The MS Brain

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Most people will say 10 cents. This answer tends to look obvious at first glance, nonetheless it is incorrect.

This example is given in a book about the brain that I am reading. It is given as an illustration of how the brain thinks, which is really not at all like a computer nor a calculator. Rather, it appears that the brain will often run on intuition rather than logic, the reason for this being that the route to conclusions is shorter, faster on the intuitive highway than on the bumpier road of logic.

Now, on the other hand the damaged brain (i.e. the MS brain) falls into the habit of taking long-cuts. This is because multiple and various routes are blocked by scar tissue. The process runs up against a wall. It reroutes. This takes just long enough to create physical or mental deficits--spasticity, confusion, indecision, cognitive hiccoughs, feet that buzz, shoulders that twitch, hands that tremble.

Maybe you get lost in a parking lot while your brain is busy at sending thoughts through dizzying alternative channels, picking up the necessary information to arrive at a proper construct of sight and memory, motor response and accurate identification. Maybe you actually become dizzy in the process as well, adding a further impediment to the solution of your quandary.

Let us say that yesterday morning you fell down the stairs in your house. This is something that most all people will do at one time or another (unless they have no stairs in their houses), but with MS it is something you can count on happening if indeed you also happen to have a molecular beaver dam halfway down the stream between the lift foot instruction and the put foot down instruction.

We begin, therefore, after enough falls, after enough endless journeys around the parking lot, to commit ourselves to a deliberate sort of thought process. This is not to say that we succeed at all times (or even at most times), but it is a matter of practice, a matter of adjustment. In MS there is no straight route, and there is no intuitive route--there are only the routes that propose to navigate the damage that was done by the storm--whoops log-jam there, washed out bridge to the south, we will have to go north and then cut back again, down by the old river road--you know, the one that hasn't been used in ages. And so forth.

More and more I try to practice an artificial sort of deliberation as often as possible. This in turn often results in a physical slowness that mirrors the mental, a necessary trade-off. I stand by the door counting my way through a checklist--keys, cell phone, wallet, cigarettes, laptop, & etc. I stop before getting behind the steering wheel, collecting data on locale and recollection. I check notes that I keep in my back pocket, and whatever tasks I find that can be done on the instant, I do--for I will surely forget if I put them off for even five minutes.

Sometimes I feel like a game piece on a Monopoly board. I move according to the numbers, look at my cards, follow the directions, plan my strategy. But this is not a game, not a mere amusement--this is walking, thinking, talking, functioning, where poor planning sends you not straight to jail (do not pass Go), but flat on your face at the bottom of the stairway.