Monthly Archives: September 2012

It wasn’t until she was 25 that Barbara Arrowsmith-Young stumbled across an explanation for why she had lived her life in a state of permanent confusion. She couldn’t understand conversations, she was baffled by written sentences until she had read them many times, and she couldn’t read a clock. Her struggles with learning had driven her to the brink of suicide. But by reading the account of a Russian World War II veteran, Lyova Zazetsky, she found her story. After Zazetsky suffered a traumatic injury to the left occipito-parietal region of his brain during the war, he could no longer make connections or understand relationships. He could not grasp that an elephant is bigger than a fly. In his journal he writes, “I’m in a kind of fog all the time.” Continue reading →