My Brain, My Body, and Me

I have never been a scientifically-minded person, but I have a (perhaps morbid) fascination with neurology.  I like that, for all its power over the rest of my body, the brain is still a physical organ.  I like that there are physiological reasons behind my feelings and thoughts: when I'm sad, or when I forget things, or when I make mistakes.  I don't have to associate who I am with sadness or forgetfulness or my mistakes; I can remember that my brain is generating these things, just as my heart pumps blood or my lungs let me breathe.  My brain is making me sad.  My brain is making me forget.  My brain is allowing me to make mistakes.  I can still be happy, I can still remember, I can learn from my mistakes.  I am not my brain; it's just another organ in my body.  Remembering this fact can alleviate my unpleasant feelings and, if I'm lucky, allow me to move on from them.

Because of this, I understood exactly what Christine Hyung-Oak Lee meant in Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember when she differentiated between the mind, the brain, and the body.  I’ve learned over the years, as a coping mechanism, to blame and shame my brain rather than myself.  I tell my brain, “You idiot!  Why are you making me upset right now?  There’s no reason to be upset,” and so on, filling “upset” with other unpleasant emotions: nervous, angry, frightened, etc.  It’s probably not healthy, but I used to blame myself instead for feeling these unpleasant emotions at inopportune times.  Singling out my brain as a troublesome organ sometimes keeps me from putting myself down.

At the beginning of Lee’s book, she describes in excruciating detail how her stroke felt.  You can see how her brain fell apart, how her world literally turned upside-down.  I was fascinated by how Lee described her overstimulation, her loss of simple communication, her worsening memory loss.  It was tragic and awful, yes, but it was the neurological side that gripped me.  What I didn’t expect was for her to delve into her marriage, her family, her childhood, her parenthood, her work, her friendships, her college years.  I was almost disappointed when Lee continued her story past her recovery, because that was the interesting part!  How her brain recovered from this terrible yet captivating stroke was the juicy stuff; what was interesting after that?  (Luckily, Lee is a fantastic writer, and I of course continued to be captivated.)

My interest lay where it did because before reading this book, I hadn’t thought about my body as containing the things I typically associate with my brain, particularly memories.  In fact, I hadn’t thought about my body much at all.  I’ve never had much reason to.  I’ve been relatively healthy for my entire life.  I recover quickly from illnesses.  I’ve never been to the hospital except for my own birth and for visitations.  I’ve certainly thought of my mind and my brain as two separate entities, but for me, the trinity was brain, mind, self.  My organ, my thoughts, and me.  My body never factored into the equation.  My physical focus is generally, so to speak, top-heavy.

Having read Lee’s book and thinking about it now, though, I’ve realized that I too carry memories in my body.  When I was a freshman in high school, I made myself small, trying to blend in so as to avoid the bullying I’d suffered in middle school.  I was hyper-aware of my movements in class, how I breathed, how I sat in my chair, how I positioned my arms on my desk, anticipating how others might notice and judge my every motion.  I have since mostly recovered from that severe social anxiety, but I still hold those memories in my body out of habit.  It’s hard to tell yourself to stop analyzing how you cross your legs below a desk or how loud you swallow when you had those thoughts every day throughout high school.  And this is just one example of my body containing memories—I could go on.

And if my brain is an organ, as I am fond of thinking of it, then it too holds memory—physically speaking.  I’ve heard that the brain can form deep pathways that result from thoughts or concepts constantly leading to one another over time.  For instance, if you often make a mistake and think, “I’m an idiot,” your brain will create a pathway between making mistakes and putting yourself down.  If you do this often, the crevice will deepen, and over time associating idiocy with making mistakes will became a reflex.  The brain is plastic, as Lee talks about, and this pathway is capable of being overwritten.  You can train yourself to think, “Oh well, I made a mistake, I’ll learn from it later,” when you make a mistake, and this becomes a new pathway.  But it’s difficult.  It takes time and conscious effort.

Related to this is Lee’s struggle to ask for help.  In the midst of her stroke, someone asks Lee how she is, and she reflexively replies, “I’m fine.”  She reasons, “I was not in the habit of asking for help.  It had become a habit for me to say I was fine.  It bothered no one when I said I was fine.  It was thus easier for my brain to shoot out that automatic verbal response.  Help, on the other hand, was a new concept.  My brain could not build new things.  It was busy repairing the old things.  Help was difficult.  Help was complicated.  So, I am fine, I said” (17).  Lee’s habit of saying that she is fine instead of asking for help is not just a part of her personality, but it is also woven into the anatomy of her brain.  It is a result of her past, as she later details in her book, how she learned to tough out and ignore pain from her father.

Before writing this blog post, I decided to rewatch Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk on her own stroke, titled “My stroke of insight.”  Near the beginning of the video, she picks up a brain to show the audience its left and right hemispheres, and the audience reacts with groans.  I, on the other hand, was delighted.  I thought, “Wow, look at that!  A real life brain!  Just like the one in my head!  Amazing!”  Again with my morbid neurological fascination.

Dr. Taylor explained the functions of the left and right hemispheres using language that reminded me of Lee’s book.  In regards to the right brain, Dr. Taylor said, “It’s all about the right here, right now.”  In regards to the left brain, she said that it “thinks linearly and methodically.  Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future.”  Already, we can see how this relates to Lee’s stroke, how Lee “lived entirely in the present tense, unleashed from the part of my brain capable of worry and anxiety and fear and strategy and power.  I was happy and peaceful” (110).  Thinking to the past or the future causes this worry, anxiety, fear, and so on.  Living in the moment, however, makes this impossible, and thereby alleviates worry, anxiety, and fear.

What really interested me was how Dr. Taylor described that when she was having her stroke, she had moments where she could not differentiate her own physical body from the world around her, how she felt at one with everything.  This is not quite how Lee describes her own stroke, but the fact that Dr. Taylor also talks about her body is interesting to me.  Without a functioning left hemisphere, the individual is lost, singularity is lost, and memories and their associated anxieties are lost.  Without the memories, the concept of the body changes, and vice versa.  Lee talks about throughout the book how she rebelled against her body, but when she has her stroke, she loses her mind and her body takes precedence. 

I came away from this book thinking that there is more rooted in my body than I think.  I think as humans, we often laud our own brains for being so complex, and devalue our bodies for being useless—after all, we can’t fly or climb trees or scratch our enemies with sharp claws.  We can think, and that’s our specialty.  But we still live in bodies, and we still store things there.  I grind my teeth at night because my mother does, and I have a tendency to worry because my mother does, and we both worry and grind our teeth at night while trying to sleep.  I am so used to trying to understand and work with my brain that I am not used to doing the same for my body.  After all, my brain is an organ, but it isn’t the only one I have.

-Leah

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight#t-1083054