What’s it like to recover from a brain injury? Well, it leads to odd moments like this: Therapist: Give yourself credit. Me: For what? Therapist: For booking the tickets. Me: *blink* Thinks: I know how to book tickets. I’ve booked tickets since I was so young, I can’t recall when. *scowls* Therapist: You booked the…
Category: Brain Power
Musings on what makes for a powerful brain. This category also includes the sub-category Brain Health, which covers all things related to brain injury.
PTSD Freezes Reading Homework Out
Relearning how to read comes in fits and starts when you have PTSD in addition to brain injury. Reading is probably more vulnerable to being sidetracked than other aspects of recovery because it is so difficult cognitively and, for me, fraught with issues of loss and identity and being part of mainstream society. One of…
Non-Experts and Healing Damaged Reading After Brain Injury
I’ve recently had a few people tell me they’re not experts, as if that’s a bad thing. I bring this up because in the old days, pre-brain injury, I held experts in high esteem. I respected their education and experience and saw them as authority figures. Well, okay, I had no problem challenging them in…
Early Days in the Reading Homework Trenches
Another reading observation stint. This time an easier article, my neurodoc assured me. The Wall Street Journal piece he handed me was on Rosetta, the European Space Agency’s mission probe to a comet, and her findings. (Aren’t ships, even space ships all female? They do have to be smart and strong, able to ride the…
Gamma Brainwave Biofeedback and the Healing of Emotions in PTSD and Brain Injury
Brain injury can lead to emotions turning off, short circuiting, the frontal lobes not mediating the reptilian brain. PTSD can lead to emotions being blocked. Having the two makes mood and feeling emotions like being on a rudderless ship in an unpredictable gale. So where does gamma brainwave biofeedback fit in? If brain biofeedback or…
Reading v. Learning: A Thought Exercise
Is reading learning? Are the higher cognitive aspects of reading really just learning and concentration? Are my problems only learning issues and not reading ones? If it’s solely a learning issue, then logically I would have the same kind of issue with any kind of learning. If learning is the issue, then the modality of…
Reading Rehab After Brain Injury: More Observing and First Homework Assignment
Reading observations continued this week. I’m getting used to this being-watched-as-I-read thing. First up was a page from the Toronto Sun. Busy busy, visually speaking. Ugh. But as my eye caught the byline “Don Peat,” I exclaimed: I follow him on Twitter! That’s OK, my neurodoc replied; he still wanted me to read the article.…
Talking Reading Strategies Post Brain Injury
After my neurodoc observed me read a portion of a Wall Street Journal article, he discussed the first thing for me to do to at least not make reading harder than it was: relax and bring anxiety under control. We then discussed strategies I’m already familiar with but discussing it in a way I hadn’t…
Reading Ground Zero: Observing my Reading After Brain Injury
My Neurodoc is into the dribs and drabs method the last few months. For most of my post-brain injury years, I’ve roared ahead at top speed, first trying to get back as quickly as possible to my life, then to regain necessary skills as quickly as possible, then to normalize some skills and continue to…