Although I did well in the Oxford online short courses on philosophy of mind and metaphysics, the reading just about broke me because my neurons in the reading-related networks were injured, and so little is known about how the brain reads that treatment had been a series of guesses and so not hugely effective. Plus no one in the health professions grasped that a writer needs to be able to read for hours, not a few minutes.
In my book Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, I write about my ongoing reading rehab adventures and draw up a theoretical program to recover reading.
Since I took the Oxford courses, I no longer need a two-hour nap after reading a newspaper article or couple pages of a book; my abstract processing has improved; my cognitive skills have improved; and my emotions are beginning to connect. But I still cannot read philosophy.
Thank God for the YouTube revolution and NaNoWriMo winner goodie of a discount to The Great Courses Plus. The GCP site has a course on mind-body or philosophy of mind. After getting help to sign up, I’ve happily begun watching Prof. Patrick Grim’s series of half hour video lectures with graphics. OK, I needed a nap after the first one, and I can feel my brain straining to grasp the concepts in the second one even though I’ve studied the Greeks back in high school and studied much of the first two videos in the Oxford Short Course. But it’s still a lot easier than reading!
