Patchwork Labyrinth®

Patchwork Labyrinth® is about brain trauma, but it is also about human resilience, and why you should care.  The story explores how movement fuels learning by keeping experience at its heart and letting curiosity open new pathways. There are dead ends; there is encouragement.

Patchwork Labyrinth® begins in 1993 when injuries from a car accident impacted my abilities to read, walk, and write. (Click to hear how improvement took months.) Some concussive symptoms never went away, so I began tracking how different activities, environments, and foods affect them. My training as a forest scientist gave me the patience and tools to look for patterns in what was happening to me and how it felt. Because a revolution was underway in brain science, I also paid close attention to advances in neurology. Concepts like neuroplasticity, or how the neurons in the human brain can change into adulthood, and the free-energy principle.

By 2012, diagnostic imaging had improved enough for doctors to identify small holes in the bony labyrinth of my skull. Here was an obvious source of my poor balance, of chronic mental overload. After surgeons patched these holes, many lingering symptoms improved.  During convalescence, my observations about what had helped me get back on my feet some twenty years earlier got reinforced. Using my limbs for repetitive activities –like handwork, like walking –boosts my learning and memory. Neuroscientific discoveries keep yielding evidence to explain how this process could occur.

Questions? Contact me here.