PTSD

The military is known for instilling leadership and teamwork ability ..skills that battle conditions can quickly take away. According to a Rand study, nearly one third of all returning troops suffer from some form of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury. Some of them show up at student services where I see them. James was part of a tank crew. On a hot day in Iraq ..they left the hatch open. That’s when a grenade blast slammed his head against an iron plate. At home, he enrolled in college using his GI benefits. However, crowded classrooms make him feel trapped and panicky. When he tries to contain these feelings, he finds he can’t make sense out of what the instructors are saying. Answering a question is like trying to find the answer to a riddle. He mumbles and strains to put together a coherent sentence ..and hopes he’s somewhere in the ballpark. I referred him to the VA for therapy. A short time later he quit school and went looking for a job. He hoped the skills they taught him in the service would help. Unfortunately, many employers told him they couldn’t accommodate time off for therapy. When I talked to him about it, he said he didn’t think that was the real reason. “They hire the disabled all the time.” He says “Guys that need just as much time off as I do.” “No, it’s more like they’re afraid I’ll go postal or something. Head-cases make them nervous.”

Territorial dispute

My neighbors across the creek have finally defeated Aaron’s efforts to live in the house that he built. It’s a beautiful Spanish-style residence that sits perched on the canyon just back from the creek. It has masonry-white walls, red tile roof, hardwood floors ..and no electricity. My neighbor Susan has kept him in court fighting for an electrical easement for so long now that he can’t afford to live there anymore. I like Aaron and I think it’s sad, really. At first I thought it was a case of extortion ..offering him easement rights in exchange for money or his first-born. I went on a long screed about this in a journal entry last year [link], if anyone’s interested.

Anyway, I have a new theory. I think it’s a tragic case of misperception. I believe it’s what happens when a strong-willed, powerfully-focused neighbor tries to negotiate a property agreement with a contractor who suffers a profound attention deficit. Aaron, the contractor, can’t stay on topic long enough to reach an agreement ..any kind of agreement. Susan gets frustrated and believes he’s taking her for a ride. I’ve actually heard her say things like “He talks in circles, purposely avoiding the issue, saying one thing then another .. he’s been bull-shitting me for so long, I don’t believe a word he says anymore.” Aaron, on the other hand, throws up his hands and tells me he has no idea what she wants. Susan says all she wants him to do is repair a shared driveway if he’s going to have to dig a trench through it in order to reach an underground utility. I don’t think Aaron can track what she’s saying long enough to grasp this. He can’t figure out whether she wants him to re-model her house ..re-surface the street ..scrap the project ..or leave a duffel bag filled with hundreds of thousand of dollars in an airport locker. He complains that she’s got him in a Catch-22. “She won’t let me go underground and she won’t let me go overhead” he says. “There used to be a pole on her property with wires leading to my property, but she conspired with the city and California Edison to have them removed so she could put me in the situation I’m in right now where she’s calling all the shots. I think she’s a sick greedy control-freak..! Don’t you ..?” I don’t know about that ..but I do know my head starts to spin whenever I try talking to Aaron about anything specific. I try asking him how long the trench would have to be ..and he tells me how long he’s been living in Santa Barbara (he’s fourth generation). I ask him to show me where the underground hook-up is so I can see for myself ..and he points to where the pole used to be and tells me he’s been robbed.

Social ecology

I grew up in the safety of a middle class neighborhood, which didn't seem all that safe to me. Housewives visited each other in the middle of the day carrying coffee mugs filled with Vodka. I could hear them downstairs complaining about their kids ..and how they’d like to “..really rip into them sometimes.” However, it was usually the mothers who were not present that got to be the subject of ridicule .. spouse and children included. So, it was very important that I be raised not to be a topic of housewife gossip. But I knew it was inevitable ..they spared no one ..everyone got his or her turn on the ‘chopping block’. They knew it too ..I could feel the tension. I could definitely hear it in the grief my mother gave me. Expressions like “What will the neighbors think..!?” were often used in reference to the length of my hair or the style of my clothes. Then there was “Look, I’m not talking Little Lord Fauntleroy or anything ..but it wouldn’t hurt if you wore something other than Levis or corduroys to school everyday ..what about those nice gray slacks I bought ..how come you never wear those ..?” Because I’d be mortified, I thought. I was more concerned with what a group of vicious classmates would do than what a flock of housewives might say. Which reminds me, the expression “birds of a feather” was one of the choice clichés my mother frequently hurled at me. So, you could say I was raised on a diet of clichés and hackneyed expressions. I guess it’s no wonder I don’t have an original thought to my name.

Dear John

Eric received a Dear John letter just before shipping stateside. It has made civilian life hell. Much more painful than anything he experienced in Afghanistan. He tells me she was everything he was living for over there. Now he’s reminded of her everywhere he goes, like ..the clubs ..city streets ..friend’s houses. He describes it as “..receiving an jolt of electricity around every turn.” Classes are torture, he can’t concentrate and I get the impression that student services are wasted on him. I’m out of my league. I see signs of depression. He has difficulty sleeping and concentrating .. the pain is like, everywhere he goes .. and he’s beginning to withdraw. I’m going to have to refer him to VA and hope that they don’t drug him into oblivion. I’m not unfamiliar with the pain of being dumped, however, so I try to convince him that it doesn’t last ..the shocks will begin to fizzle-out and his memory will begin to clear-out. But he’s not paying attention ..it’s not what he wants to hear. I try to imagine what it’s like. I picture him getting hit in the head (or punched in the stomach) with a baseball bat every time he goes through a door. Now he doesn’t open many. He doesn’t leave his room much either.

Net neutrality

There’s a space inside my mind that opens up from time to time ..and in those rare moments I’m in there, everything resonates with equal potential. I think it’s a place Eastern practitioners refer to as ‘Buddha mind’ ..a neutral state free from forces of passion and indifference ..and nagging opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. In other words, it’s out of reach of my judgmental mind. Apparently neuroscientists have discovered this place too. They’ve located a network inside the brain that comes online whenever the analytic networks are at rest. They call it the ‘default state network’ [link] and it lies somewhere outside regions of the brain dedicated to analysis and judgment. It skirts areas that are active in weighing alternatives and narrowing down possibilities. These areas are never at rest. Even when they go offline, the ‘default state network’ keeps them humming in unison. This creates a state of equilibrium where no one tendency outweighs another. They say it restores a sense of balance and even-mindedness. In some ways it sounds as though they’ve discovered what Eastern practitioners have experienced for the last 25 centuries.

Working memory

Presented to the
Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

It was interesting for me to see a recent study in neuroscience that supports my theory of reading comprehension [link] Bear with me while I try and explain (or you can duck out now and I won’t be offended). What they found is that working memory interacts with the senses in order to produce a stable view of our surroundings and reduce errors of perception. For one thing, it has to identify signals that are the result of actual sensory events and filter out extraneous signals that are produced by fluctuations inside the nervous system itself (like those caused by changes in activity levels, neurotransmitter concentrations, circadian rhythms, etc..). Neuroscientists refer to this as the ‘sensory orientation’ function [link]. The visual areas in the brain must distinguish changes in actual sensory events from changes in internal activity in order to follow the ‘genuine’ action. They claim that the brain makes this estimate based on principles of ‘Bayesian inference’, which are not much different than principles of ‘Pragmatic inference’. It works something like this: Incoming signals that are considered likely to occur, based on the contents of working memory, are given a boost. Signals considered less likely are held in abeyance and immediately suppressed if subsequent events don’t do anything to rehabilitate them.

Scatter brain

I’m chopping tomatoes for scrambled eggs when memories of doing this in the past pop into my head ..followed by thoughts about my partner’s progress on the road to Austin. A whistling sound brings my attention back to water for tea when I suddenly see flashbacks of my sister laughing at me about my breakfast routine ..followed by the sound of my college roommates yelling at me about how long it takes ..which morphs into a rehearsal for what I’m supposed to say at a meeting this afternoon. Suddenly scalding tea is spraying out of my mouth and I douse it with orange juice and realize I’m already sitting at the table eating breakfast.