Tag: neuropsychology

The Eyes Continue to Surprise

I enjoy when I find Bitmojis or GIFs or whatever that represent some part of my experience well or with humor. This one is an old favorite of mine because it so brilliantly captures my experience of brain damage:

I recently stumbled upon another one that led to an unexpected experience. I have written many times about my visual deficit, the loss of much of my vision on my left side in both eyes, called Homonymous Hemianopia, resulting from my brain surgery slicing away some of my optic nerve. Previous posts have pictures of my actual visual field over the years since my surgery but they don’t show what things look like through my eyes. People have difficulty understanding what it really means, but this does a pretty good job of illustrating my visual deficit:

It’s not that I see a black space; it’s just that I take in what I do see and there’s nothing else unless I go searching for it. This particular image in an example, but backwards, in that I’m missing the left side and see what’s on the right side. So I created the mirror image to better match my actual vision. This one is what I see when I look in the mirror. It is also how I see you if I’m talking to you. I am looking at your left eye, on my right side.

The surprise came to me when I looked at this second one on my phone. My eyes freaked out and couldn’t handle looking at this third person view of what I normally see. I did NOT expect that at all. I had to switch back to the first one to settle my brain a little. Who would have thought that I could easily look at the mirror image, but not the correct orientation? I pondered on this for a few days. I have two guesses. The first is that my brain just really hates my hair parted on the opposite side. 🤣 My second guess is that my brain has learned that there is often more information that can be found by scanning left and that I naturally do this now. I think it threw my brain for a loop when there was literally nothing over there but white space. It simply doesn’t compute and my eyes get strained and I have to lean back from the picture while it’s in front of me, even while I’m sitting here typing. I have nothing profound or philosophical to say about this; I just had an experience that I found super interesting and wanted to share with folks who might also find it interesting. I am thankful that my brain continues to entertain me.

Stone Temple Pilots in neuropsychology

In my first neuropsychology therapy session on handling neuro-fatigue, I learned a tool to Stop-Think-Plan and as my therapist was explaining it to me, my brain was totally fixated on STP being Stone Temple Pilots. I was a 90s kid, that is what STP means to me…unless I see it on a vanity license plate I suppose, then I would think STOP.

The concept makes perfect sense. In order to be proactive about my neuro-fatigue, more conscious self-monitoring can help me figure out when I’m doing things inefficiently and I can learn to auto-correct. My problem is that my human factors brain wants things to be simple and user-friendly from the get go and if I don’t perceive them to be, I go into redesign mode immediately and have a hard time paying attention to the content of the discussion. I have the feeling that I might be an unintentional pain in the ass patient as we move forward. First, it drove me a little crazy that the STP handout was in almost all italics so they weren’t used for emphasis. Second, I found the stop sign concept to be too jarring for my brain for a mental tool that I want to become an automatic helpful tool. I’ve been thinking of another picture that could be the visual representation of this tool. Perhaps the STP sticker or maybe I’ll just put pictures of Scott Weiland around my apartment as my reminder. It’s not like he’s hard to look at anyway. From now on when I see a picture of Scott Weiland, it will be my mental trigger to take a break and ask myself:

-What am I doing?

-What was my original goal?

-Could something else work better?

I just realized I can have auditory representations of the tool as well. I will add some STP songs to my playlists so that they can also be mental triggers. Dual coding my STP triggers into multiple sensory systems. Go brain!