Contributed by Billy Ethridge
Actions / Surprises / Insights
Michael Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating how the brain enables the mind. Over the course of several decades, a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres.
In addition to his position in Santa Barbara, Professor Gazzaniga is also the Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and is the Director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project.
Contributed by Billy Ethridge
September 6, 2008, about 1:50am, I had a massive hemorrhagic stroke at home. Like millions of other stroke "survivors", my life has changed irreversibly.
I am not a physician or rehabilitation therapist or other medical professional, though I have greatly benefited from kindness of some very skilled ones.
A number of years ago, I did PhD work -- but no dissertation, so no PhD -- in Philosophy (Logic and Linguistic Analysis) at UCSD, with a strong mathematical background. At age five I started judo, and subsequently studied Aikido and Tang Soo Do, and other martial arts. I am also a musician -- singer and instrumentalist (primarily a guitarist and harmonica player). Over the years (I was born in 1948), I have created music & lyrics, poetry, and other writings.
I summarize these elements of my life because everything in me, and what I have learned from my rehabilitation, conversations with patients and medical professionals, and extensive reading, tells me that: (1) the stroke I have had has been THE single most transformative event in my life; and (2) this transformation has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me even in the midst of dramatic neurophysiological demands.
Stroke Revelations is intended to provide personal reflections about what is possible to those of us who have entered the "event" of a stroke and came out alive. This blog is dedicated to all people whose consciousness has been overwhelmed, from whatever avalanche of neurophysiological reasons, and did not make it to the "other side".
"Every human being is the author of his own health or disease." ~Buddha
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