Ode to the brain

I have this wacky case of vertigo today, I assume it's some kind of inner ear thing. I've been feeling queasy on and off for a few days, and I thought I had some kind of stomach bug but maybe it's related to the vertigo. I'm walking around feeling like I just got off a really nasty carnival ride, ready to heave my breakfast and fall to the floor in a fit of dizziness.

I'm sure it will pass (and if it doesn't I'll get my ass to a doctor), but it is one of those experiences that makes me marvel at the wonders of the brain. When you think about the mechanics involved, it's pretty amazing that we're not constantly stumbling around in a dizzy, disoriented state. The part of the inner ear that maintains balance is a complex series of circular tubes filled with fluid and tiny, little hairs that monitor the distribution of the fluid and send signals to the brain - which matches these up with visual inputs to figure out which way is up, down and sideways. It does this all the time, constantly, unobtrusively in the background of our conscious thought processes.

It's kind of like the time several years ago that I had the rare form of migraine that mimics a stroke by causing expressive aphasia, the loss of language skills. I could read individual words, but could not have decoded a written sentence if my life depended on it. I was able to speak, but only in simple, slow sentences extracted with overwhelming mental effort and concentration. People spoke to me and I could follow along, more or less, but it was oh, so exhausting. Meanwhile, the thoughts inside my head - which I think of as occuring in sentences - were unimpeded. Inside my head I was observing and cataloging and analyzing my experiences with perfect clarity. I can remember standing in the toothpaste aisle at the store, staring at this baffling wall of brightly colored boxes, and thinking - "how odd; I have no idea what any of these things are."

I took a long, deep nap and woke up fine. I saw a doctor, and they scanned my brain, and determined that I didn't have a stroke or an impending aneurism. My doctor explained that a tiny little bleed in the brain sometimes sets off life-saving signals by leaking out little drops of blood, because "the brain doesn't like to be touched" and thus it goes a little haywire, giving you just enough of a heads-up to fit in some emergency brain surgery before a full-blown rupture.

It was diagnosed as the atypical migraine, but afterwards - knowing it wasn't anything life-threatening - I really wanted to have the experience again. We take speech so much for granted, and I am fascinated that a tiny little hiccup in the brain could cause that function to shut down temporarily. The brain is doing all these incredibly complicated things for us, all the time, and we don't even think about it. It's amazing it doesn't hiccup more often, really.