On the general practices of well-being amongst personified literary characters serving as an allegory to real life

I recently read about a man named Clive Wearing, a respected pianist and musicologist who contracted a vicious virus which struck him with retrograde and anterograde amnesia. bet you didn't know there was more than one type of amnesia.

Well, retrograde is your soap-opera amnesia, you know, wake up and can't remember any past memories. Anterograde is sort of the opposite, you lose the ability to form new (long term) memories.

Clive Wearing lost his memory and the ability form new memories. Boy does that suck. How much does it suck? The mere act of opening his eyes after blinking seemed to him waking up, coming into existense, for the first time ever. this happens nearly every time he blinks. From his wife Deborah's book...

"It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say. “It’s like being dead.”"

He keeps a diary. Here are some entries...

"2:10pm This time properly awake
2:14pm This time finally awake
2:35pm This time completely awake"

He can recognize his own handwriting in these journal entries, but he can't--in any stretch of his mind--understand how he could have written them because as completely as he knows, he has just come into consciousness for the first time ever. More entries...

"At 9:40pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims."
This is then crossed out and followed by...
"I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.”
which is in turn crossed out and followed by similar statements.

He has kept this journal for years, and it consists of hundreds of pages of these nearly identical statements.

This astoundingly horrible, terrible story has led me to think a little bit about my own brain. I know that my brain doesn't process information in the same way that the majority of people do because i have ADD (which i'm sure you all know means Attention Deficit Disorder). Our culture has a completely wrong and flippant understanding of this "disorder." You do not have ADD moments, you most likely do not have ADD, and contrary to popular belief it is not something that everyone has a little bit of. I don't even like the name, because so-called ADD is not actually "not being able to pay attention." I prefer to call it "Attention Imbalance Syndrome."

I don't think most people understand all of the processes of paying attention. You can break them down into a couple of parts...

• choosing the right stimulus to focus on,
• sustaining the focus over time,
• dividing the focus between relevant stimuli, and
• shifting the focus to another stimulus

Most people simply consider #2 up there, but people with ADD break down at all four stages of this "paying attention process."

procrastination can simply be laziness, but for an ADD person it can be (not always is, but can be) the difficulty choosing the right stimulus to focus on. One common occurance among ADD'ers is what's called hyperfocus, which is a breakdown in shifting the focus to anotehr stimulus. Etc., etc.

If this were all the differences, it might be one thing, but there's a whole slew of other differences in the way the ADD brain works than the way the majority of people's brains work. There's a lot of things, and I certianly won't go into many of them, or in much detail.

ADD brains file incoming information differently than other brains. The simple way of saying things? Our brains are disorganized. Well, by normal standards. Practical (regular) example--that phone bill that comes in should be filed under "Financial, pay by tuesday." The ADD brain files it with "need to go get a Christmas tree." You may think that sounds dumb and illogical--it certianly doesn't make sense to most people because your brains naturally organize these things. ADD brains don't do this naturally, and that's why on Wednesday when i'm at the store (even though i meant to do it on Monday) to get a christmas tree, I remember the phone bill. Fat good it does me on wednesday at Target to remember to pay the phone bill, so the information gets re-filed, probably next to "Natalie Portman is heck of hot" or somethign like that.

there's a ridiculous amount of other things, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting all the ideas out of my brain down onto the computer (also ADD--an input/output inbalance). If you're interested, talk to me or pick up "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?" by Kate Kelly & Peggy Ramundo. It's pretty fascinating, actually.

I learned a lot about myself when I started learning about the way an ADD brain works compared to most people's brains. What shocked me the most was figuring out that all this stuff that my brain does, the way that it works and doesn't work--that isn't the way most people are! All this stuff that I assumed was normal, this stuff that I just figured was normal, wasn't!

it's hard to go through life working as hard as you understand you are able to do things that other people can do without batting an eye. it's really frustrating and debilitating to live a life of "if you would just work a little harder, you'd be able to do this" when you ARE working really hard and still failing. You pretty much start to think that's all you are--a failure.

The trick, of course, is not working HARDER. It's to work smarter. Learning the strengths and weaknesses of your brain, leveraging your strengths and finding the right tools to overcome the weaknesses.

Because what it boils down to is that we can't use this difference in our brain activity as an excuse. I cannot and should not be expected to be held to a different standard than anyone else. I am not inferior, I am not less able, I simply work in a different way.

And that different way has it's own benefits, definately. That willy-nilly organizational system inside my brain can lead to brilliant insights and creativity when two seemingly unrelated thigns get filed together (grilled cheese & ice cream). The too-fast working brain bypassing it's normal filters speeds ahead to a conclusion before everyone else gets there. A case of hyperfocus blocks out distractions to get the rush project done on time. All sorts of stuff like that.

I don't really know what the conclusion I was working towards was when I started this whole post. I know that the brain is beyond fascinating, and cases like Clive Wearer are astounding, tragic, and remind us about how little we actually know about what makes us tick.

Did you know famous anterograde amnesia patient HM could learn new procedural memory (muscle memory) but he couldn't remember how he learned them?

I don't care what you think about hwo far we've come with science or technology or computers or anything, we haven't even come close to creating anything so nearly complex and flexible and capable as the brain.

But mostly, i think that the sad and strange case of Clive Wearing is the sort of thing that needs to inspire a song. Hopefully I'll be able to write one.