Introductory post.

A brain injury is much more than an illness. You don't just rest and  wake up one day and everything is back to normal.

Neural networks are built up through exposure to the environment via the sensory system then processed and stored. You are the accumulation of your experiences, your neural networks.

A brain injury damages or destroys many of these networks and by extension damages and destroys your experiences and ultimately affects you as a person. You are different as a person, the feeling that something is missing is strong and can be overwhelming. There is a saying in the brain injury world, "the mourning for the former self", it is a bereavement process. You feel the loss of a person that existed and is no longer here. The irony of this situation, the person is still present in physical form and is mourning the former self. The mourning is for the experiences and neural makeup that has been built up to create that former person.

It may sound odd but personally I have found the whole process of having a brain injury and working though it very interesting. I have realised that there is no recovery in a real sense. There is instead a recreation, what you experience is what you become. The plastic nature of the brain allows this process.

I have experienced many states of consciousness, described by front line medical staff as 'hallucinations' and generally phrased as mental health issues. My opinion and that of a GP friend is that this is standard practice and the reality is that most medical staff, GPs, doctors and even psychologists have absolutely no idea whatsoever what these experiences are. The standard brief, according to my GP friend, is to diagnose a mental health condition, for as she further points out the  general population is viewed in economic terms, as 'economic units'.

During these altered states of consciousness you become very aware of your own conscious awareness. It is the central theme, you are aware of these states, and their contents, as they happen. There is an unchanging central you that existed before the brain injury, during the brain injury, during 'hallucinatory' shifts in conscious awareness and during every day of existence. Once it is experienced the awareness is always present.

This I find presents a problem because whatever the state of the brain the central conscious awareness remains consistent. But as described earlier, the 'mourning of the former self', of previous experiences, is what seems, on that level, to be the self. Is there some kind of interface between conscious awareness and the neural mechanisms of the brain. Are they separate? Does the brain generate conscious awareness? Does consciousness exist as a separate 'thing' and somehow experiences this reality through the sensory mechanisms of the brain?

I will record my experiences in the 'pages' in the blog.