Rupture: A Matter of Life OR Death Page #6

to return to an area they remember they'd found water,

maybe 10 years ago.

And it allows them, this memory allows them to live.

I remember my husband telling me things after my operation

and I wouldn't understand what he was saying.

The words were familiar, but their meanings would evaporate.

And I couldn't make the connection between the thoughts

and the words, and then I couldn't retain what he was saying.

So, it was a real, real battle with the memory,

and I was feeling awful,

as if I'd become stupid.

How does the meat of the brain give rise to the mind that we experience?

How does memory, perception, language, problem solving skills,

control of action,

how does it all come together to produce this unified sense

of self that we all experience?

GUITAR MUSIC:

I had a great deal of anger in me,

for what I referred to at the time

as misdiagnosis. To have been diagnosed

as a manic depressive

when I was suffering from birth AVM, arteriovenous malformation,

was very injurious at the time.

I thought it was injurious.

There's a whole legend that has been built up around Pat.

We have this great guitar virtuoso,

a prodigy who leaves home in Philadelphia as a 15-year-old kid

and goes to live in Harlem and plays with the jazz greats.

That in itself is a pretty remarkable story.

He then begins to have psychological problems.

He then develops seizures.

And in 1980, at the age of 36,

he has a life-threatening brain haemorrhage,

which requires pretty drastic surgery.

And that's where the legend really starts,

because then he completely loses the ability to play the guitar.

Not knowing who I was, not knowing how to play,

being told that I should play my instrument again,

being told that I should do this and I should do that,

and this person is who you are,

all of those things I was told were very painful because I feared not

being able to live up to the overall description that others gave to me

of that person.

It took me 17 years to play the instrument again.

He certainly lost the motivation to play.

I think he was, for a while, a lost soul.

He'd lost his sense of identity.

He didn't recognise his parents, he didn't really know who he was.

It takes a long time for him to even pick up a guitar again,

despite the encouragement to get him back to his old self.

And eventually, he relearns the guitar from tuition videos

from a great teacher, his former self.

In a sense, the legend is intact.

It is a remarkable story that he did have this period of loss

of identity.

So the idea that he completely lost the ability to play

was never...was never probably true.

What he wouldn't have lost is the sort of the dexterity,

the movement of the fingers over the fretboard,

because those parts of the brain were not affected.

When you remember your life story, that is known as episodic memory.

When you remember skills, like knowing how to ride a bike

or play the guitar, that is known as procedural memory.

Memory is obviously a huge topic,

and it is a major commitment of real estate by the brain

to manage all your lifelong memories

and have a really efficient filing system so that you can access

that memory rapidly.

It's amazing to see Google do that.

So, you type in some obscure thing and you instantly get this answer.

Well, the brain does that a million or a trillion times

more effectively, and we don't know how.

Someone who is injured and loses their ability to form

new memories, they don't have short-term memory,

they can remember what happened before the injury

because the machinery that put those memories in place

was functioning then.

That machinery is somehow damaged by the injury.

They can't put new data into the filing system.

There are things that the human brain does that is incredible,

that is very difficult to measure.

How does one measure creativity?

Our ability to see, our ability to speak, our ability to think,

our ability to create,

our ability to ask the questions that we don't understand.

It's hard to assign that to a particular region of the brain,

so my view has always been it's that something extra,

that something special that those vast areas of the frontal lobes

and temporal lobes are actually performing.

When Herbie Hancock, you know,

composes a great piece of music, or Quincy Jones.

Yeah, I mean, one can remove large areas of one's brain,

but can you still get that type of creativity

without those areas? I doubt it.

Can you describe what happened to you in 1974?

Well, something that I'm sure both of us hope never happens again.

I guess I was 41 years old and all of a sudden I blank out,

double vision.

When I come to, I feel like somebody had shot my head off with a shotgun.

And you had it at what moment?

Well, I was being intimate with my wife, you know,

and I had been up for two or three days writing music.

And we were lying there that afternoon

and one thing led to another, and, bam, I was out, you know.

For seven days, they couldn't figure out what it was.

Thank God my doctor was a genius. She was a very special lady.

She is one of the ladies who worked on Einstein when he was dying.

She said, "I think I know what it is, but before we do it,

"we have to cut the throat and put in two pipes at 32 degrees

"to cool the brain down because it is inflamed and if we open the top,

"it'll jump out the top."

All this talk, I don't need this, you know!

I don't need to hear all this stuff.

They told me the odds were 100-to-1 to live,

- that makes you feel real good.

- Yeah.

And they came back in after the operation and said,

"The good news is you'll live, the bad news is you got another one

"on the other side and we have to go back in two months."

So...

A lot of the things I'm glad I missed in the first operation...

For instance, before I go in, I'm looking and I see a bag down there

in my stretcher and I say, "What's that?"

They said, "That's your hair. If you don't make it,

"we put it back on so you look good in your coffin."

THEY LAUGH:

For the second operation, my whole left side was paralysed.

Did you find that the experience, the near-death experience,

and going through all of that really painful journey

made you discover something new in your music?

The essence, I think, stays the same.

It's just your passion probably steps up

six or 17 marks, you know,

your passion for being able to write music, to express yourself, because,

you know, everything in life, the value just goes straight up.

You know, just everything, your relationship with your family,

your friends, everything becomes more important.

You are more careful about everything,

you just care a lot more.

What did the doctor say to you when you had your operation,

that you were not allowed to do in music anymore?

The first thing was I could never play my horn anymore.

Only with just the physical idea of blowing with that kind of force,

it could blow the metal cap off of the brain and you would die.

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