I had a mini stroke that was classed as a TIA at the time, though it later turned out to have some lasting effects. It's a fascinating and overwhelming experience to unlearn reading.
To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.
I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.
As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.
But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.
I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.
I had gone blind in my right eye. There was one person standing before me at the reception in the emergency room arguing with the receptionist because he did not have health insurance (before the ACA). I remember thinking about a post card I saw in Powell's Books on Hawthorn St. in Portland Oregon out of the corner of my eye years earlier that said (paraphrasing) "Be thankful for our enemies, for they give us the opportunity to learn patience and understanding -- The Buddha." (The Buddha never said that.) While waiting I thought this was a good opportunity for me to learn patience and remain calm letting the man finish. That was a good thought because I was suffering from a stroke and if I had not been calm likely I wouldn't have survived. Turns out, every prior moment I had learned patience and understanding was for that one single moment.
Had a minor stroke a couple of months ago - scans show two holes in my brain, one was in my right arm's motor control (I realised what was happening when I kept missing the keys on my laptop) which came right within hours. The other is a mystery, it's hard to think of things that are gone, I'm hoping it was something I don't need anymore from a long time ago like COBOL or Fortran
No one knows how he would deal in such a situation and cope with it, some would give up or even kill themselves, other fight to come back.
Being able to reflect on that traumatic experience in such a calm and thoughtful process is inspiring.
Side note, could it be possible that the 'inner voice', which the author lost during a while is what separate us from animals ?
She mentions being at peace, calm without it. Not thinking about the past nor the future, just present.
I kept thinking this experience made her behave just like an animal : can't speak, extremely limited thought process, basic instinct. Is that what separate us from ape ? A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Edit: author seem to have written a book called 'a stitch of time', if you enjoyed the reading.
> A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat.
She didn't only lose her inner voice but the capacity to communicate and understand language properly. She also lost a lot of other, harder to detect, stuff. She also writes that she was capable of complex thought, just in a different way.
There are people naturally without an inner speech who can think just as well.
The Calm she speaks about is something else, it may be similar to animals or it may not but I doubt it was only caused by her loss of speech.
Beautifully written. Especially when you consider that the author suffered a brain injury to her language centers. Fascinating insights to how the mind works and how we process our world. I was supposed to be working, but I read the whole thing.
Yeah, I was struck by the thought of my child-self, perhaps 2 years old before I had a good grasp of the words I heard around me. Before I had language myself.
I scarcely remember but a couple things anyway, but even into the early years when I could speak, understand language, the memories of those times are as though of a time that seems not within the current continuum. It's like I was seeing the world but only through a small B&W TV.
This piece is a gift. Read it the second time today, but was only vaguely sure I've read it before (I think also through HN submission).
It might sound cynical to people who suffer from these severe neurological injuries.
But it also is also a great piece about "not thinking".
If you are a person who feels tormented and fascinated by inner monologue or generally have issues with self-perception, trauma, mental health, depression, this is a great read.
Especially if you feel trapped in your inner monologue. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this more often than not.
Same message like many spiritual or self-help strategies (mindfulness, living in the now, etc).
But this story is visceral, captivating.
I'm not a doctor, but I would even recommend it as a therapeutic device.
A friend of my wife's showed me a video of herself, post-stroke, reading from a Barney (purple dinosaur) book. She read with a strange accent that was more of an exaggerated Southern mixed with something completely alien. It was fascinating, and saddening, to see the precise ways in which her linguistic ability had been hit.
My father recently passed, and on the way there had 3 strokes (he's been smoking since he was 8).
The unnerving thing about his first stroke recovery is that as the brain healed, his personality seemed to change.
My dad is friends with everyone, my mental picture is of him telling a fascinating story while everyone listens. For a few months, the confident man I'd known for 40 years became like a teenager, quiet and timid. I think the timidity came from him not being able to find the words as easily, but it felt like there was a different person inside him for a moment.
My mom's had some personality changes since coming down with dementia. For one, she doesn't attend church anymore. Church is really close by; with assistance she could walk or be driven there easily. She just doesn't want to go. She'd been a Catholic all her life, and was just suddenly tired of all that Catholic stuff, in a way I thought I'd never see her be.
Well written - I do not possess an internal monologue (which apparently isn't uncommon), and a common thing people think is that it is like this author's description of "quiet" - yes, there is not a person "talking" in my head, but my head is anything but quiet most of the time. It just doesn't take the form of words/sound.
I know it's bad to say this - lile telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that someone truly has no inner monologue and at the same is capable of expressing complex ideas in writing or speech.
What IS there then, if it's not quiet like the author describes?
Could it be a lack of introspection? Have you been examined by any kind of specialist or is it self diagnosed?
a long time ago, we actually had to practice in order to be able to speak in our head without speaking out loud. so, in a way, we sort of used not to have an inner monologue, and had to develop one on purpose. now we do have one (though often it's more of an inner dialogue, because DID...)
Don't you ever think to yourself when waking up 'time to wake up' ?
Or when you see someone you don't like 'oh here is that motherfucker' ?
I mean the inner voice isn't like a deep discussion between you and you, its spontaneous stuff you just wouldn't say out loud.
I have a hard time believing some people don't have it.
I love that description of the quiet, not as something absent, but something incredibly present. The Quiet. I wonder if the experiences of that quiet are comparable to enlightenment during meditation.
Got about as far as being unable to read before I started crying.
After two Heart attacks, welcome to my last five years of passive acceptance.
Just about back up to reading so long as a sentence doesn't have too many concepts or TLAs. In which case, slow down and start again.
Had to learn to program again. I could remember the university lectures teaching programming (modula-2 - never used since) perfectly. I could remember reading the text books over the last 20 years (C, Ada, Visual basic, C++, ASP, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript) all of which I've programmed in but the fingers can not type the magic program words any more.
I've re-learnt C, I've prodded some of the bits I've completely forgotten the existence of (C unions of all things!), I've written half a pascal compiler. I've waded through Petzold's Windows Winforms C# book. I'm currently poking at relearning OOP with writing lisp interpreter from scratch (not just the meta-circular thing), but I seem to have side tracked into OpenGL, WebGL and ES.
After five years I've just about at the point where I can (technically) cope with a job again. But, s*t, agencies and CVs. I might hit retirement before I can deal with those again.
Meh, have fun.
Don't expect a reply - I've already forgotten the password for this account.
I posted a few days ago about my own experiences with aphasia as a teen. The term author came up with, "The Quiet," resonates with me. My own experience was also quiet, but not as peaceful as hers.
My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.
For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.
Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.
Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.
For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.
I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.
Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.
[+] [-] caseyy|10 months ago|reply
To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.
I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.
As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.
But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.
I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.
[+] [-] sdwr|10 months ago|reply
That's what makes great art sometimes, sharing an obvious truth that everyone overlooks. (Proof of work kinda - difficult to find but easy to prove)
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dataviz1000|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidlogin|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aucisson_masque|10 months ago|reply
No one knows how he would deal in such a situation and cope with it, some would give up or even kill themselves, other fight to come back.
Being able to reflect on that traumatic experience in such a calm and thoughtful process is inspiring.
Side note, could it be possible that the 'inner voice', which the author lost during a while is what separate us from animals ?
She mentions being at peace, calm without it. Not thinking about the past nor the future, just present.
I kept thinking this experience made her behave just like an animal : can't speak, extremely limited thought process, basic instinct. Is that what separate us from ape ? A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Edit: author seem to have written a book called 'a stitch of time', if you enjoyed the reading.
[+] [-] hirvi74|10 months ago|reply
Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat.
[1] Found this video on this site, and I found it to be a fascinating discussion if you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s
[+] [-] unaindz|10 months ago|reply
The Calm she speaks about is something else, it may be similar to animals or it may not but I doubt it was only caused by her loss of speech.
[+] [-] JanSolo|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|10 months ago|reply
I scarcely remember but a couple things anyway, but even into the early years when I could speak, understand language, the memories of those times are as though of a time that seems not within the current continuum. It's like I was seeing the world but only through a small B&W TV.
[+] [-] moritzwarhier|10 months ago|reply
It might sound cynical to people who suffer from these severe neurological injuries. But it also is also a great piece about "not thinking".
If you are a person who feels tormented and fascinated by inner monologue or generally have issues with self-perception, trauma, mental health, depression, this is a great read.
Especially if you feel trapped in your inner monologue. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this more often than not.
Same message like many spiritual or self-help strategies (mindfulness, living in the now, etc).
But this story is visceral, captivating.
I'm not a doctor, but I would even recommend it as a therapeutic device.
[+] [-] bitwize|10 months ago|reply
She's fine now, though, so no worries.
[+] [-] nailer|10 months ago|reply
The unnerving thing about his first stroke recovery is that as the brain healed, his personality seemed to change.
My dad is friends with everyone, my mental picture is of him telling a fascinating story while everyone listens. For a few months, the confident man I'd known for 40 years became like a teenager, quiet and timid. I think the timidity came from him not being able to find the words as easily, but it felt like there was a different person inside him for a moment.
[+] [-] bitwize|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnMakin|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] the_gipsy|10 months ago|reply
What IS there then, if it's not quiet like the author describes?
Could it be a lack of introspection? Have you been examined by any kind of specialist or is it self diagnosed?
[+] [-] RGamma|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LoganDark|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aucisson_masque|10 months ago|reply
Or when you see someone you don't like 'oh here is that motherfucker' ?
I mean the inner voice isn't like a deep discussion between you and you, its spontaneous stuff you just wouldn't say out loud. I have a hard time believing some people don't have it.
[+] [-] magicmicah85|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ngruhn|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] verythrownaway|10 months ago|reply
After two Heart attacks, welcome to my last five years of passive acceptance.
Just about back up to reading so long as a sentence doesn't have too many concepts or TLAs. In which case, slow down and start again.
Had to learn to program again. I could remember the university lectures teaching programming (modula-2 - never used since) perfectly. I could remember reading the text books over the last 20 years (C, Ada, Visual basic, C++, ASP, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript) all of which I've programmed in but the fingers can not type the magic program words any more.
I've re-learnt C, I've prodded some of the bits I've completely forgotten the existence of (C unions of all things!), I've written half a pascal compiler. I've waded through Petzold's Windows Winforms C# book. I'm currently poking at relearning OOP with writing lisp interpreter from scratch (not just the meta-circular thing), but I seem to have side tracked into OpenGL, WebGL and ES.
After five years I've just about at the point where I can (technically) cope with a job again. But, s*t, agencies and CVs. I might hit retirement before I can deal with those again.
Meh, have fun.
Don't expect a reply - I've already forgotten the password for this account.
[+] [-] shippage|10 months ago|reply
My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.
For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.
Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.
Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.
For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.
I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.
Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.