"Illusion is the price that must be paid to evolve perceptions that can keep up with a dynamic environment"
-Roy Sorensen-
When we think of the term "brain damage", we generally experience an instantaneous bristle - a perish-the-thought kind of shutter and revulsion. We run from the very imagery. We think of half-dead wretches lying, lifeless, in some state-run institution or hospice with nuns, shoes squeaking, running amok and tending to the albeit quite limited needs of the "brain dead", whose drool out of the corner of their mouths, have a hose of some sort stuck in it, or not. Whose fingers and toes are curled, whose nails are yellowed and long-since neglected, whose decubitis-stricken body is simply waiting for their brain to stop completely, legally, and finally. We think of the poor Karen Ann Quinlan's and Terri Schiavo's of the world - once vital and young and the waiting world their lovely oyster, now counted among the poor souls whose body has betrayed them, lying in wait of death to take them.
Ok stop! This is BRAIN DEAD not BRAIN DAMAGE. Not the same. Not even close - although it can be. If you are reading this, trust me here, chances are pretty good that you have or have had some of the later. In fact, it is a virtual impossibility to get through life without any form of brain damage somewherein that otherwise wondrous and most likely highly functional brain of yours. Just as it is nearly impossible to get through life without any damage, mild or otherwise, to your physical person. Think about it.
Sex addiction is another term for a specific condition secondary to a brain damaged right prefrontal cortex. But hold that thought for now...
Damage does not infer permanence. This is important so let me say it again - damage to the brain does not mean that the brain will remain damaged or that the damage was severe in the first place. And it certainly does not infer totality. It infers nothing other than damage. It means that something was nicked, marred, broken, or somehow discombobulated at some level. It might be minor, fleeting, and completely reparable. Or not. It means that something happened to a part or parts of your brain, directly or indirectly. Your brain is much like the rest of your body below the neck. Meaning, there are strenghts and weaknesses and levels of damage. As a female, I have characteristically stronger legs than I do arms. I happen to have a superior sense of smell and hearing than I do vision, and my right prefrontal cortex clearly outshines a portion of my parietal or temporal functions - for the most part. Oh, and I also happen to have a very unusual and highly specialized but nonetheless permanent and unmistakable brain damage. It happened when I was not quite 16.
I have a problem with numbers. Not just any old numbers. And not numbers in the sense of plain ol' numerals. Numbers that involve a compound meaning or analytic calculation. I cannot conceptualize what mathematical application to use for a specific numerical problem because that very specialized portion of my brain has been severed - or in my case, fried. I understand what is being asked of me. I understand the nature of what the result or answer should look like. I just cannot for the life of me, come up with the application - it is if all of a sudden everyone stopped talking and I forgot what was just said. The most effective way to describe the problem would be to picture yourself standing on a pedestrian bridge. You know of course where you are standing - after all you are not blind. And you know where you are going because you can see the end of the bridge - therefore you know your destination. But oddly and inexplicably, there is a gaping hole right smack in the middle of the bridge and you simply cannot figure out how to get to the other side. So you just stand there, starring blankly, knowing something is expected of you, some action is required, but you haven't the slightest clue of what it might be or where to go to get it. There is a complete and utter disconnect - and the rest of you is connected enough to know it.
In the spring of my 16th birthday a random but synergistic co-mingling of two otherwise innocuous events nearly caused my death. That summer I was flying to Israel, and happened to be one of the last people in this country to receive a mandatory small pox injection prior to overseas travel. Little did I know that the little boy from across the street, with whom I had direct physical contact, was incubating the chicken pox. The incubation period while highly infectious, consists of roughly 3-weeks time from initial exposure where there are no apparent symptoms. Somewhere high above the seas of the Mediterranean, the incubation period ended and my coma began.
I had no way of knowing that my very unusual and specific problem was due to the specificity of function of our miraculous brains. And so I did what most people do who are ignorant of something, in the true sense of the word, meaning "having no knowledge of" - I dismissed it as something "scientific" or having the property of anything "real" and "concrete", and simply relegated the problem to the "psychological". This is what ignorance does - it takes something that is unknown to us and pawns it off onto something insignificant or worse - something "soft" and not scientific. Something attached to willpower or stupidity or laziness or defect.
It took some 30 years post damage (and much frustration) to come upon the excellent work, still in progress, from the Parisian neuroscientist, director of the INSERM-CEA at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, and professor of neuroscience, Dr Stanislas Dehaene and his amazing and ongoing work on the temporal and parietal lobes and their neural circuitry for "number" and "location". His webpage can be found at
http://www.unicog.org/main/pages.php?page=Stanislas_Dehaene. In fact, these same but seemingly separate and distinct functions may indeed share the same exact neural pathway! Amazing. Apparently it is an extremely rare occurrence to have these and only these overlapping impairments, since we did not even know they existed in such specificity nor that they were related in any way. Apparently numbers that are associated with space and time are located very, very deep within the intra-parietal sulcus of the brain, and are quite different from any other type of "number" or "numerical" function or operation. Who knew? No one believed me. No one believed it was possible for this otherwise highly intelligent and more importantly, very abstract thinker who wanted to be a physicist, who could easily comprehend advanced statistics and the theory of probability, but who looked like a deer caught in the headlights when a simple arithmetic calculation was presented to her. What was the answer to my problem? That it must be "psychological" of course...
Alcoholism was until very recently (see initial post in this blog) considered a sign of "weakness" or "character defect", and still is by many people the world over. Ditto for sexual addiction. But nowhere is this conundrum more problematic than it is for the case of sexual addiction. We think this when we say, sexual addiction must be a "weakness", because why would an otherwise educated or bright, or socially facile individual who seems to have it all, in a high-profile profession, risk it all by going out one night and having anonymous sex in the park at 2:00 in the morning with a bunch of anonymous teens, moments after having kissed the wife and kiddies, snug in their bed in the burbs, "good-night"? Such was the case one day, of a certain well-known and highly respected judge whose judgment landed him on the front page of the city paper, somewhere in America, for all the world to see? When asked why he did it, he said with complete an utter honesty, "I haven't a damn clue".
For a brief but thorough summation of my frontal lobe sex addiction research, go to http://drsarahullman.com and read the article on the sexually addicted frontal lobe.
When we understand the nature of the brain - how different parts of the brain function differently, and what happens when there is damage to a specific part of the brain and the result it will have on us psychologically, physically, and mentally, then we can begin to answer the question, why is it an otherwise intelligent, high-functioning, and seemingly responsible adult can act with total disregard, either physically or emotionally, toward another human being? The answer lies within the right prefrontal cortex (PFC). When there is damage to the neural circuitry of this area, then the functions subserved by this area are impaired. What is subserved by the right PFC? Things like impulsivity, judgment, reasoning, consequences, social intelligence, delay of gratification, planning, goal-directed behavior, and a host of functions that we think of when we think of "personality". It is like drinking alcohol. The brain might be just fine until you take a few swigs of an intoxicating substance. That very same brain that was working just fine a few moments ago, is now, while under the influence, acting as if something pulled the plug on their ability to act like an adult! When the brain is under the influence of sex, all of us act just a little differently. But when a brain that is already impaired or damaged in the right PFC, has sex, then it is as if the plug has been removed, the dam bursts, and all of the functions attributed to that part of the brain become go completely or partially haywire, until such time that the brain sobers up and is no longer under the influence. And that is why a sex addicted brain while under the influence, appears to be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I fully understand what it is like for the world to so completely misunderstand an important aspect of your life. Forget the fact that I was reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain at 11 - for the second time because I was bored, or that at 13, I was one of the youngest members of the Gurdjieff foundation of which I was a self-proclaimed fan. The problem was that I could not calculate mathematical problems - I was considered mentally slow and put into "special" classes. And so, having had enough of what I knew could not be true but without the wisdom to prove my case, I up and left the 8th grade and went to college instead...
I understand what it must be like when the world tells you that what you have is all in your head, and when there is nowhere to turn nor anyone to turn to for the answers. It is amazing how we incorrectly and often dangerously surmise and whitewash those things that we fail to understand. How we are so diligent in categorizing people no matter how incorrectly, so that they fit nicely into our prefabricated folders of how the world makes sense.
Sex addiction is a neurological problem that can be repaired. Period. Wouldn't it be nice if the world were able to see things as they really are and not how it best fits into our limited level of knowledge and understanding? I think so, do you?
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