X-Message-Number: 5993 From: Alan Brain <> Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: Brain Damage - Personal Experience Date: 14 Mar 1996 07:59:31 GMT Message-ID: <4i8jl3$> 2 Anecdotes regarding Neural damage, which may be germane to discussions regarding the 'not 100% perfect' issue of being de-suspended. a) [Personal Experience] I contracted E II Viral Encephalo-Meningitis at age 20. When I recovered from the Coma, I'd suffered significant and irreversible disfunction along the spinal cord, Cerebrum and Cerebellum. In terms of what this meant to me, I'd lost a lot of reflexes in my legs, had slight-to-moderate aphasia, an almost indetectable speech impediment, and virtually complete loss of sensation in all extremities. The sensation bit has come back about 60% in the last 17 years, but there seems to be no improvement in the last 5. Even now, I must perform a visual scan of hands, feet etc that is the lot of anyone stricken with Hansen's disease, or similar damage. No fun when a secretary screams when she comes in the office because you haven't noticed the pool of blood from a cut on your hands... Fortunately for my peace of mind, I'd had a Stanford-Binet test only a week previously, and took another a few weeks later - which gave a 2 pt improvement. Yes, I know such a thing is statistical noise, but was still glad it was higher, not lower. I've since travelled extensively in non-English-speaking countries, and seem to have an increased faculty for learning languages by sound. b) A very good friend of mine suffered a complete heart shutdown on his honeymoon. Somebody-or-Other's syndrome, a genetic abnormality. His wife is a nurse, he was on the steps of a hospital at the time, BUT he had no pulse for 7 minutes. Very bad news. During recovery he had to be taught to walk again, had almost no memory of the last 15 years, and had a radically changed personality - almost a Tabula Rasa. Over the next 10 years, he's made an almost complete recovery! Even 6 months later, he remembered my face, if not my name. A year later, he remembered my name, and some of the past. His new personality seems to his friends and family to be just the old one grown back again. Not all memories are intact, but most are, and the remainder are at least partial. Conclusions: I'm not a neuro-physician, nor a psychologist, just a Computer Scientist, so can only give a personal view: I hypothesise that providing no gross structures are destroyed, that the self-repair capability of a Neural network as complex and redundant as the Human CNS seems to be quite effective at recovering lost patterns, and establishing alternate paths. Unfortunately, without knowing quantitatively how many, and the distribution of cells that karked it from toxins/viral infection or anoxia respectively, I can't say more than that. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5993