Your Brain Injuries
Here is another instance where your body and its abilities are strangely similar to your brain and its performance, taken from a real-life story… right now:
I injured my ankle more than 6 weeks ago and it still hasn’t healed.
In fact, it’s been two weeks since my condition improved, and I would even say that some days it gets worse, but it’s not because the human body isn’t efficient, quite the opposite.
I’m playing volleyball like I used to (with an ankle brace): I jump, I run, I move quickly, and my ankle doesn’t hurt… at all.
The problem is that following my injury, my Achilles tendon swelled, and now that’s where I have pain.
For weeks I did stretches, exercises, and iced everything to heal as quickly as possible, and I was even surprised by how quickly I improved.
It took me 3 days to be able to stand without pain, 1 week to walk, 2 to run, 3 to play volleyball again, and 4 to get back to my previous jumping height.
Today, I am where I was 4 weeks after the injury.
Why?
For several reasons actually, but the most important is this: I am doing less and less exercises and stretches.
Result: instead of improving, my Achilles tendon is becoming more and more tense, which makes me even less inclined to do my exercises.
The moral of this story?
Your brain does the same thing.
Of course, you can’t really have a brain “injury” unless you have an accident, but fortunately that’s never happened to me, so I can’t talk about it.
I compare my rehabilitation more to learning.
In other words: you learn like you heal.
When healing:
- At first, you pay attention: it hurts, and you have to do everything you can to heal as quickly as possible.
- You heal quickly, you are happy.
- You can now do almost the same thing as before your injury, no need to pay attention.
When learning something new, it’s the same thing:
- At first, you pay attention: you don’t understand anything, and if you want to understand, you have to see everything in detail, and go gradually.
- You learn quickly, you are proud.
- You can do pretty much what you wanted to do at the beginning, it’s better, no need to dwell on the details, since you can make do with what you know.
Has this ever happened to you?
No need to listen, I already know that!
No, no and no!
When learning, you should NEVER say that you “know” something.
Firstly because it’s probably wrong, and then you won’t learn the details that you didn’t know that can make all the difference.
For example, one of my French teachers said the same thing when he was talking about grammar.
Most of his students said to themselves:
Grammar? … oh yes! I’ve already heard that word, I know what it is.
And they were thinking about something else: their weekend, the dinner that was coming, etc., and missed the essential.
However, everyone knows that it is not enough to know “what it is” to be able to always write it in the right way.
So you see, through my ankle experience, that we should not take our knowledge for granted.
Personally, when someone talks to me about something, no matter if I think I know what they are talking about, I listen carefully and I act as if what I knew was only a hypothesis.
In the majority of cases, it only improves my previous “hypothesis”, and then I know more about the subject!
Of course, you should not believe everyone, you have to know how to recognize what is true from what is false, but if I talked about it here it would become a little too long …
Besides, I will stop right now.
P.S. I’m starting my exercises again today, 3 to 4 times a day, and the ice a little more often, especially since the session is ending soon, I must not relax while I have no more training!
P.P.S. Written in 2009