Reader’s Digest was a popular magazine in my youth . People would write in with cute anecdotes about the military, family vacations or an embarrassing situation with a child in a store. They also had inspirational stories of people who faced incredible odds and survived. Inevitably, the inspirational story would start along the lines of, “It was a bright sunny day…” before the tragedy occurred.  I found it odd that they would use that language, but as an adult I realized what they were trying to convey.  You never know what will happen from one moment to the next. January 13, 2013 was the day when my husband’s “Reader’s Digest” story began.

Joe was working at a home improvement store. One of the electric ladders he was on malfunctioned and he fell – hitting his head and knocking him unconscious.  He received an MRI and we had a follow-up appointment with a neurologist. The neurologist gave Joe a cognitive test to determine what, if any, damage there may be to his brain.  She had him identify pictures of simple objects, testing his explicit, semantic memory. She gave him a piece of paper and asked him to draw an analog clock face and to make the hands of the clock read “10:25”. She also asked him to listen to a list of words and then asked him to recall the list after a period of time, testing recency effect. She was testing his short term and long term memory to determine if there were deficits in either, and the severity of each.

I watched from the corner as my strong, intelligent husband struggled to remember the word for “hammer” (something he has used for most of his life). I watched as he drew a clock face with missing numbers and misplaced hands. The neurologist was compassionate and caring as she described the results.  She saw that there was some damage to his brain but nothing that couldn’t be treated with therapy and practice. The scientist in me came alive. I wanted to know how the brain could be healed with therapy and what would that therapy look like?

According to Rice University, “…portions of the temporal lobe seem to play a large role in managing lexical and semantic information.” (Rice University, 2000)  (Disclaimer: I am not a physician) I believe that there was damage to Joe’s temporal lobe since semantic memories, such as completing the face of a clock, were difficult for him. Joe was assigned a cognitive therapist who gave him practice drills to improve his short term memory.  In order to improve his semantic memories, like remembering a sequence of numbers, she instructed him to assign a letter to each number to spell out a word. It was easier for him to remember one word than a digit span.  In order to remember a list of letters, say for a product code, she instructed him to rehearse the letters every few seconds in his mind so that if he was distracted by other information (interference), he could still retrieve the code he needed to remember from his short-term memory.

While there were definite improvements in Joe’s condition, he still suffers headaches and dizziness and certain semantic memories seem to have disappeared permanently. However, the other day, I asked him to help me with one of my class assignments by remembering a sequence of three letters after counting backward by threes from a specific number.  He defied the odds and scored a 100% on each trial. He smiled proudly and said, “The therapy worked!”

Works Cited

Rice University. (2000, June 26). Temporal Lobe. Retrieved from langbrain: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/cglidden/temporal.html