Yes, there are more ways to accidentally break a complicated machine than to improve it. And the brain is finely tuned to work as it does. But when I read about negative personality changes resulting from accidents, lesions, surgery, or what have you I always wonder if anyone ever had a positive personality change from brain damage, at least from the POV of their friends and loved ones. Perhaps going from a spendthrift to being more of a long term thinker, or going from an aggressively smug chauvinist to being just a swell guy – whatever the case may be. It always seems to work the other way around though.
My grandmother, by all family accounts, was a miserable bitch. She openly hated my mother for being a girl, could barely cook a meal (this was in the 50s when, as a housewife, this was considered a personality deficit) and often left the kids home alone so she could go play cards at the neighbors’. When my mother told her she was finally pregnant with me after 7 years of trying to conceive, Grandma completely ignored her, as if she hadn’t heard a word. No one liked her, not even her own family.
Then she fell down the stairs. Long flight of concrete stairs, hitting her head and giving herself several concussions. She was in the hospital for several weeks recovering, and for a while, they didn’t think she’d wake up.
She’s the sweetest most caring, nurturing, loving, generous woman I’ve ever met. And she can cook a mean meal, too!
I’ve always been grateful that I met Grandma “After the Fall”. (You can hear the capital letters whenever someone in the family uses this phrase.)
You might find this book interesting: http://www.amazon.com/My-Stroke-Insight-Scientists-Personal/dp/0670020745
A neuroscientist that got a stroke, she writes about her experiences:
Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat has an interesting case history of a woman whose personality was radically altered (in her opinion, for the better) due to neurosyphilis, an infection she acquired decades prior when working as a prostitute in a brothel, and which remained dormant until she was much older.
This is sort of the point of ECT (a.k.a. electroshock therapy). Zap a lot of neural pathways and hope that when they start running again the patient feels better.
My grandmother had a multi-year run of small strokes which tweaked her personality in different ways. For the majority of that time, she was easily excitable, prone to mood swings, and tended toward anxiety. Then she had one event that left her calm, introspective, and relaxed for several months. She didn’t seem to lose any mental acuity; it was more of an emotional change. Sadly, she had further events that returned her to her anxious baseline. She was unaware of the difference, fortunately.
Great story- did Grandma ever acknowledge the change?
There have been some “successful” lobotomies.
Gary Busey effectively became lobotomised after a traffic accident. (damage to his frontal lobe)
I dont know if the behaviour changes since has been positive or negative. But *different *if nothing else.
Frontal lobotomies may have helped some people…
It’s not that unusual for folks with severe personalities to mellow out a bit if they infarct or suffer generalized brain damage such as Alzheimer’s. I’m not aware that anyone’s real good at consistently damaging the correct cells on purpose though, except for very rare instances such as tumors or something that are obviously already pathologic areas of brain to be excised.
After my mother’s stroke her sense of humor became more prominent and slightly less inhibited. This probably was a positive, however, it did not make up for her temporary loss of ability to speak or read, or the long rehab needed, or permanently diminished linguistic ability. I mean, sure, she was a lot more fun during the dinner table banter, but I’d would have rather had my more straight-laced but non-stroke mom back.
I don’t know. She’s never ever mentioned it to me, and no one talks about The Fall to me in her hearing.
I should ask her about it some time.
I know several people who are kinder and gentler post-brain-damage, but they’ve taken significant hits in other important areas (like being able to use their right side effectively or having a functional short-term memory).
The closest thing to ‘positive’ brain damage I’ve ever heard of is the story of WhyNot’s grandmother.
I have a co-worker who became more easygoing and less OCD-ish after surgery for a brain tumor, but she also had to learn to talk again and has some residual speech issues.
Although the artist Augustus John was an excellent draughtsman in his teens, he is also reported to have been shy and diffident. When he was 18, however, he experienced a diving accident, cracking his skull on a rock. This is said to have changed his personality. He became a flamboyant, bohemian character (with a string of mistresses, and for some time living in a ménage-a-trois with his wife and mistress), and soon gained a reputation as one the best artists of his time.
(There seems to be some skepticism about the details of this story in many more recent accounts of John’s life, but it is not quite clear to me why. It does appear that he may have deliberately spread the story to promote the image of himself as a crazy genius, but the fact of the personality change seems well attested, and he did have the artistic chops to back it up.)
Very interesting story WhyNot.
Anecdotal, but I remember a story about an Australian man who’s criminal and anti-social behaviour supposedly stopped after getting a kitchen knife through the head. I remember the story because the newspaper had an x-ray of the knife going in one side of his forehead and out of the other. The details were pretty sketchy, I don’t know if he was mentally impaired after the inicdent.
Personally, I’d put the OP’s idea in the plausable but rare category. Mood and temprament can seriously affect mental actuity, and there are reliable reports of that being changed by brain injuries. I’m sure there are parts of my brain I wouldn’t miss, but I’m not about to start experimenting.
The life of Jumpin’ Jack Flash seems to have improved dramatically (at least from his own perspective) after getting a spike right through his head.
It has occurred to me to wonder whether this song might be (loosely) based upon the story of Phineas Gage (although, from most perspectives, Gage’s life was far from being improved by his injury).
Oliver Sacks has another story (I cannot recall where) of a man who had some sort of accident or trauma and woke up as suddenly a musical genius. He had previously had no particular interest in music. What I find chiefly interesting about this tale is that it gives a partial refutation of the claims (by Malcolm Gladwell, inter alia) that there is no such thing as talent. On the one hand, Gladwell’s ideas seem to have been partly confirmed by the fact that the guy did have musical talent concealed, but that ignores the fact that motivation, interest, etc. are all part of a person’s makeup. Sure, you may have concealed somewhere the ability to be a research mathematician, but if you cannot understand the definition of continuous function, you will not be one. Perhaps with enough application, you could understand it, but without sufficient interest the application won’t be there.
My dad had bypass surgery twice and suffered mild cognitive defects commonly associated with being on bypass. Best thing that happened to him. He suffers from PTSD and whatever damage he received it effectively muted a lot of the memories that plagued him. He became a gentler, happier person as a result.
How about the recent reports of the Croatian teenager that suffered polyglot aphasia? She entered a coma then, after recovering, could no longer speak Croatian, but her fluency in German, which she was studying in school at the time, had markedly increased.