Category Archives: executive functions

Human experience (2016)

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(December, 2016)

There are various parts of the brain that create our various senses of happiness, and all have been recorded in various ways many, many, many times. Neurologists have been able to stimulate them in order to create happiness for decades now. In fact, neuroscience, neurosurgery and nanotechnology are on the verge of giving us regular control over our own moods. Basically, any discussion of the human experience that does not see us as merely the outward manifestations of our brains is horseshit. (Not sure if I’d wholly agree with that conclusion now, but never mind.) You are what you think, even if you have no clue you are thinking it. When you realize how much of our mind isn’t in the brain at all, but in, say, the skin, gonads, or digestive tract, it gets even more depressing. We are only aware of what we consciously know, yet our consciousness is only a fraction of our brain, most of what the brain does we are completely unaware of…yet so much of what we do is because that unconcious part of our brain does it. What neurologists call the Four F’s–feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction–are overwhelmingly what concern us every day. And even when they do not concern us momentarily–like when we do accounting at the office, or watch golf on TV–any one of those four F’s can and will instantly distract us. We are those Four F’s, with a lot of intellectual frontal lobery out front making us think we are more than just hungry, angry, scared and horny animals.

Losing my facial recognition skills

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Back in 2006 I lost my facial recognition skills. Suddenly most people were unrecognizable and the ones I recognized often looked very different. Eventually it mostly came back but there are people I used to see everyday that I still keep in contact with and I have no idea what they look like. Others I see pictures of and their pictures look different than I remember them. Typically everything looks the same but the face is not the face I thought they had. Voices are instantly recognizable though. If I hear the voice the face follows.

When it was really bad I used all kinds of things to recognize people. Hats were handy. As long as they wore the same hat. Beards the same. Height was great. Really tall guys were instantly recognizable. Really little people too. Height doesn’t change. But some jerk went on a diet, lost his double chin and left me clueless. A lady I knew got a breast job and I didn’t recognize her.

The weirdest thing about suddenly losing your facial recognition is that you don’t see the right things when you look at someone. You’re missing all the expressions and signals we use when talking to each other. You’re talking to someone and you see all these details of their skin, tiny little flaws, wrinkles, the shape of their face, it’s like looking at a painting. People look older. You’ll hear their voice behind you, turn around and they’re ten years older than they looked before. It’s as if the first impression their face made on you a decade before is locked into your facial recognition memory. Weirder still is that you think about this as they’re talking to you. It could be very disorienting, but you just deal with it or hide in your room.

It’s mostly repaired itself now. Though if we’ve only met a couple times there’s a good chance I won’t recognize you. I’ve gotten really good at faking my way through it. In a crowded situation it can get pretty dicey. I can tell if we’ve talked before and just hope someone says your name. But still there are inevitably moments when someone starts talking to me and I inadvertently diss them because I have no idea we’ve met before.

Oh….On the morning that I woke up with no facial recognition—it was an epilepsy thing, seizure activity burning its way through my temporal lobe—there was an all hands meeting at work. Hundreds of people milling around and nearly all of them as featureless as mannequins. It was pretty damn funny. Well, maybe not at the time.

It’s always interesting, epilepsy.

These sentences seem adrift on their own

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[from 2019, I think]

Head on a floor cushion I just woke from a three hour nap on the floor in front of the TV. If I hadn’t had to piss I’d still be asleep there. Woke up having no clue what time it was. 3 am? 7 am? That panicky retired guy sensation that I must be late for work. My brain sure needed that sleep, tho’, the poor thing. It’s hard dragging around the big old lummox it’s stuck in year after year. And all he does is whine and complain these past few days anyway. Best to leave him in his daze.

I mumbled something incoherent to Fyl and followed it with a joke that sort of disintegrated before it ever got to the funny part. She smiled. Then I flopped down on the sofa and my fingers wrote this. I wrote it as an email. Email is a safe zone, the people I send my emails to are patient and unexplosive. Social media, though, is a minefield, deadly to the sonambulist. Still, these sentences seem adrift on their own, the dummy whose finger this is not yet aware of what he’s typing. But he can feel the seizure drugs he took again a a few hours ago settling everything down, a mild nervous system euphoria. By the time I post this brain and fingers will be connected again.

Hollow suspicion

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January, 2017

Fifteen years ago, I worked for about thirty or so people, from executives on down, and I handled all their expense reports and purchases and you name it. I was so good at it that I was one of the employees that others would come to when they were stumped trying to figure out how to expense something. Executives from outside my department would come and ask for help. That was at Disney and I knew my shit. I was also, for a year or two, the one man purchasing department for Disney Online, when it was a start up. Millions of dollars of purchases went through me, I drew up the purchase orders, I figured out to set up the accounting for each, I got them approved. I remember setting up a database on MS Access to keep track of them. A schedule for them on MS Project. I had that purchasing down, too. Later, I was told by accounting that I processed more accounts payable invoices than the rest of the Walt Disney Internet Group put together. Tens of millions of dollars every couple months. That is in addition to all those expense reports and getting purchase orders processed–though I was no longer the purchasing department. There were several people by then doing what I had once done. I was a master of details and process and numbers.

This occurred to me a couple nights ago as I stared at our bank account and tried to figure out if we had enough cash on hand to cover rent. (We did.) I couldn’t remember what charges were outstanding. I couldn’t remember what we had paid or not. I had definitely forgotten to pay the DWP, I knew that, as they were threatening to shut us off. Time Warner Cable too. All these numbers swimming, these things I have no ability to calculate or schedule or understand. An infitesimal fraction of what I was once a master of at Disney. It’s all beyond me now.

Losing your executive functions is a bitch. Abilities just disappear. Things everyone can do I can no longer do. Basic human being things. Those neurons burned away a long time ago. My temporal lobe, where all these things lie, is a beat up mess. A life time of small seizures, thousands of them, have done their damage. It’s like someone reached into the hard drive of the computer I’m writing on and 0-949uj1/’p23fh13wcde’p9dcalkjaZXA. Just like that.

A couple days ago was our wedding anniversary. The day before I was looking up at the digital sign above the busdriver, charmed, and it said November 28. November 28? Oh wow, November 29th is our anniversary. I said that aloud. She said yes it is and smiled. I said I had completely forgotten. I had never forgotten before. Not even almost forgotten. I always remembered. She smiled again. That’s OK, she said, we’ll have a nice dinner. You live with a husband long enough and you can see that his brain has been zapped away, and that he forgets things, but he means well.

I had never forgotten our anniversary before. I wondered what else I was forgetting. What else I would forget. And I sat there as the bus lurched along with the cold hollow suspicion that I was not going to able to take care of us by myself much longer.

A couple months later I stopped writing completely and the brain began to repair itself. Had no idea that writing was such a trigger, especially as the torrent of writing was itself the result of epilepsy. Hypergraphia they call it. Once the writing ceased most of the executive functions returned, as did our solvency. After a while I tried writing again, though in small, managed doses. The epileptic life….

Time

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Man, I have no sense of time anymore…hour, day, date, even month sometimes, it is just gone. Just flowing along in the eternal present. I walk outside and everybody’s on a schedule, tied down tightly by 60’s–seconds and minutes, you get the idea–and dozens and two dozens and sevens and thirty or thirty ones. All these numbers you guys live in. I don’t. Years of epilepsy took care of that a long time ago (while her’s disappeared in a few endless minutes coding blue). It’s like I look out the picture window at another universe full of math and inside the two of us flow along in the present, segmented only by our circadian rhythms. I look at the fish tank with the two surviving fish (you might recall their killing spree) and I’m like them. They do their thing, having a ball–if there’s such a thing as a happy fish, it’s a zebra danio–their tiny striped lives managed only by watery circadian rhythms. They swim madly about, from impulse to impulse, and I write, mostly, and wonder where the time literally went, because it’s gone.

Remembering all the things you used to be able to do

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You know, I have to confess I found my corporate day gig much more rewarding than writing. I don’t mean financially rewarding–though it was, obviously–but more personally rewarding. Writing has always been so easy, and I have to go out of my way to make it challenging, I never really get much a feeling of accomplishment from it. I mean I like writing, and I like a lot of what I do write, but none of it knocks me out. It’s just pretty writing. And now that my brain is so worn away by epilepsy that I can no longer do what I used to do at my day gig, that I was so damn good at, that’s a drag. That’s when I really know I’m disabled. I run into people I used to work with and I don’t know what to say. Of course to them the writing is so much more exciting. They can’t imagine I’d rather have a day gig. That I’d rather not be a full time writer. But I suppose when a messed up epileptic manages to hold a day dig despite all the challenges, nearly all of which I was able to conceal pretty well from my co-workers, and when he is indeed is one of the very best in his company at that gig, that’s a genuine feeling of accomplishment. Making it in the normal people’s world is rare among my sort. Most epileptics can’t manage it. I not only managed it, I thrived at it. Alas, in the long run it’ll eat an epileptic up, as it did me, the mental strain and pace causes too much neural excitement and wears out the brain, burning out the synapses connecting the neurons. Brain functions slip away and you’re left cognitively crippled. Time disappears. Planning disappears. Papers pile up, mail goes unopened, bills are forgotten. Surrounded by things that never get finished you find yourself remembering all the things you used to be able to do but now can’t. So you write about it, and the words flow like liquid gold, so easily, too easily.

Losing track

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Damn. I’m at that stage of brain rot where I really can’t figure out my bills anymore. I literally can no longer do it. I used to be a master of that stuff, had everything worked out a year in advance. Now it’s like handing a stack of papers to a chimpanzee. About the only thing I can do anymore is write. I do that really well. Apparently what’s left of my grey matter has adapted to drive me mad with hypergraphia, writing at five a.m. when I ought to be in bed. Not that mind that much. I get a lot of writing done that way. It’s weird, though, losing my sense of time. I know today, but before today and after today is pretty close to non-existent. I don’t have a week, I have trouble remembering the day of that week, I know the month only by the days we get paid. I just live blissfully day to day, each morning utterly new, devoid of the previous day and oblivious of the next.

This past Monday (I remember it was Monday, though that feels like yesterday, or maybe the day before, and actually, some of my devoted fans may recall, I thought it was Friday, i.e. today) I was noticing I was feeling stiff. Everything stiff. Like it needed loosening up. So I figured I’d run some items down the stairs the recycle bins. The night was just a tinge chilly, the breeze carried the scent of night blooming flowers, the moon bathed the deck and steps in a pasty light. It was gorgeous. I stood there a minute soaking it all in. Suddenly I realized I had not been outside the house in a week. Well, I had, a couple times, out on the deck for moments, maybe a minute or two in total. A minute or two in a whole week. I hadn’t noticed. I was busy the whole time, never bored. I was reading and writing and following the madness in Washington, I did chores and cooked and washed dishes. I had done laundry. I watched a whole mess of Alfred Hitchcock movies. But I had never left the house. A whole week had gone by and I didn’t even realize it.

A friend of mine has an epileptic cousin. You’re so different from him, she once told me. You have a day job and a writing gig and go all over the place and seem so in charge of your life. Which was true. It was a struggle, the epileptic damage was already afflicting me, but I hid it well, complained little and managed to keep very busy and productive. Not like her cousin, she said, who mostly stays in his room all day and never goes anywhere. The poor spastic bastard, I thought, thank god I’m not one of them. Most of us are, helpless and housebound and out of sight. Not me, though. Not back then. Funny how things just sneak up on you.

Short bus

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Losing your executive functions doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t make you less intelligent (well, maybe a little), and doesn’t seem to change the personality dramatically…but it is a pain in the ass. Sometimes a mild pain in the ass. Sometimes catastrophic….though you don’t really notice until one of the catastrophes hits you. Part of it is the time thing I keep talking about. I mean you retain your 24 hour sense of time–that seems to go much deeper than all the fancy brainage humans have laid on over the eons. Hell, plants have that sense of time. It’s the calendar you lose track of. That’s an add on we probably developed tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe earlier. It’s up there in the frontal lobe, apparently, and the parts of my frontal lobe that used to do wonders with calendars (and Microsoft Office and scheduling for a dozen bosses and complex multi-tasking and writing a weekly column for a major paper and never missing an issue in seven years) has been worn away by too much electro-chemical energy. (That’s what epilepsy is: too much electro-chemical energy.) But even more of a hassle is my inability to focus on things. Shit doesn’t get done. I am utterly mystified as to why it isn’t getting done. I have tried a zillion techniques to remind me that shit isn’t getting done. But the end result is shit not getting done. Even my writing has changed and all I seem to write are brief vignettes, snippets, small little essays. It’s pretty writing, sure, but it’s impossibly short. What can you do with it? But that’s how I think anymore, with (to quote our president) a few exceptions. But what especially disturbs me lately is that I can’t seem to focus on books. I was always the type that started a book and finished it in a few days or a couple weeks if it was long and turgid and dull, but I always finished it. Lately it takes forever, and I don’t always finish. I’m working on that too. I have so many books to read. I’m not making a lot of progress. Still, life is pleasant. It shouldn’t be, because actually everything is hopelessly fucked up, two brain damaged people incapable of doing what adults need to be able to do to survive in a complex world, but it’s never been more pleasant. We have friends who look out for us, and we keep life simple and spare. I get up and write. She reads. We watch old movies. She walks back from Trader Joes with a few groceries, some flowers and a snack. She makes dinner. I wash the dishes. It’s a daily routine but doesn’t feel that way since every day is completely new. Very little stress. Very little contact with the outside world. You look at people on the short bus and they always seem to be smiling and laughing.

Bliss

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I have a pretty good idea of the time. Our internal clocks are very, very ancient and keep us aware of about when it is in the day. And we have calendars all over the house and if I look at them I can see the month. But man, my natural state is to have no idea what day of the week it is, or the date of the month. The calendars don’t help. The one I am looking at right now has a mother bear and three baby bears and beneath them thirty one days, each day a perfect little square. I don’t think I am supposed to see the days as perfect little squares. They are supposed to be numbered concepts. But the concepts seem to be missing and I have to keep asking my wife what day it is or what the date is. It’s kind of blissful, actually, this timelessness, but I’ve never been a fan of bliss. I was never a bliss kind of guy. So it’s a struggle not to disappear into this blissful pit, this little brain damaged heaven up here in the hills of Silver Lake. It’s not a battle I am winning. The timeless bliss is unrelenting, like a tide that comes in and never goes out again. And to think there are people who do yoga with goats to get where I am.

One man’s app is another man’s seizure

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One of the more annoying things about having your executive functions rot away is how you keep forgetting how to do things you’ve done a zillion times. I’ve blogged thousands of times on WordPress by now, but I still forget how to do the most basic things on it. Simple little tasks that ordinarily took a few quick steps, just a couple seconds. Now I just stare at the screen, and if I get too stuck I start to get numb all over, then queasy, then realize the epilepsy is totally fucking with me, and soon I find myself writing about what I was trying to do it instead of actually doing it. Jesus Christ, a half century of this shit. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I need a smartphone but dread getting one as I’ll be so bewildered by it, it’ll be this little screen that opens onto a multi-dimensional warren of a zillion options, each requiring the ability to remember a few simple steps. Sounds so easy. One man’s app is another man’s seizure.