Traumatic Brain Injury

[djama]

I lost large parts of my frontal lobes
after a car crash
I have been told that I suffer from 'disinhibition'
which is usually described as something like
losing the ability to refrain from impulsive acts

but I have found
that losing frontal lobe function
is a much more profound loss
than losing the simple capacity of an ‘adjudicator’
who decides whether or not
you engage in a particular behavior

it seems to be the loss of the site
where the specialized belief system
for the particular culture
in which you find yourself
is acquired, developed and housed

acquiring and adopting such a belief system
is critical to fitting in with the culture
but it is separate
and it is fundamentally different
in form and function
to any decision making process

eg it is one thing
to not walk down the street naked
because the society in which you live
finds this undesirable behavior
and you decide it would be inadvisable
to participate in such undesirable behavior

and it is quite another thing
to never have the desire
to walk down the street naked
because you have absorbed the belief system
of your society which regards this
as undesirable behavior

the second form
although unconscious
is much more efficient

not only is there no conscious process to run,
there is no conflict to assess
and no resolution to find

also it avoids the difficulties that arise
if current cultural beliefs
are inconsistent, unethical or unjustifiable
because when the process is unconscious
all these discrepancies go unnoticed

if by virtue of a Brain Injury
a person has lost their capacity
to house the current cultural model
they simply cannot function well
in that culture

such people are continually rejecting
and objecting to the inconsistencies
of the culture in which they find themselves
and that is not conducive
to doing well in that culture

this is especially unrewarding
if the current culture
is a particularly unjust one

it is like being stuck eternally
in the ‘rage against the machine’
adolescent phase of development
where unethical, unjustifiable
and inconsistent cultural beliefs
are repeatedly and vigorously rejected

the loss of the frontal lobe function
and the hypothesized loss
of 'current cultural belief system'
seems to me to be like the loss
of the particular printer driver
that you need for your computer
for your specific printer

that driver may be very idiosyncratic
with many inconsistencies
it may even be badly written
but you have to have it
to drive that particular printer

if you don’t have it
your results will be opposite of what you wish
terribly time-consuming
and horribly uneconomic

just about describes my life really - ciao