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The healthy brain is a symphony of 100 billion neurons, the actions of each individual brain cell harmonizing into a whole that enables thoughts, movements, memories, or even just a sneeze. But it takes only one dissonant instrument to mar the cohesion of a symphony. When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.
We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.
Maybe it’s true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.”
His case also established the existence of two different types of memory: declarative (places, names, object, facts, and events) and procedural (those learned as a habit, like tying shoes or riding a bike).
The parietal lobes provide the person with the “where and when” of the image, situating us in time and space. The temporal lobe supplies the “who, what, and why,” governing our ability to recognize names, feelings, and memories.
The parietal lobe is also involved in sensation, and malfunction there could result in a feeling of numbness.
NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate acid) receptors are vital to learning, memory, and behavior, and they are a main staple of our brain chemistry. If these are incapacitated, mind and body fail.
All neurotransmitters carry only one of two messages: they can either “excite” a cell, encouraging it to fire an electrical impulse, or “inhibit” a cell, which hinders it from firing. These simple conversations between neurons are at the root of everything we do, from sipping a glass of wine to writing a newspaper lead.
The frontal lobes are largely responsible for complex executive functions, prompting experts to refer to it as “the CEO.”
But one thing is certain: the frontal lobes make us creative, human, and simply less boring.
Sometimes, just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.
Studies seem to point to all autoimmune diseases in general as being about two-thirds environmental, one-third genetic.
Dr. Najjar, for one, is taking the link between autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses one step further: through his cutting-edge research, he posits that some forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression are actually caused by inflammatory conditions in the brain.
In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands.
The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.
Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”
