Rupture: A Matter of Life OR Death Page #3

We are looking in at ourselves looking out.

Looking in, looking out.

That is the curious thing about brain science.

The object of study is also the investigator.

I am my brain and I am not my brain.

I am not my brain, but I am nothing without my brain.

As the Bard said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell

"and count myself the king of infinite space."

The human brain consists of 100 billion nerve cells.

Each nerve cell makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts

with adjacent nerve cells.

And each point of contact, called a synapse, can either be off or on.

So, this gives you some idea of the staggering complexity of the brain.

The number of permutations

and combinations of brain activity, or brain states,

exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

The human brain can explain the ghostly interior of an atom,

but it cannot fathom its own ghostly interior.

Consciousness remains a profound mystery.

It seems absurd that self-awareness can be conjured up from meat,

a lump of proteins, fats, sugars and salt.

So, what am I? Thing?

Or thought?

You are both.

And neither.

But I am a person.

A flimsy construction, fragile as a bubble on the breeze.

It's highly unlikely we have souls.

- It's highly unlikely there's an afterlife.

- Why is that?

Well, because I said,

if you've seen people with frontal brain damage...

Yes.

..it's very hard to believe that somehow when they die,

it all comes back again. It doesn't make sense.

We can't get our heads around death, that's the thing.

We can't conceive...

Well, if you think that there is some, you know,

heavenly theme park that we go to when we die,

and I find that really hard to imagine,

who do you meet there? What do you do for the rest of eternity?

But that aside, if you don't believe that...

..um...

..how can you imagine nothingness?

Everything that we imagine is built on something-ness.

Which is maybe one of the reasons, you know,

that we shouldn't be afraid of it.

If there's nothing that we can imagine or experience,

then there's nothing to be afraid of.

I'm not actually scared of death,

you know, like going to sleep and not waking up,

but I am scared of the violence before dying. The pain.

That physical pain.

And I think that the fear of it happening again is part

of the trauma, and I think it's part of the trauma that a lot

of brain-injured suffer from.

Even though they might be happier in rejoicing in their new life,

you know, but there is that fear.

For the fortunate few who recover without major disability,

the close encounter with death can be terrifying.

And often life changing.

In the world's killers,

after heart and cancer,

it's the third biggest killer in the world.

I mean, of 150,000 people who have a stroke in Britain this year,

one third will die.

Roughly. And another third will be so badly disabled

that they will never work again.

One of the things about affliction to the brain is that no-one...

one doesn't know much about it. I didn't know a thing.

I didn't even know what a stroke was.

And I was 42 at the time, so I should have known.

But there had never been one in my family, I had never seen one.

As far as I... Now, of course, I am very alert to them.

And when I came home, I just felt very unwell and I made

a cup of tea and went to bed.

Whenever I woke up the following morning,

I was completely paralysed down my left side.

And I had had what was called a right hemorrhagic infarct.

The right side of the brain goes to the left.

I was very fortunate, because if you have a left side,

you lose language, you lose speech.

And I had none of that. I have a slight stammer as a result of it.

The stroke itself took place in what is called

the basal ganglia in the brain.

Very deep.

And it's the bit which controls the tongue,

so, for example, right now, for instance,

I'm having to think quite hard about speaking,

which I wouldn't have done before the stroke.

When I was in hospital, my left side was complete...

I couldn't stand. I was in a wheelchair.

And, um...

For a long time, for about three months,

it looked as though I'd spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

But, you know, my life before the stroke feels like another life.

It feels very remote.

And it feels like something I've lost.

- It's a loss?

- It's a loss.

So, I think part of when I think about anger,

it's partly the anger of bereavement,

self bereavement.

Then the other thing that I had to do is that

I had to find a way of dealing with the depression,

because I think one of the things is you get very depressed,

you know, depressed at the loss of, you know, one's old life.

I felt very ashamed and very, very overwhelmed by that.

And very nervous. And awkward.

Even meeting old friends, it could sometimes be very difficult.

Well, you're a writer, and I think it's great,

great news that your mind has not been affected.

I've got my language, I've got my words and I've got my right hand,

so I can always write with my right hand.

I did feel, and I wanted to express myself,

I wanted to express my story, get it out.

And so, in some ways, I think the effect of the stroke was

to sharpen my desire to write, to be creative.

I had to kind of except it. I wrote a book about it. And then move on.

A really interesting feature of a stroke

is that very frequently people have partial

and sometimes complete recovery.

I know this from my own father

who had a stroke, oh, about now 15 years ago.

It was really very extensive, the damage.

And then, within a few weeks, he started to recognise people.

And then, amazingly, he has now got his driving licence back,

Not that he's allowed to use it, because he's 95!

So I've seen first hand how brilliantly

and how quickly the brain can recover from a stroke depending

on the extent of the damage and where the damage is, of course.

The more a brain cell is made to work,

the stronger the connections between other brain cells will be.

So, if you are suddenly making other brain cells work

because some have died, then they will make connections,

and that can be part of the so-called plasticity

of the brain, its ability to recover.

In addition to phantom pain,

people have also applied this technique to treating strokes.

You can make a phantom limb appear to move,

that alleviates phantom pain.

What about after an actual stroke, which causes actual paralysis?

Some of this paralysis is due to permanent injury

to the nerve fibres going from the neural cortex

of the right side to the arm, down the spinal cord into the arm.

So, there's not much you can do about that.

Those fibres are permanently damaged.

But maybe some of the paralysis is a temporary paralysis caused by

a temporary block of nerve signals going from the motor areas

of the brain to the arm.

So, on a hunch, we said, what if you put a mirror and have

the chap look at his reflection of his normal arm in the mirror.

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