A Philosopher on Brain Rest

THE STONE

A mild traumatic brain injury forced me to question where the “I” in my identity truly lies.

By Megan Craig
Ms. Craig is an associate professor of philosophy and art.

In January 2018, while I was chaperoning my daughter’s school ice-skating trip, a sturdy third-grade boy lost control and came sliding into me from behind on his knees. He was just the right-size projectile to undercut my skates and send me flying backward on the ice, where I landed on my head. Thus began my ignoble descent into becoming a philosopher on brain rest.

When I got up I was not my usual self. Feeling disoriented and unable to remember my own address or the date, I was taken to the emergency room, where I was examined and told I had whiplash and a concussion. I found the medical terminology for my condition, “mild traumatic brain injury,” confusing and humorous. It was confusing because I’m not sure how anything can be both mild and traumatic at once. It was humorous for the same reason.

The elegant doctor who saw me assured me that I would stop weeping for no apparent reason very soon, and that all I had to do to hasten my recovery was commit to “brain rest” — essentially no reading, writing, screens or strenuous thinking until I could sustain focus without a headache or other symptoms of injury. The predicted time for recovery was three months. It was at this point that she nonchalantly asked me what I do for a living. “I’m a philosopher,” I replied. And I’m pretty sure we both thought that was hilarious.

Being a philosopher on brain rest is like being a point guard on hand rest. The major asset for your profession is suddenly not working reliably. I have often lamented the fact that my job as a philosophy professor confines me so much to a chair and a desk. I’ve wished that philosophy entailed more calisthenics, rugged walking, running outdoors. [She must have been unfamiliar with the Peripatetics!] With my concussion, I found myself suddenly freed from the professional obligation to think. I even had a doctor’s note.

Sadly I was in no condition to run, and absent a clear head, walks and daily movement were more difficult [in my experience that's backward, clarity comes from movement] and less enjoyable than before. Brain rest itself was elusive, as I seemed incapable of arresting thought. There was no protective cone to keep the wounded place from being itched, no cast to keep the brain still. Perhaps predictably then, brain rest inspired more thinking about the very nature of thinking.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the immediate days and weeks following my concussion was the degree to which I found my self missing. I felt bad in so many ways, but the profound gap in my identity had to do with my lack of basic recall and the challenge of carrying out previously simple mental steps. I was moving about with no apparent difficulty, but my head felt like an anvil and my mind felt like slosh. It made me question anew the degree to which I am my brain.

Ever since Descartes insisted upon the separation of mind and body, philosophers (especially feminist philosophers) have tried to impress upon us the necessity of attending to the body. Descartes thought the mind was the divine and indubitable aspect of his own being, that single point of certainty on which to rebuild his crumbling world: “I think therefore I am.”

Descartes’ theory of mind recalls Plato’s theory of the soul as the immortal, essential and indestructible part of the human being, the body a temporary prison or shell. Mind-body dualism is often ridiculed in contemporary philosophy as a legacy of stubbornly metaphysical, patriarchal and Western thinking. Dualism oversimplifies both mind and body and leads to a devaluation of the complexly embodied, psychosomatic ways in which beings inhabit the world. No serious philosopher or neuroscientist today thinks that mind and body can be neatly parsed into two distinctly separate objects or systems.

But a concussion has a way of changing one’s sense of the balance between mind and body. It’s one thing to be hit in the arm or the gut. It is an entirely different thing to be hit in the brain. Dualism is terrifying in part because the separation of mind and body implies the possibility of radical skepticism, brains in vats and other “Matrix”-like specters of disembodied life. Such modern-day versions of Cartesian skepticism ask us to imagine the entirety of the external world as an illusion or the intricate deception of an evil genius. What if we are just brains hooked up to an elaborate virtual reality?

It has been a long time since I took any of these images seriously. They seem easy to dismiss when one’s health is good. When things are otherwise, dualism takes on a new dimension. The injury to my brain highlighted the degree to which my identity and my powers of identification have a specific seat in my brain. The concussed condition was an intimation of how terrifying dementia and other brain disorders must feel — the loss of a thread that has so far tied together one’s life and tethered it to the lives of those one loves. In my case, the loss was temporary, but it was the first time that I have ever felt so distinctly the efforts of thinking, the brain as a muscle and the depression that accompanies the feeling of having lost oneself.

Unable to rest my brain, I thought about N.F.L. players and the progressive loss of identity and mental aptitude common to those who experience consecutive concussions and C.T.E. (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). I thought about memory and the loneliness of being unable to recall names and places that are the road marks of a communal life. I thought about the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease whom I helped to care for when I was in high school. I would arrive each morning at her door only to have her greet me with the same wide-eyed gaze and question: “Who are you?”

Though my condition was transient, it highlighted the degree to which the brain serves as an anchoring center of control. For months, uncertainty accompanied my every move. In the immediate days after the concussion I mustered all of my energy to read my daughter several pages of a Daniel Tiger storybook (against my doctor’s orders), only to fail to reach the end. I felt embarrassed and demoralized. I recalled my grandfather, late in his life, describing his own failing mind as a library where all of the books were shelved too high to reach.

Over time my symptoms subsided. I started to read again — not only Daniel Tiger, but Henri Bergson and Toni Morrison — and eventually I began to write. But how does one know when the brain has healed? I’m not sure where my identity resides or even what my identity is or consists in, but I am sure that my brain is crucial in the continuing orchestration of a world that feels inhabitable and a life that feels livable. Brain and body cannot be separated, and yet there are episodes when they fall out of phase, the one wounded and diminished while the other projects a picture of health and ability.

Philosophers tend to make terrible patients. I’m fairly sure that by thinking so much about brain rest I have prolonged my own recovery time. I also suspect that my thinking about my own brain and the specter of dualism is symptomatic of the injury itself. Perhaps when I recover fully, dualism will seem as ridiculous as it once did, receding into the background along with the muscular effort required to read. But I suspect I am altered.

On the bright side, philosophy has been relentless in my life as a thinking person, and a little brain rest was long overdue. Without a doubt, philosophers have to remember and insist upon the dignity and complexity of embodied life. We have to attend to our bodies, to care for our fitness and psychosomatic health. But we also need to care for our brains. I wish someone had told me that long ago, and that my education into philosophy included more common-sense doses of rest for the primary organ of my thinking [see William James on "the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing"]. It would not have saved me from the injury, but it would have better primed me for the work of recovery.

Now more than a year since my injury, I am grateful for neural plasticity. I am alert to a difference between the everyday phenomenon of forgetting and blanks that intercede like dark matter in a brain laced with gaps. I remember the date, my address, my children’s names, with intention, holding them in place like precious stones in a ring. And I know that rest and recovery are as complex and meandering as thought itself.

Megan Craig (@waterstreetprojects) is an associate professor of philosophy and art at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and the author of “Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.