How music fixed my head injury

This has little to do with Big Data (or anything IT related for that matter) but I’m writing it anyway in the hopes it helps someone somewhere recover.

History

I slipped and fell backwards on ice last February in Connecticut early one morning. I woke up on the pavement outside my apartment in teen degree weather a while later with a cracked skull. Ended up being taken to the hospital where I spent the night. Some internal bleeding and damage to Broca’s area (stuttering and some aphasia) were the diagnosis. In addition, I lost most of my sense of smell and taste. This was interesting; sometimes I’d eat food while on trips that turned out to be a lot more spicy than I could normally tolerate. I recall once eating some Indian dish that I didn’t know was spicy until I started sweating while eating it.

Friends I skyped regularly with (mainly people in technology, smart folks with solid careers, smart folks) kept in touch with me after I went dark mentally. One told me later “I was worried about you. After you fell you stopped completing sentences and were pretty incoherent.” Personally, looking back I feel like my IQ dropped about 50 points or so after the fall. I had no ideas, no original thoughts, I stuttered a lot when anxious or upset and I used to tell people, “Words feel slippery in my head. I can know them but not say them sometimes.” It was like part of me was in a jail cell inside my head. I used to forget things. Not like “where are my keys?” but more like taking the kids to school in the morning and saying “Hey kids, where are we going again?”

Fast forward a year later, I’m different. I’m better, functional in society, etc. BUT, I am different than I used to be. Some of my technical skills I relied on in my IT career are either a) gone or b) trapped somewhere in my head waiting on a neuron path to be wired to them.

How do I know this scientifically? I don’t. But I can feel it. Like tiny islands in my head, missing spots where ideas and thoughts and paths of information used to be, but aren’t anymore. At first the left side of my head was ‘quiet’. I used to tell my neurologist that my left side was silent. Like a void. My internal voice wasn’t in there anymore. Now it is to some degree. Better than nothing yay!

I used to meditate a LOT when I was young and have a fairly self-aware mind (I like to think anyway).

What does this have to do with music and brain injury?

Anyway my brain seemed to be flailing around trying to rewire and eventually I fell into a pattern of listening to tracks of music in a loop. I think I listened to some of them several hundred times. The music I centered on all had some interesting criteria in common.

1) I typically hadn’t heard of the artist or track before my injury

2) It was repetitive, predictable melodies and somewhat nonsensical lyrics. Tracks like World at Large, or Don’t get lost in Heaven as examples.

3) It made my left side of my head feel funny. Like there was fuzz in it. A cotton ball or something. A tickle. It still happens when I listen to these tracks weirdly. Dunno.

This seems, more than any other therapy or exercises, to be the root cause of improvement.

I mentioned this to a good friend, a long time friend of mine, and she made a couple comments to me that seem to back this concept up:

Things like Gabrielle Gifford using music to rewire or this book called Musicophilia, to name a few. A simple search also showed a pretty interesting Psychcentral article on the topic.

So how are you different, exactly?

For people who don’t know me this is probably a question worth answering, so here goes.

Before:

Public speaker on Technology (performance, reliability, deployment of Windows)
Top-shelf technical engineer
Smart/creative do-er person

After:

Technical writer on cloud technologies
Slower to jump the gun
More a ‘how to guide someone’ than a ‘lead the way’ person now

If this still doesn’t summarize it well for you, Google or Bing can show you what I was like. What I do now vs what I did then is nearly a polar opposite from my perspective.

Also, my interests have changed some. My wife may disagree, but I’m more likely to think of the impact of things I say now. Before I had no problem saying it how I saw it and letting the dice roll from there. Now it’s more a ‘what is the impact of me saying or doing this’ before I jump the gun.

So maybe more introspective. Some might say, a little more slow. A little less likely to be bold. Different, you see?

So why did you write this?

To help others. There’s hope if you have a brain injury. Or know someone who has one. Try music, even if it’s ‘not their thing’. It might save their mind. Never know.

Peace. (continued)