Traumatic brain injury and Buddhist understanding of mind.

[Matthew]

This is a very interesting history of someone with traumatic brain injury.

'By the time she was preparing to return home to Victoria, she was gradually growing more comfortable with a definition of recovery that exchanged an idealized normalcy for a model where permanent changes coexisted alongside personal growth.

She realized that she had been seeking to fulfill a story she was inventing about her recovery. Humans have an instinct, an adaptive response likely forged long ago, to extract some kind of deeper value or importance from their most challenging experiences. “We love finding meaning,” Sophie told me during one of our conversations. “We’re just trying to create meaning. We’re trying to create a narrative that we can understand and that sits right. And that might not be the truth—and that’s OK. That’s just how it is.” When catastrophes cleave our lives apart, in order to restore purpose and cohesion we need to stitch our stories back together with a new through line.'

https://www.wired.com/story/the-curious-afterlife-of-a-brain-trauma-survivor/

[Middleway]

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing Matthew.

“The sweeping changes in her perception became the crux of her reinvention. After all her experiences distrusting her senses and cognition and relentlessly plumbing the slippery depths of her identity, Sophie had come to imagine a different sort of self. “I have rejected the notion of having an identity, and I take so much meaning from the things around me,” she said. “The birds coming out, the mushrooms growing, the rain coming back, the smoke rolling in.” She was, she said, “just a witness, a witness to everything wonderful and awful going on.”