"In his decades of medical practice, Marsh has been a witness or a party to almost every kind of mistake."

"There are errors of commission (the hubristic removal of too much tumor) and of omission (the missed diagnosis). There are errors that go unreported (after a successful surgery, Marsh might decide not to tell a patient about a close call) and errors for which Marsh is held accountable. (He writes that, after one operation, 'I told them to sue me. I told them I had made a terrible mistake.') There are errors of delegation�as when Marsh allows a resident to perform a simple spinal surgery, and the patient is left with a paralyzed foot�and historical errors: at a mental hospital, Marsh encounters victims of lobotomy. One morning, Marsh operates after having a petty argument with another surgeon, and the operation paralyzes half the patient�s face. He writes, 'Perhaps this was going to happen anyway�it is called a "recognized complication" of that particular operation�but I know that I was not in the right state of mind to carry out such dangerous and delicate surgery, and when I saw the patient on the ward round in the days afterwards, and saw his paralyzed face, paralyzed and disfigured, I felt a deep sense of shame.'"

From a New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman � "Anatomy of Error/A surgeon remembers his mistakes" � about a book by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh titled "Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery."

Oliver Sacks writes about Spalding Gray's brain injury and suicide.

Gray was in a car accident, in 2001, that drove bone fragments into his right frontal lobe and, it seems, changed him profoundly:

It was while he was in the hospital in Ireland following his hip surgery, he told me, that he finalized a deal to sell the old house. He later came to feel that he was �not himself� at the time, that �witches, ghosts, and voodoo� had �commanded� him to do it....

Three years later, he was still obsessing about selling the house. Asked if he had other recurrent thoughts:

He said yes: he often thought about his mother and the first twenty-six years of his life. It was when he was twenty-six that his mother, who had been intermittently psychotic since he was ten, fell into a self-torturing, remorseful state, focussed on the selling of her family house. Unable to endure her torment, she had committed suicide....

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"'Free time' � an interesting concept. You always do something with your time."

"You would have more free time if you saw yourself as free when you are doing whatever it is that you do. The question is, how did you get into the predicament of doing so many things that when you do them you do not feel free?"

From a post I wrote on April 14, 2007 titled "The man whose left pre-frontal cortex � the center for positive emotion � soared off the charts."

"Shortly after the accident, it became clear that PA had lost much of his memory; he didn't recognize his family..."

"... and the woman he'd been cheating with � whom he'd gone so far as to proclaim the 'love of [his] life' � was now a stranger to him, too. But more than that, it appeared he'd lost his own sense of self. He tended to 'cling to the identities of others,'his physicians write in the case report, by which they mean that he often believed he was whoever he happened to be around at the moment."

"In 1998, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the idea of 'the extended mind'..."

"... arguing that it makes no sense to define cognition as an activity bounded by the human skull. Humans are masters of mental outsourcing: we archive ideas on paper, we let Google Maps guide us home, and we enlist a spouse to remember where our wallet is," writes Daniel Zalewski in a New Yorker article about an artist, Lonni Sue Johnson, who has suffered from from amnesia ever since, in 2007, viral encephalitis "essentially obliterated her hippocampus."

Her "extended mind" includes: 1. a tote bag full of various notes and maps, and 2. her sister Aline (whose "account of her life [she trusts] as strongly as she used to trust her own memory"). Johnson has a terrible impairment, but reading about her impairments, we see things that are true about ourselves. We may feel that our mind is entirely inside our heads, but the people and things that surround us function enmeshed with our memory. I was especially struck by this paragraph:

Johnson was wearing a magenta turtleneck with black sweatpants and plastic Mardi Gras necklaces. (An amnesiac cannot be trusted with gold.) She had worn the same outfit to the Princeton lab. Some of her favorite clothes are growing threadbare, but it�s difficult to replace them, because she doesn�t accept new clothes as hers.

She doesn�t accept new clothes as hers... We're not that impaired. New things can become ours. But I know the feeling. It's something like what George Carlin was talking about in his delightful monologue "Stuff":



"That's all your house is - a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it." But that's your extended mind, too.

"Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house." Well, of course, you're going to need your mind.

"You get over to your friend's house... and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something... You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, 'All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay.'"

What things (and people) do you accept as yours? How are they part of what makes feel okay... makes you remember who you are and what you are doing here?

"Is Chris Borland�s retirement the beginning of the end for the NFL?"

"Chris Borland is quitting... as a linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers at 24 because he�s concerned about the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma. ."

Borland becomes the fourth player at the age of 30 or younger to retire in just the last week...

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