‘Caveman with a missing link’ – or something like that was what the game on Facebook called “How Big is your Brain?” had described me as. Thinking I could do better the next time, I got ‘Goat brain’. I sighed heavily and thought it’s probably only telling me what I don’t really want to admit to myself.
Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s really going on in my grey matter recently, and I’ll probably be thinking about it even more for the next two, three, four or so decades. These last few months I have become very intrigued by the subject of brain science and neurology.
It seems after having done a bit of reading that I have a lot of missing links up there which I didn’t know for a long time were ever missing in the first place. About ten years ago when I was in my early thirties, my wife at the time, told me she had been reading an article about someone who suffered from Tourettes Syndrome and she said that the article listed many symptoms which I matched. That was when I first learned that what I had was essentially a neurological disorder and that it had a name.
I recall quite vividly, one time in 1976, I was coming home one Friday afternoon on the train from my school for the partially hearing (as it was described then) in Southport where I boarded weekly. I was reading a jolly book about a ghost that turned into a black shadow in the day and became white at night, and while reading it, I suddenly had this urge to blink my eyes… It’s odd really that I am able to recall that day so well.
During the years that followed, my eye blinking became a habit I had little control over. Other kinds of tics developed too, such as twitching my nose and worryingly I had one where I would shake my head. It bothered me very much, and it bothered my parents too, especially my mum who would often tell me to try to stop doing it. I was of course teased by my peers and I remember one time when I kept a pocket diary in which I had written some personal stuff such as; ‘I must try to stop shaking my head...’ and unfortunately, I dropped my diary one time and one of the girls in my year snatched it and read out aloud in front of all her friends everything I had written in it. I was relentlessly teased for weeks afterwards. Adolescence is difficult enough to have to go through as it is, without this urm… blinking Tourettes. At the age of 14 and 15 I had to share company not only with Tourettes, but also acne which blessed mostly my forehead, atrocious smells which especially frequented my feet, big plastic things dangling on my ears called hearing aids, greasy hair, a pair of black NHS style framed spectacles and big silver braces on my crooked teeth - so crooked in fact that one tooth stuck out like one of Dracula's fangs and alas I was nicknamed 'Baby-toothed Dracula'. In fact, if I'd been entered into the 1980 geek of the year competition, I'd had won it hands down.
Tourettes is a neurological disorder that always starts in childhood often around the ages of 6 to 8. Experts tell us that this condition may affect as many as 1 in a 100 of the population worldwide. For most sufferers the symptoms disappear in early adulthood but for some it can be a lifelong condition and sometimes chronically so. Every sufferer has different kinds of symptoms and there are different grades of severity of the disease, usually described into three categories. At the lower end is ‘pure Tourettes’, where the symptoms are movement and sound tics only; then there is ‘full blown Tourettes’, which in addition to movement and sound tics, the sufferer may have one or more of conditions such as paliphenomena, echophenomena, copropraxia and NOSI. With paliphenomena the sufferer repeats his own words or short sentences, and with echophenomena the sufferer repeats the words of others. Copropraxia is when the sufferer says offensive words involuntarily and with NOSI which stands for non-obscene socially inappropriate behaviour, the sufferer usually makes inappropriate remarks about a person but falls short of actual swearing. The third category is known as ‘Tourettes plus’ where the sufferer in addition to the symptoms of full blown Tourettes has one or more accompanying conditions such as ADHD, OCD and Sleep disorder.
It surprises me a bit that in this day and age of advanced technology, the causes and the mechanisms of this particular disease are still not very well understood, and while there are various kinds of treatments available, there is no real cure for it to date. What is understood is that it has generally to do with an imbalance of chemicals (namely neurotransmitters) that upsets the normal working of neural circuits in the brain.
I’ve never had my condition formally diagnosed by a neurologist since I’ve generally learned to manage with it without too much bother. By my understanding of the disease, I would say my symptoms fall into the ‘pure tourettes’ category, except that in addition, I often have considerable difficulties with my thought processing. If there is such a thing, I’d say I have internal paliphenomena, meaning that whilst I have absolutely no urge to repeat what I say aloud, I do have thoughts in my head which repeat themselves all the time. Sometimes when I am talking with someone, I will say very odd thoughts about that person in my head such as ‘he smells’. You can laugh of course but believe me it is very distracting to my concentration. When I’m reading, I almost always have to repeat the sentence I am reading which in turn causes me to lose my concentration and I have go back a sentence or two anyway to take it into my mind properly. I have similar problems when writing or typing. I frequently have to go over the last sentence again and again because I very easily lose my train of thought.
This internal paliphenomena, or whatever other name the condition goes by, also has implications on my ability to make conversation. It is rare for me to be able say much more than a couple or so sentences at a time because usually by the second or third sentence I have lost my train of thought. There has to be a pause, while I try to think about what I need to say next. Anyone, unfortunate enough to be in a conversation with me has to have the patience of a saint – assuming that saints are a patient kind that is. I don’t know for sure if the condition I have just described is a part of the Tourettes or if it’s something in addition to it. I'm inclined to believe it is a part of it.
My Tourettes waxes and wanes. Different kinds of tics come and go. The symptoms have always intensified during times of high stress at work, and also during times when I am going through intense periods of study and learning. I'm not surprised by this because in study and learning, your brain is establishing new networks and so there is more neural activity going on in very specific parts of the brain. Maybe the faulty neurotransmitters that are being secreted in the newly created networks is what triggers a higher activity of the symptons, until other neurotransmitters are generated as a response to suppress the symptoms. Similary in times of stress the neural cells secrete a certain type of neurotransmitter to tell the adrenal glands to make some cortisol and I suspect that particular type of neurotransmitter is often faulty in the brain of a Tourettes sufferer thus triggering the symptoms. Just my own personal hypothesis and probably very wrong! Jeez! I'm bloody brilliant aren't I? I ought to be in a science lab leading the way in research into the causes of Tourettes.
In the years gone by, there have been times when these personal limitations will have undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on my confidence levels. Fortunately these days I have learned not to worry about my conversational performance. I am who I am and there isn’t really that much point in fretting over it. There is no gain to be had by being embarrassed or ashamed. I have no reason to care about how others perceive me. It’s taken awhile to develop that attitude and to shrug off the burden. Slowly but surely my confidence has grown and together with the maturity that comes with age and experience I have become a much more relaxed and self assured person.
So back to the caveman with the missing link... yeah, I thought with a smile on my face... that's me all right.
