Sunday, September 10, 2017

Has Donald Trump been brain damaged?



The famed neurologist Oliver Sacks once described a brain-damaged actor.
He was not describing Donald Trump. But the resemblance is remarkable.
You may also find it eerie

Remember the late Oliver Sacks? 

He was the celebrated neurologist who wrote books about people with quirky conditions of the brain that led to behaviors incapable of explanation by simple psychiatric means.

In "Awakenings," he told the story of a group of people who seemed to be in a kind of paralytic sleep for decades — except the when you threw a ball at them, they'd catch it. 

In "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat," — well, the title pretty much describes it. 

Sacks once treated the actor Spalding Gray, who eventually committed suicide.

After an automobile accident during which Gray suffered a concussion, he underwent a troubling change in personality. Sacks attributed it to damage to one of Gray's frontal lobes. Said Sacks, in an article that appeared in the New Yorker Magazine:
But the frontal lobes also exert an inhibiting or constraining influence on what Pavlov called “the blind force of the subcortex”—the urges and passions that might overwhelm us if left unchecked. (Apes and monkeys, like children, though clearly intelligent and capable of forethought and planning, are relatively lacking in frontal lobes, and tend to do the first thing that occurs to them, rather than pausing to reflect. Such impulsivity can be striking in patients with frontal-lobe damage.) There is normally a beautiful balance, a delicate mutuality, between the frontal lobes and the subcortical parts of the brain that mediate perception and feeling, and this allows a consciousness that is free-ranging, playful, and creative. The loss of this balance through frontal-lobe damage can “release” impulsive behaviors, obsessive ideas, and overwhelming feelings and compulsions. 
Frontal-lobe damage can lead to difficulties with attention and problem-solving, and impoverishment of creativity and intellectual activity. 
Does that sound like somebody you've seen in the news recently? Does it sound like grounds for removing a sitting president, via the 25th Amendment

Only wondering.




4 comments:

Inconstant Reader said...

Just FYI, Crank, the man's last name was Sacks. I hate to be picky (not really), but thought you might want to fix that.

The New York Crank said...

Thank you, Inconstant. You are absolutely correct. Attribute the error to a quirk in my own brain. At any rate, it's fixed.

Crankily yours,
The New York Crank

O’Hollern said...

In other words, he's a dotard. I actually don't think he's brain damaged. He's just a garden variety narcissist, the id brain of the one percent.

Comrade Misfit said...

Drain Bamage, agreed.

Maybe from untreated VD?