My Brain Damage

You know how I was joking around the other week when I posted up images from my MRI scan? Turns out the joke is on me.

The story is this:

Waaaaay back in 1983, when I was a lad of 12 going on 13, I worked weekends at the Bundaberg Gun Club. My job was to spend the entire day down a dirty, smelly, hole in the ground, covered by concrete, putting clay pigeons

 onto machines called traps which shot them out into the sky at a million miles per hour (or thereabouts) for the guys standing 10 metres behind me to shoot with shotguns.

Well one day in 1982, I was down in the hole with my best mate Ross. It was lunchbreak, and we busy re-stacking a large automatic trap which could hold about 100 clays at a time. The usual ones only held one at a time. We had our flag up to let the shooters know that we were in an unsafe position. The process was supposed to be that, before they resumed shooting, they came down to our hole, told us they were ready to go, and we would resume our safety positions (ie sit BEHIND the trap).

Well for whatever reason on this day, after lunch they decided to just start shooting without warning us. The trap was operating by remote control from where they stood (they yell "PULL" and the adjudicator presses the button to shoot the clay).

As it happened, when they pressed the button, I was standing to the side of the trap and my head was directly in the path of the large metal arm which flings the clays out into the sky...

Ross managed to get me out of there when I re-gained consciousness after a minute and they took me to hospital where I stayed for a week with a head the size of a watermelon. I've still got a hole in my skull just near my left temple but I hardly think about it.

It was my dear old mum who noticed the white bits on the MRI scan below.

I asked my shrink about it yesterday and he concurs - that's some serious brain damage in my left pre-frontal cortex (the images are reversed).

Now HE thinks, because I was only 12, I was probably lucky, because that part of your brain doesn't fully develop until later on in life. The brain probably just re-routed the neuronal development around the damaged areas.

HOWEVER. I was an early bloomer (at least I was until then). I reckon that cost me.

I remember reading this study last year about the each side of the pre-frontal cortex and how they seems to correspond to emotion. 

Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain's set point for moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

So I'm interested - is my damaged LEFT pre-frontal cortex partly responsible for my moods?

Anyway - my shrink refuses to give me a "mentally disabled" sticker for my car so I can get those good carparks and a disability pension.

Comments

[Rob Irwin]

Bummer! I knew, reading this piece, you were just angling for a good park... ;-)

[Paul Montgomery]

Damn dude, that's some crazy stuff. Your brain has certainly compensated for the positive moods. You should get your shrink on G'Day World to discuss the ramifications further!

[Josh Graham]

Who the hell needed an MRI to know you had some form of brain damage? I just thought it was from the excessive alcohol consumption and non-stop deathmatch LAN parties in years gone by. Hmmm, that might explain mine anyway. ;-)

[Noel Kelly]

ummmm...

I got hit in the head by a bin lid frisbee at High School. Maybe I should go stick my head in a Magnetic CAT too!

Gee, I remember when MRI was called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). Guess the N just ain’t PC.

Gnoll

[CD]

You could set up an online petition - surely you'll get enough people to vote you "totally insane" :-)

How about suing the Gun Club for billions of dollars you could have earned if this accident had not happened...like you could have created Google or something like that...

[Cameron Reilly]

yeah I've thouught about that CD. I don't think they have much money, but perhaps I could get a free shotgun or something. Are they illegal these days?

[Rob Irwin]

Nah, you can have a shotgun. It can't be pump-action or semi-automatic, but you can have a regular old shottie, sure.

[Stephen Pierzchala]

Treatment in Australia must be better than in my home country of Canada. In Canada, people suffering that level of brain trauma are doomed to a life in politics.

All joking aside, you are extremely lucky. Goes to show just how resilient the brain is.

And humans sometimes to worse things to the brains of other humans.

'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080

This is a serious examination of what can happen when someone deliberately messes with your pre-frontal cortex. Makes you step back and re-examine many things.

smp

[Greg]

Somehow I stumbled upon your blog searching through some recent pings on other sites. Great website! Sorry to hear about your unfortunate luck with the MRI results. But good parking is something that doesn't come along much in life :P
www.FiveZeroFive.com

[Anthony Joseph]

Ouch! The brain is much more adaptable than previous thought ... by coincidence Richard Davidson has shown meditation improves brain activity associated with happiness ... so you can change it ... can't quite imagine you sitting still ... check this out http://www.cognitivetherapy.com/goleman_nyt_2003-02-04.html

[Cameron Reilly]

AJ... check out my post dude... I already linked to that study! :-)

My reading on his study though is that those parts of my brain which show neural activity during "happy" meditation are all dead. :-)

[James]

It's a damn good excuse, I'm very jealous... that could go a long way!

[Bear]

Dude, that is a great image of your broken bits!

I'd be keeping a copy of that in my wallet and pulling it out to show people so they would by me drinks! My shout when we meet up someday.

Don't worry about the happy moods being missing, I have my little black cloud follow me around most of the time and I never got whacked in the head with a trap mechanism.

[Richard]

Despite the facetious commentary of the response, I think that the findings on your MRI scan are directly related to your moods and possibly to verbal concentration and planning. Left brain injured patients are classically more depressed and are
"tarnishers" rather than "polishers" Although you had the injury at age 12, you were a little too old to escape the long-term effects of the injury completely. You might look up the work of Oliver Sacks to understand how subtle some of the brain injury effects can be. good luck

[Miriam Parkinson]

Hmm Random as this post was AGES ago but all I have to say about it is that developmental abnormalities in the frontal lobe are responsible for ADD which is associated with lower levels of seratonin in the brain which causes both ADD-type symptoms such as poor concentraion/verbal retention/foward planning and depression particularly in highly intellegent people so there you go!

Also even the most minor bang to the head can completely change your personality.

incidentally I KNOW I cant spell - not my fault I have retarded development of the frontal lobe ;-)