Sublime

Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.

On the downside, the bullet affected his brain processing – new neural pathways establishing themselves, heightening his intuition when it came to other people, a sixth sense so to speak. At least that’s how he rationalised it when he left the hospital and did the research. Neuroplasticity it was called. The brain’s ability to heal and to compensat

From the earliest days of my medical career I’d held a deep, intuitive feeling, almost a sympathetic pain for patients whose illnesses made them unrecognizable, sometimes even to themselves. Perhaps because I’d experienced my own identity as fragile, my old fear of not having a handwriting, I saw myself in these patients.

Hofmann became convinced he was going to be rendered permanently insane or might actually be dying.

If you want to see what a person who is totally removed from relational interaction looks like, examine the brain of someone who endured prolonged solitary confinement in prison.