Having an injured brain is making me wonder about a lot of things. For instance, what exactly has been damaged? Should I be envisioning a top layer with a shallow bruise, home to really advanced processing, of some sort? A deep bruise with damage to high-level and really basic functions? What is “higher” or more complex or more valuable thinking, anyway? Memory retention and recall is definitely affected, and so is word-finding, and so is what I call the anxiety channel. Where do they fit in?
I have no idea. But one thing I feel pretty confident about — with no evidence at all, now that I think about it — is that creativity is a higher-level brain activity.
And my creativity is definitely broken.
A very November-y scene. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Svln_svln4821_ordubad_me_best_top_photography_resimleri_sekilleri_photos_creative_profil_maraqli_sekil_resim_fotograflari_fotograf_ornek_resimler_(351).JPG
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and usually I would be frantically writing some fiction, carrying around a laptop and hammering out poor-quality high-quantity prose every chance I get. Not this year. This year even writing these short blog posts has felt really tiring — and that’s without any plotting or character development (etc.).
Usually I’d be doing something creative, like writing song lyrics, or drawing. But I don’t feel any urge to do these things, for the first time in my life.
Come to think of it, this is a pretty boring post, isn’t it?
Wow, this looks complicated. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lionsthlm/9174309962