Patchwork Labyrinth®

Patchwork Labyrinth® is about brain trauma, but it is also about cognitive resilience, and why you should care. Because thoughts are physical and not just chemical, movement fuels learning, too. My story explores how this is so, using my own experience with brain injury as its heart and then following branching pathways of scientific curiosity. There are dead ends; there is encouragement.

Patchwork Labyrinth® begins in 1993 when injuries from a car accident affect my abilities to read 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 bad balance, of mental overload. After surgeons patched these holes, many lingering symptoms improved.  During convalescence, my observations from the 1990s about what had helped me twenty years earlier got reinforced. Learning and memory are boosted when I use my hands and feet for repetitive activities like crafting, walking, and writing. Neuroscientific discoveries keep yielding evidence to explain why this is so.

Questions? Contact me here.