Having known thousands of adults with brain injuries over the course of a 28-year career in rehabilitation, one can’t help but acquire a deep reverence for all the tissues of the brain.
Every neuron and mental power we possess is precious; these manufacture every iota of our intellectual, emotional, sensory and movement experience.
My job in identifying a list of reduced, distorted or obliterated abilities in TBI patients promotes an awareness of the look and power of each of our mental faculties. The loss of a capacity vividly informs us about how difficult life is when a skill is reduced or rubbed out.
This leads me to the recent Extravaganja. I know that drugs are intensely alluring and pleasurable and the brain just loves pleasure and novelty. But fun or not, it is disturbing to see the actual celebration of a substance – marijuana – which gums up your synapses and, from my experience, looks like brain damage.
Pot impairs clusters of the most vital human mental abilities housed in the frontal lobes: Initiation, motivation, goal-setting, problem-solving, judgment, planning, coordination and length of attention and sequencing action towards a goal.
The awful rub is that for most regular users of pot, their life trajectory is likely to be rather flat, if not downwards, owing to reduced mental prowess. The other rub is that there is a clear tendency for users to forgo the development of more effortful pleasures: reading Joyce, climbing a mountain, playing a sport, wooing and winning the adored object, practicing your horn, keeping a garden, getting a degree or building things.
Our pleasure circuit, evolved over eons, rewards us nicely for these and many other satisfactions. The worst rub of all is this: Say you can experience a “10” on the pleasure meter from natural, effortful pursuits. With drugs, the pleasure circuit is hijacked into producing a 20, or a 50. Natural highs find it hard to compete.
The silence, complacency and enabling of this slow-motion train wreck is hard to believe. Why? There is no identifiable train wreck, just an expanding cohort of regular users who quietly do not come close to reaching their potential.
David Zimicki
Haydenville
The writer works as a rehabilitation psychologist.