Driving with the brakes on...

Fear not. Not really driving at all. And everyone is better off for it.

I read an interesting article on “howstuffworks.com” the other day. It talked about how “swearing” or “cursing” works. Great website, by the way. Explains all kinds of things work (or might wok), from car engines to tsunamis to teleportation. The article explains that in most people the left brain is in charge of language. The right brain adds the emotional or instinctual components. Language is a complex function involving the right brain coming up with phonemes (units of sound making up words), and the left brain assembling them into sentences (basically). The theory is that the right and left brain can find itself in quite a power struggle when swearing. The higher the emotional charge (or other feature which might provoke swearing), the more advantage the right brain has in this struggle. Scientists theorize that swear words are stored, not as phonemes, but as whole word units. This difference makes swearing a function that could be performed solely by the right brain (the emotional side), without the left brain’s help. The ECT I am having, so far, is right unilateral ECT, meaning that that electrical stimulus is being used on the right hemisphere only (again, where emotion is thought to live.) Who cares about all of this? I have noticed that my reaction to stimulation in my environment, irritants, frustrations, etc, has changed over the last week (noticeably.) Where before I would have been very prone to become very frustrated at simple things and “resort” to swearing, I might get frustrated (although that tolerance level seems to have been elevated at times), my choice of reaction is different. My choice of words has changed, become more “thoughtful” in that my choice of word and tone are more managed. Could it be that with my right brain getting slapped around three times a week, my left brain is able to overcome some of the advantage my right brain enjoys in its use of profanity? End of anecdote.

There are many metaphors for how my head and body feel today. It took serious planning to get all the way out of bed today. I was wiped out by the treatment yesterday, and slept good. I started to get up several times this morning, and would find reason after reason (i.e. a new section of the “Today” show would start) to delay. I’m very unalert and distracted. Feels sort of like I’m not really part of my world. Like a hamster in one of those acrylic balls they run around in outside of their cage.. I’m in my world, but somehow detached. I guess as long s no one kicks me in the “ball”, I’ll be ok (yeah, yeah, bad pun. What did you expect from a guy in my state of mind?) I don’t feel depressed at all, not unhappy, not worried about the future. Not happy either, and not looking forward to the future. I find myself slipping into that stare or trance people fall into when they are staring at nothing and thinking about something inane (I like to think of that as my brain going to “screensaver”). I’ve noticed, since yesterday, that there are things I can’t remember, and they fall into two classes. Class I are the things I probably shouldn’t be able to remember anyway, like the old man’s name who lives a block behind me and two houses over, and whom I’ve only spoken to once. Before, I might have been able to dig some clue out of my database to piece together a name for that guy. But probably not. Then there is Class II. The things that I know I should be able to recall, things not intimate to my daily life, but immediate enough that they should pop back into my memory when I need them. And they are there, but they seem just behind a dark filter, like a window sheer. I can see the silhouette, but I can’t make out enough detail to bring the memory forward.

My wife said I looked bad all day yesterday, like I was drugged out. I felt that way too. Over all, today, I notice less rigidity in my thoughts and a need for less structure and routine, less of a need to be in total control of how every little aspect of my day goes. I think this might be what people call “relaxing.” And it occurs to me that I’m not sure that I will know “happy” should it come back into my life. I will notice the absence of “unhappy”, but the gap between “happy” and “unhappy” could cause me perceptual issues.