entry hole under his cheek, this exit hole through the top of his skull, like a bit of his Um, his scalp has flapped back, you know, to emerge, and not only just standing, he's completely conscious. He's talking. Yeah, he's not doing That's that's important to underscore here because

this sounds like like just a death blow. You just had a metal rod dynamited through your skull, through the through your face and out the top of your skull, a three foot eight inch metal rod with a more than an inch diameter by the way. Yeah. And but almost immediately after the accident, he's conscious. He's tall, king and and and and he insists of walking to the cart that's going to take him down to town to

be treated, and and along the ride he's lucid. He's rational during the ride, and he's he's able to speak with his attending physician, a doctor John Martin Harlow. And so he Carlo treats him and uh and uh and uh, and Gauge is actually able to return home to New Hampshire ten weeks later. Yeah. And the thing is too just so everybody understands that he did he bled for two days so um, and then he had an infection.

And what doctor Harlow did is that he he didn't um, he didn't he wasn't able to suiture the hole in his head, right, but he was able to cover it up, and that's what got the infection. And it actually rendered him semi conscious for about a month. And in fact, his family started to prepare a coffin for him because I didn't think that he was going to make it. Um. But then the infection resolved itself after the fifth week, and um, and he seemed to be completely fine. Seemed

to be right. I mean, we we know that he left, he lost his eyesight, his left eye, and then some of his motor abilities on his left hand side of his face. But again here he is like he's he can still talk, walk and cogitate. Yeah, because we're talking the brain portion here is the prefrontal cortex. Uh, and this is uh the anterior part of the frontal logo of the brain, and generally it has to do with motor and pre motor areas. But let's but let's talk

about just how Gauge was before the accident. In addition to having a little more brain and one more eye, uh, he was also supposedly a pretty you know, efficient, capable employee, a decent guy to hang around. He's one of the best foreman's They said, yeah, yeah, he was a good dude. His only fault was one out of maybe thousands of times he got a little distracted. Well well yeah, but after this accident once he's you know, he's he's up and about really and and recovered from this uh these

this bout of unconsciousness. Uh. They find that he is, uh is fitful. He's uh, he's swearing like a drunken sailor all the time. It's like he's got to rats or something. And and he doesn't seem to care, and and he's childlike and bulling. Yeah, he doesn't seem to have like he's lost this ability this like ethical um,

moral um governor in his mind. That's right, he's he's lost his social inhibitions essentially, which we know now that the prefinal cortex is sort of tamping that kind of down force, right, so that we're not all screaming at each other all the time. So and we know that that's where the tamping iron went through. But of course, you know, back in the day, they did not know this.

And it was actually Dr Harlowe who was observing all of this and saying, you know, my patient seems to be physically fine, like there doesn't seem to be any um neurological damage. But I think that his personality has changed as a result of this accident. And people were like,

they just summarily dismissed him. And the reason for that is because phrenology was really in vogue during those days, and it was thought that the personality was influenced by the size and the shape and even like the bumps on your skull. So they couldn't conceive of how your brain could be changed because you could say internally. They thought it was sort of set in stone in the structure um, and that your personality was sort of set

in the structure of your brain. So Dr Harlow was dismissed on this count, while another doctor came in and said, oh, no, this person is completely fine. I don't know what Dr Harler was talking about, because I mean, his intelligence was still fine. He in so many other respects, he seemed perfectly normal. Studies have have suggested that the frontal lobe actually has separate functional areas, one in the underbelly of the frontal lobes and along the mid line between the

two brain spheres. That's that supposedly specialized for making social decisions in an emotional context. In a second, more to the side of the forehead, seems to specialize in abstract calculation, other kinds of decision making that call upon lesser emotions. So, uh, this this is basically like the case of Gauge here in addition to being a really grizzly awful accident, yeah, it's also yeah, more combat like incident. It's also just

a classic case in of a frontal cortex malfunction. And uh in even these early studies about his condition were really influential in neuro psychiatry uh and played a crucial role in our discovery of behavioral syndromes resulting from frontal low of dysfunction. And people continue to have dysfunctions in this area the brain today, generally not due to dynamite

related rod insertion in the skull. But but there are people that have dysfunction in this area and they perform well and intelligence tests, speak normally, make new memories and association and use use logic just fine. But you'll also see similar disruptions in the expression of who they are. Yeah, yeah, I mean he basically sort of had an unwinning lobotomy, um, which ended up really helping science understand later on how how the brain functions. This presentation is brought to you

by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. And like he said, the other parts of the brain just kind of sort of well function fine. But then you've got him, you know, losing his job eventually because he became I guess you could say that he became so I guess, ballistic and not not the best foreman anymore. They felt like he was kind of unemployable, like he worked for I think for like a circus kind of thing for a while.

He took it on the road, he went to Chile, and then finally in February eighteen sixty he began to experience epileptic seizures and that led to his death on May eighteen sixty. But, um, you know, he's famous now we're talking about him now, many many years after his death. And you can even see his skull and the rod at the Warren Anatotomical Museum in Harvard Medical Schools count

Way Library of Medicine. I've seen the photos. Actually pretty cool because I mean if you look at his skull and you look at that three ft eight inch rod and just amazing to think that that could have happened and he would have survived it. Yeah, it really makes you rethink. I mean, you know, life is fragile, biological life is fragile and brief, but it's amazing some of the damage that we can can be inflicted upon us

and we still survive. So yeah, and another another good example, and this came out we actually spotted this when we were doing research for the podcast about music Changing your Brain. And this was about a guy named Tony Sistoria And in four he was forty two years old and he's this orthopedic surgeon was in a phone booth when the phone was struck by lightning. It entered his foot and then it exited his head and he was blown backwards

by that force. And then the weird thing is, as if that weren't weird enough, is that he had like a big near death experience, big near death meaning that he was sitting there watching as you know, according to him, as someone gave him CPR, and he was feeling this sort of like one with oneness with the universe and was submitting himself and he was actually trying to say to the person performing in CPR, please don't do this, and he could see his mother in law and you know,

he and he and all of a sudden he was brought back in his in his words, was that all. Yeah, I think we've discussed an unpassed podcast in the future that all these near death experiences, there are a lot of compelling scientific explanations for what's happening. So we're not we're not attributing any kind of divine or or supernatural occurrence here, No, but he is. Certainly this is a big thing for Sosori and how he explains what happened to him and and actually how he continues to live

his life. Um, so what happened then is that he seemed to be fine, and actually they tried to call an ambulance, but he said, no, no, I'm fine. It's badly enough. I've been struck by lightning, struck by lightning, or have rods fired through their head. And they're like, WHOA, let's not don't call an ambulance. No, he's a surgeon, he's an arthathic surgeon, and he has a PhD in neuroscience. But he's stupid guy. Yeah, No, he's like he knows

what happened to him. Um, but he says, you know, I feel kind of fuzzy or whatever, but let's not do this. And so later on he does get checked out. Um, he gets an e G. And this shows there's no cardiac arrest. Right, he gets an m R. Everything seems okay. About four weeks later, during this forty eight hour period, he just has this incredible insatiable desire to hear piano music. And previously he's more of a zepe fan, right and yeah, and it probably doesn't even have NPR programmed into his

his car's stereo system. I bet he does secretly, but I bet most of the time when he's he's doing or he turns in, he's just tuning in for like Marketplace or whatever, and then uh, you know, instantly clicks off when the classical starts playing. Right. Yeah, So I mean, yeah, this is someone who never had sort of a predilection for classical music before, but all of a sudden is just completely taken by it. Um, obsessed with it. Has to play, it, has to hear it, gets sheet music,

begins to learn it. Uh. Serendipitously, his babysitter asked if he can store her piano for him. So all of a sudden, the piano shows up starts playing piano, and you have to understand he's he's resumed his job, right, He's had a little bit of temporary memory loss, like he can't remember some of the surgical procedures the names for him. But then that all falls away and he's once again whole in the sense that he can perform

his jobs to the best of his faculties. Except he has this maddening desire to play the piano and compose piano music. Yeah. So I mean he literally runs home from his job and that is what he does until you know, four o'clock in the morning, and then he gets up again, I don't know three hours later, goes and perform surgery. Yeah, and comes back and does it again. Yeah.

I mean, there's no doubt here that there's something odd going on that that before this he never could have cared less about classical music playing it, so on and so forth. And then he has a dream that he's in a text and he's performing in front of an audience a piece that he wrote, and he begins himself to be flooded by compositions. So he begins composing. It's insane. And he's actually talking to Dr all of our Sacks about this, who's the author of Music Ophelia and other

books neuroscientists as well. So uh, Sacks was completely taken by this case because he could not figure out what had happened. Um. And and let's just kind of step back for a second and remember that he was struck by lightning, so obviously something tinkered with him. If well, that the brain is basically an electronic system, and electronic impulses are are a vital part of how it operates.

So you you're disrupting that with a bolt of lightning. Yeah, yeah, not just in the bolt of lightning, which could be as high as thirty thousand am piers with one million or more volts and could last you know, something like second Um. So yeah, we're talking about getting your brain fried. And it's amazing to think too that this happened and

that he's pretty much intact, you know, plus this obsession. Um, when something like twenty five percent of lightning strikes to individuals results and fatalities, and then those who do survive sustained permanent damage. So I mean, this guy is sort of like a unicorn among you know, lightning. Yeah, the damage sustained is like the best possible damage. You know. It's like how many people out there wish they could be struck by lightning and it would wake up some

artistic creative you know. Just I mean, because even assuming even he and he's really good at playing piano and and and composing, but even if he wasn't, like the idea that lightning turned on this new area of his life that he just criminously enjoys, you know, even even if he just really sucked at playing piano, he would at least be enjoying it. You're right, it wouldn't matter, right, because he's he's getting so much out of it. And I did actually wondered about that because I went online

to listen. I thought, oh no, I wonder if he's put all this effort into it, and it's kind of like my dog has please, you know. But he's actually right. He's he's a very good pianist um and does compose

his own original material. UM. So it's kind of hard to get some sort of medical revelation out of this because Csoria, as we talked about before, he doesn't he attributes this to some sort of um, mystical religious experience, and he doesn't want to be studied because he doesn't want to lose that feeling, which again is kind of maddening because because he's he's a he's a surgeon, he's he knows how the body works, he knows how the brain works, and and so it doesn't really seem like

there would be much room, uh too, for the for disillusionment. It seems like he would already basically have all the answers right there before him. Yeah. And that's what Sax has too, is like, Okay, this is again, this is a guy who has a PhD in neuroscience. He knows on some level that there's there's a basis for what

has happened neural neurologically. Um. And you can tell that Sax really wants to get in there and like study because he's because he's sitting there thinking, you know, there's this one clip of sex and he's sitting there talking about he's like, there's something that happened in that forty eight hour period, um. And then he even talks to about you know, there's we've seen correlations that parts of the brain in the temporal lobe UM can give rise

to a mystical euphoric feeling. We know this when and that part of the brain is stimulated um. And in fact, when we sometimes talk about religious experiences or even experiences with music, we know that that part of the brain is going nuts, right right. Uh. So it's fascinating. You know,

I understand where he's coming from. I mean, this is uh you know with sasoria, that this is something that has happened to him and this is his great love and obsession in his life, and he doesn't want to look under um, you know, under the covers and see what's going on. At the same time, it's like, and why piano music? Like I think of all the the the less appealing things he could have been struck with, Like what if he was like struck by lightning. He wakes up and he's like, I've got to become a

prop comic. Give me give me some watermelons in a in a chest and a hammer I'm gonna yeah yeah, and a big mustache. It could have been much worse. Yeah, yeah, I know it is. It's fascinating. So it also brings to mind, you know, we're talking about brain is an electronic system UM. Lightning is electricity disrupts it UM. It also brings to mind transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS UM.

And this is a much it's kind of like a much lighter controlled and uh and far far less severe technique, and that is actually used in treatment of some cases of depression and other anomalies. It's uh, you'll have what basically looks like a little rod, a lower little paddle, and you move it next to a person's skull in just the right area, and it produces magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. And and this can,

if used correctly, can improve symptoms of depression. So you have people that will go in, you know, it's like people who have generally it's people who have a number of mental issues and you don't want to actually go to the met to the extremes of using electro shock, which is a more severe version of uh, you know, a little more akin to lightning than this. But they'll go in and they'll they'll get a TMS treatment for like half an hour, and they found that they can

actually be pretty pretty successful. Yeah, and this is UM actually, if if I remember correctly from John Horgan's book Rational Mysticism. He goes to the doctor Michael Persinger who has the God machine, right, which is along the same lines as like this helmet that you put on, UM. And the idea is that you could create these spiritual mystical experiences by by messing with the magnets and the temporal lobe. UM.

And we've talked about this before too with alien abductions. UM. That season Blackmore, who has looked into this before, actually she herself went and had her temporal lobes manipulated. Comes sounds kind of journey UM and had a feeling that there was someone in the room actually and had this sort of experience UM that had some of the hallmarks of alien abduction. So we already know we know that

there's some manipulation that can happen here. Yeah, it comes down to to the whole idea that there's the world of our thoughts and then there is the external world and uh and and some would argue that there's really only one world, and that's the one in our brain that everything we perceive, everything we feel really takes place UM in the back corner of the fleshy electronic globe that is in our skull. So you start messing with that, you give it a shock, you fire a rod through it,

and you're you're you're changing the world as you perceive it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right, because I mean, I mean it sounds some of that sounds kind of straightforward, right, but I mean, I mean, how do you experience You can't experience someone else's view, right, you can only experience your own. So, um, it would make sense that, you know, even though there's these commonalities of our existence, if you screw up the wiring a little bit, then all lot of that will

get out out the window. Yeah, it's really in a way, it's kind of an outrageous over statement of the obvious. But but yeah, when a when a horse kicks somebody in the skull, it's not simply a matter of changing that person or changing that person's mind, but it changes the universe from that one person's perspective, and ultimately that one person that's the individual perspective, is the only perspective. We can never know another person's mind completely. And uh, yeah,

so it changes the world. And Oliver sucks, don't He has a book? Uh? Is it called The Man who Mistook His Wife? For a hat, I believe, Yeah, and talks a little bit more about this, right, like that that these sort of assumptions that we make about you know, a glass is a glass or a pen is a pen, can you know, be quite jumbled up in the brain when things go wrong. Yeah, the line between what we call sanity and what we call insanity is often far far briefer and far more fragile than we give it.

Give you credit, absolutely, and uh not not that I would say that Jill Bolte Taylor is insane or sane. Um. Actually she is quite sane. But using that sort of example of how tenuous or you know, our existence is, at least in our psyche. If you look at Jill Bolte Taylor, she is the neuro anatomist who witnessed her own stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain. She documented that in a great Ted talk. If nobody's ever seen that before, it's worth

checking out. We'll definitely put it up on the blog post accompanying this podcast. Yeah. Yeah, and she, of course she's a brain researcher. She was completely It's very interesting to hear to talking about this because she was absolutely astandard that she recognized that she was having a stroke, and so she was sitting there as the events were unfolding, sort of tagging every single thing that her brain was

doing as much as she could. It was December she woke up, discovered she was having this stroke, and two and a half weeks later she underwent major brain surgery to remove a golf ball sized blood clot that was placing pressure on the language centers of the left hemisphere of her brain. Right. Yeah, and um, she does detail this one part of when when she first started having

a stroke. I guess that the first four hours actually before she was hospitalized, and she says she couldn't watch, you couldn't talk, She couldn't read or write or recall parts of her life. And she says that she essentially became an infant in a woman's body. Um, and she goes on to explain a little bit more to the audience.

She talks about how the right hemisphere is consciousness of the right here, the right now, processing what we see, what we smell in fear, it's it's very much part of the limbic system, which is associated with emotion or to get a little hippie dippy here. Um, it's like the right hemisphere lives in the now, and the left hemisphere is the brain chatter that is worrying about the

past or fearing the future. Um, Like, it's the left brain that that you're always trying to turn off when you're meditating or even when you're just like you're you know, you're running or swimming or engaging in something, just trying to turn off that chatter. Well, it's it's observing everything that's going on. The right side of the brain, that's the right side of his brain is processing what's going

on right now. But my left side of the brain is tagging and categorizing little details from what's going on right now, and it's applying it to what might happen in the future. It's worried about the future. It's um, it's very much concerned with um calculating intelligence, right, what

constitutes me or I? Yeah, so it's ego, it's yea tied up and just a lot of very important aspects of who we are, but also some of the more problematic I would say like, yeah, well well this it's the seat of judgment, right, so we're you know which problem Yeah. One of the really cool things about this talk.

I mean, there are many cool parts, but um, she brings out a brain and she actually, you know, with with the smile and attached skull, Yeah, which is right, right, And she said, you know, I told you someone in the front row is going to get it. So I don't know why they were surprised, but um. But she pulls out the brain and that an assistant brings her brain. Um, that was obtained by legal means. And she shows how

the right and left hemisphere are truly absolutely separated. Is this the corpus close um in the middle that connects them, right, So she she's doing this to demonstrate how very different you have two very different machines in your brain working in tandem. So the reason why she's talking about that, and why we're talking a little bit more about the left and the right is that because she had that that blood clot on the left hemisphere, she was losing

temporary functionality. And during those four hours and and many years after actually, um, and so she began to witness herself blending with the rest of the world. That was the result is that, you know, once she shut up that part of her brain the right brain, the here and the now. She started to see like the boundaries of her body dissipate and sort of meld with the rest of the world, which is like an incredibly zen type moment like this kind of like home, you know,

universal frequency kind of a thing. She just kind of melded into the universe. Yeah, and she was very much and tranced by this and was sort of sitting there thinking like, oh wow, my body is doing this. And then she would say her her left part of her brain would start to come back online and be like,

you need to get help. And then her right hart of her brain would say, yeah, like I'm witnessing this about myself, and so seriously when you go to hospital hospital, right, And that's what the left side of the friend just kept coming online trying together. And that's why it took her sover and long to get to the hospital too, because she couldn't she lost the ability to even read numbers, so she was trying to you know, dial the phone

and so on and so forth. Um So, I think it's fascinating that she had that experience in that it took her eight years to recover. And she says that the reason she knows it was eight years um and there was the marker. There is that For eight years after that she experienced herself as a fluid being. Yeah, I'm gonna quote a real quick from her ted talk. This was, you know, the whole fluid being a revelation.

She says, we are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make a world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole, and we are beautiful and it is. It is an incredible talk. And I will have to say that if you are uncomfortable with any of the sort of hippie to be right here, right now stuff, it might make

you kind of cringe a little. But you know, I think if someone's uncomfortable with it, this is just this is just me. But like you should really stop and try and disconnect yourself from fear of fear for the future and worrying about the past, because there is that that, it's right there in your head um. You know, each side and if you could just give a little more emphasis to the part of you that's living in the moment um can it can be phenomenally um comforting. Well,

And this is what she's saying too. And the reason why I brought that up is because there is sort of like a spotty and part of me that when I was watching it, I was like, oh, my goodness, she is she is exhibiting a lot of emotion right now. But then I was thinking about it, and she is. She has lived in the state for so very long where she you know, through therapy, she finally got you know,

both hemispheres of her brain functioning that she has. She does have something to talk about here, that that you can live, that you can learn something about living in the right part of your brain and living in the now and applying that to your life like that it is a choice. But yes, you do have these two different machines in your brain, but there is UM. But there is this point of living that is accessible UM.

That that she said, that is her her The main thing that she wants to tell people about her experience, UM is that you don't have to be you know, caught and under the glass of your left hemisphere all the time and functioning, you know, and in serving your ego all the time. So yeah, I thought it was a really fascinating thing. Um, and then I did again, like she's sort of she does sort of seem out there, but this is a woman who has been living. She's yeah,

she's she's out there, but she's been there. You know. It's like, this is not somebody just saying, hey, turn off half of your brain and you know, drift free. She's a path of her brain was turned off, you know, for a for a period of time here and uh, and she got to experience that for you for Yeah. And at the very end, she says something that's really intriguing.

She says, okay that here's the right part of my brain, which is one with the world, which sees this beautiful of flowing existence, and here's the left part of my brain that tells me. I'm Juel Bolte Taylor and I'm a neuro anatomous and I'm esteemed researcher of the brain. And which one would you pick? And I thought that's such an interesting proposition. Yeah. Um. And she's not saying you have to pick, that's whole that's her whole point.

But she's saying that you could if if, if you were if you're bound to one part of your brain, that that's uh, that's the sort of choice that you could make for yourself. Yeah, it's enlightening stuff scientifically and uh and and I think spiritually, if you know into that kind of thing. Yeah, well, hey, we have we have some some words from our listeners here under form of emails. Well, actually one is from Facebook and I'll

read that one first. Uh, this is a response. We received a lot of response to our five finger Evolutionary Discount podcasts, which had to do with why we have five fingers and how are our five fingers actually influenced our number system? Uh. So, our listener Julia um who I guess I can't read her last name, but she has like a wonderful, beautiful sounding like I don't know Icelandic last name or something, or perhaps green Landing because

she's writing about green Land. She says, by the way, the word for the number twenty in green Landic is in nuke nalu. And I'm probably saying that wrong, but in nuke nalu, which translates to whole person tin fingers tintoes awesome language. That's so cool. Yeah, because in the podcast we were talking about how the word for seven is something like one hand, two fingers. Yeah. Right, so

that's very cool to now listener. Emily writes the following, I love the House of Works podcast, and you've been a constant and informative companion as I'm toiling away rehabbing my house. The podcast on brain function, neurology and its ability to rewire inspired me to share my experience. A few weeks before I started law school, I had a seizure caused by a cavernous and nigoma. Imagine a vein with a weak spot that balloons from the pressure and

then leaks are burst. The brain bleed was in my visual cortex, and after brain surgery, the most challenging part of my recovery was that I couldn't see properly. It was double vision like a bad headache or vertigo causes. I also was missing part of my visual field, like a spot where objects would become invisible. Consequently, I had trouble judging depth and typing or reading required uh nose to the screen, one eyed closed typing. About four days after the surgery, I was out on a wall with

my sister and all the anomalies vanished. I went. I went to having double vision and no depth reception to seeing normally. It was instantaneous. The brain was clearly rebuilding its network and the final wire got connected. The missing spot in my eyesight also diminished, but hasn't totally left. If I moved my hand in front of my eyes, it has one place where it will disappear. However, the brain filled in the gaps, and unless I look for the little black hole, I would forget it was there.

My recovery was fine, though a few weeks later I was diagnosed with epilepsy. Epilepsy is a really interesting condition and might make a good topic. I've always wondered how many people have hidden or exploited it. I adjust to my adjusted to my new identity as an as an epileptic by blogging for six months and her blog address is a Sacred disease dot blog spot dot com. Uh.

It's all one word, sacred disease. It is uh. It has been almost eight years since that first seizure and I continue to love hearing more about the brain it's eccentricity and superpowers. Thanks for the great podcast, Emily, So that was really illuminating, especially given some of the stuff we were just talking about. Yeah, I was just thinking

about that too. Um, very cool stuff. Yeah. I love hearing from listeners about their personal experiences with with various neurological conditions or um, you know, or or anything that could conceivably be viewed as a supernatural or weird. I mean, I mean, how did people interpret this kind of thing in the past before we understood how how the brain affects how things work, you know, the idea that it

would be this invisible part in your in your sight. Yeah, yeah, and then I'm sure that people didn't even tell someone before just for fear of someone thinking that they might be mad. Right, yeah, thanks turned invisible if I look at them right, right. It's not something you would probably say one years ago, yeah, but even fifty years ago. Yeah, but thanks Simily that was it was really awesome insight

into into a personal neurological experience there. And if you have experiences you want to share, or you just want to see what we're up to online, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We're blow the Mind one word on both of those, or just go to Google and type and blow the Mind and you can always drop us a line at blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon

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