A Dodderer Looks at His Brain

When I’m out walking in our wonderful woods, I keep my head down because otherwise I’ll stumble over every rock, no matter how familiar the path. I don’t know what my feet will do next.

If I wander a few yards off the path to check out a fallen tree, then swivel slightly sideways, I’m disoriented for the first few seconds. I have no learned sense of direction.

Driving, I can’t accurately locate a knob on the dashboard. I have to feel for it or (worse) look. My body does not learn from repeated positioning. I have little of what’s now called “muscle memory.”

I have double vision and little depth perception. I can’t lay a clean line of wallboard joint compound because it requires the ability to accurately estimate a 1/8 inch-thick coating. In the kitchen, I’ll reach for a knife on the magnetic rack and slam my hand into the wall. I lumber into doorways.

Years ago, a 13-year-old housemate in our commune, one of the most extended people I’ve ever known, described her mentally precocious younger brother as “physically stupid.” That fired all sorts of slumbering neurons in my head and has stuck with me ever since. It was a brilliant observation.

In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Christof Koch talks about the learning of physical tasks being assigned to areas of “zombie” unconscious. A runner and rock climber, Koch states pretty confidently: “…much of the ebb and flow of daily life does indeed take place beyond the pale of consciousness. This is patently true for most of the sensory-motor actions that compose our daily routine: tying shoelaces, typing on a computer keyboard, driving a car, returning a tennis serve, running on a rocky trail, dancing a waltz.”

Maybe for him. For me, I do have to think about tying my shoelaces; my typing often goes so completely haywire (like today) that I have to stop and recalibrate my fingers; I have lapses (fortunately infrequent) in driving sense; I could never accurately throw or catch a ball of any kind; I can’t run without conscious thought even on a flat trail; I can’t dance for shit.

My physical blundering sends me into self-destructive rages. I smash my hand against my workbench or, as Bob Dylan has put it, “punch myself in my face with my fist.” The slightest impediment to what I want to accomplish (dropping a tool, bumping into the counter top, misplacing a paint brush) brings on a profanity-laced explosion, with not a tenth of a second latency between cause (impediment) and effect (spewing of Anglo-Saxon primitives).

It’s almost never directed at someone else – it’s a magma of self-hatred overlaid by a lava-flow directed at the inanimate world (the hammer that mashed by thumb, the screwdriver that removed my knuckle-flesh, the awl that has done its all to spill my life’s blood).

And no one I know or have met puts their raucous madness together in quite the way I do. My biliousness is nearly always sung, a blue litany put to patriotic tunes, hymns, 1890s standards, old pop songs or kiddy ditties, such as a softly lilting “Cocksucker, motherfucker, son of a bitch” set to the opening bars of “Skip to My Lou” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” It’s as though Lewis Carroll had burst into vituperation while tumbling down a cliff.

[Actually, I have an irresistible urge to sing parodies of even my most beloved tunes – including Tom Waits. Most are obscene, but here’s a rather innocuous example:

[Raindrops crawlin’ up my nose,

I keep fallin’ down

But don’t suppose I’m dead,

Fallin’ on my head.]

or

[Blow, blow, blow your nose

Gently down your face,

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is a disgrace.]

On the other hand, most of my mental processes seem to work OK, and I get the feeling that my constant, compulsive self-analysis may take me into areas of the unconscious – or at least the not-normally-conscious – that most people ignore.

So, lately I’ve started to seriously wonder what combinations of physical traits and neural structure link these various peculiarities and aspects of self together: Do I burrow deeper into my unconscious than most people (if I do) because it’s necessary to structuring my ill-adapted daily life, and if so, does this spring from lack of a strong physical memory? Or, contrariwise, do I have an innate tendency to unconscious roving that interferes with developing a physical memory? And might any of it be tied to my disobedient eyes?

It’s become intensely important to me to know what binds both my successes and my failings together; what prompts my outbursts of militant self-hatred and how they relate to the things that I can do well (like arguing with books on cosmology). I need a personal map of the interconnectedness – or disconnectedness – of my neural mechanisms. And it’s not easy, because those damned eyes of mine make reading a plodding exercise.

Over the past couple years I’ve bought and erratically studied basic texts on neurophysiology and neuroanatomy, plus more “popular” material on how the brain/mind/nervous system might work overall.

Most non-neurological analyses of brain function spring from professional case studies of aberrant conditions, and with good reason: They are like finding the key to the basement when you’re looking for a leak in the pipes. Once you’ve opened the basement door, you can find the leak. Once you’ve found the leak, you can perhaps repair it, but more important, you’ve discovered where the pipes enter through the foundation, and where they branch off to sneak beneath the flooring and inside partitions.

What I haven’t seen presented (and that could easily spring from my ignorance) is someone’s personal examination, based on the latest neurological knowledge, of his or her own array of minor but likely overlapping halts or stutters in mental apparatus to answer the question: “What makes me such a maladroit in certain areas, proficient in others?” I’d like to be able to do that.

Bu in the end, the basic question becomes: Is it possible to teach old farts new tricks?

Tangential addendum:

According to Antonio Damasio, one of the growing army of scientists studying the origins and nature of consciousness, “… in the absence of consciousness, the person’s view is suspended; we do not know of our existence; and we do not know that anything else exits.”

I agree. In fact, I know it’s true, definitely.

Some years back, I fell asleep in our wonderful old clawfoot bathtub in Philly. From that sleep, something awoke. Something that did not know what it was. Something that did not even know that it was. A primeval vacancy, it saw but did not know what it saw or what seeing was. A fully-formed mind without content or context.

I can’t begin to describe the feeling because there was no feeling – there was nothing to have feeling. And I have nothing to compare it to. To what can you compare total emptiness, the absence of sentience? For two or three seconds it was the void before the first star in the universe.

I’ve tried over four years to explain it, but all I have is a meaningless picture of my toes resting on the faucet, which could not be defined until after it became inhabited by my mind.

Even more extraordinary, this happened twice. You wouldn’t think my mind – or whatever came up with that unholy idea of leaving me vacated in a bathtub – could do it again. But I’d love to experience it a third time and more. The stupidest thing? After we moved, we didn’t have the right kind of bathtub. Now we’ve bought a clawfoot on craigslist and it’s waiting in the yard to be installed.

by Derek Davis