You ARE Your Emotions: Brain Damage and the Excuse-Making Mentality.

surprisingly or unsurprisingly the video
I made part of this one inspired some discussion on a range of related topics I think it is a new and somewhat unsettling notion for many of you that you and your diagnosis are one in the same thing if you've been diagnosed with dyslexia it's not that you're a person who can read just as rapidly as everyone else but you have dyslexia as something separate and separable from who you are and the conduct of your character no the reality is you're a person who reads poorly your person who has tremendous trouble reading your person who needs special education and special training to be able to read at the same speed as other people and some dyslexics never catch up they never get out of the same reading speed as other people they struggle with it all their lives your condition is not something other than who you are the medical description of your problem the medicalization of your problems can be deceptive in precisely this way and that's something that I think haunts and directs and misdirects people's lives to a massive extent in our culture and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this practical philosophy I'm proposing to you one person wrote in and said and I think he was imagining he was confronting me with a preposterous example he said well what about brain damage would you really take it that far are you really gonna tell me that you are your brain damaged pretty much everyone you know in 21st century society has brain damage or one kind of one kind or another from one cause or another as life goes on its merry way I can think of at least three sources of brain damage that I have suffered myself and as that list these off you may request you may reflect that these are true of you also or the two of your parents or true of your teachers at school or people you've known in your own life I grew up in a neighborhood lead poisoning in the drinking water my father did not care and I grew up in the days when you bought concentrated orange juice and a can you bought a frozen can can the went in the freezer with the orange juice in and you mixed it with tap water but five parts to one I think so every single day I was drinking orange juice that was giving me some subtle amount of lead poisoning what was my father's attitude I remember talking about it my father grew up in ultra polluted steel industry town called Hamilton so all the water he drank growing up was polluted and the water people swam in and Hambleton Harbor was polluted and he turned out far fine and he just fundamentally did not care and during my lifetime the city government had to dig up and replace all the pipes the pipes had you know led soldering led connections this kind of thing that was the source of lead poisoning in my neighborhood you've probably heard some salacious news stories just lately especially about African Americans whatever reason African American neighborhoods that had lead poisoning and the sort of suspicion that the federal government in states didn't care or the local state government didn't care due to some implicit racism and this kind of thing look one way or the other lead poisoning is colorblind a lot of the problems I've been reading about in some of those newspaper stories lately it is quite possible my behavioral problems as a child or as a result of lead poisoning and I have no idea to what extent my brain development was impaired about lead poisoning number two concussion you've probably heard vegan gains talk about the extent to which he had serious concussions from playing ice hockey don't know to what extent had changed his character don't know to what extent it created the problems he complained so at this day durianrider another well-known vegan youtuber very serious head and skull injury changed his life he talked about that in the old days and he's talked about it for a couple years but whatever that's all still up on the internet if you want to know I had a bicycle accident as a child kind of a medium sized child I would guess maybe I was ten years old something like that not not tiny but not real big maybe I was eight or nine but I really forget and you know didn't bump into anything just smashed over hit my head into the sidewalk and had all the serious effects of concussion where you had kind of memory lapses and you have all these weird you know visual effects where you're looking around you're not really seeing seeing strange colors and stuff you know I had all these effects of a concussion never know how it affected me maybe trivial but absolutely by definition that kind of injury causes brain damage in number three something I looked for scientific peer-reviewed papers on years ago and never really find any I read two newspaper articles that the specific drug I took to prevent malaria while I did humanitarian work in northern Laos causes permanent brain damage so it was as an adult I took this malaria drug and one of the newspaper articles I read said there was a class-action lawsuit on going because there was enough scientific evidence when I was googling around for it I never could find that scientific evidence I only found articles saying there were kind of questions being raised and research being done but the preponderance of evidence I've seen indicates that I got further brain damage from from anti-malarial medication taken because I did that humanitarian work and if you think I says that malaria medication for no reason at all the guy literally sleeping in the room across the hall from me in one of the remote stations where I did where he got malaria or he was at least diagnosed with and treated with malaria so they presumed he had it and they gave him the medicine so you know the same mosquito or the famous the mosquitos cousin that bit him could have bit me I was I was at risk of malaria I wasn't taking that medicine for for no reason at all so brain damage is real and it's more widespread in 21st century society than anyone wants to admit in a country like Canada go ahead and look up what percentage of us have impaired brain function because our mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy it is truly an epidemic you try to estimate how many of us have brained just from binge drinking during own lives from alcohol from marijuana yes marijuana is scientifically proven to cause brain damage that wants to fit it but it is all the other habits in terms of recreational drugs that people participate in so willingly okay which one sounds more like madness and which one sounds more like sanity to you if I tell you look this is who I am I'll never know how that brain damage shaped the development my character I'll never know what capacities I might have had that I don't have as a result what talents I might have had it would have you I have no idea in what ways that might be better or theoretically might be worse if I didn't have brain damage those persons but this is Who I am take it or leave it and with all my advantages and disadvantages no one other than me is responsible for my conduct and I can't delete this injury or this condition to then refer to what remains when you delete that problem as if that were the real me is if that were who I truly am that were my true self where people want to imagine is that when your [ __ ] brother Timmy dies and is reborn in heaven and you know Christian heaven out of the Disney movies that when you when you go to heaven then he won't be [ __ ] anymore that when dyslexics die and go to heaven their real soul their true self shows up in heaven without the dyslexia I guess if you're color blind then you die and go to heaven you can finally see color skin okay so a widespread to some of you what what's the implicit assumption there in Western civilization the implicit assumption is that you have a soul and that soul somehow remains undamaged and unchanged even by impairments that you're born with like you're born [ __ ] and yet some of the real you is somewhere else without being [ __ ] that there aren't going to be [ __ ] people in heaven you know this is it's a really deep-seated widespread assumptions in our culture that a lot of us even if you're a theist from earth to some extent your your view of the world is shaped by the sympathetic so yeah it's powerful and disturbing and necessary to face up to this and say no this is me this is you this is all we've got there is nobody else there is nothing else especially not in terms of responsibility for our own conduct you know again a guy like vegan gains he's talked about it publicly he has behavioral problems he has psychological problems he struggled with things like hallucination he started with a lot of very obvious symptoms put it that way symptoms that can be put on a checklist he doesn't know to what extent you know he was just born that way or to understand it was the result of head and skull injuries or in theory maybe even an extreme reaction to some of the medication he was put on for some of his other health but we you don't know but who now is responsible for him for his moods for his conduct for his behavior as an adult nobody it's on him one of my half-brothers struggled with dyslexia all his life to mine she's still struggling he was guy who was born with some talents and not others you know I totally understand the extent to which dyslexia is a massive impairment you know if you just look at why did he turn out the way he turned out I turned out the way I turned out one of the huge fundamental differences was he was born with dyslexia and I wasn't right and everything about my character the focus on reading and writing I'm very much a visual learner and amount of time I spent learning and learning various languages and even learning that way in English huge huge difference okay but guess what you know he was a man I'd take him I can't I can't quote Shakespeare from memory that way you know his dyslexia is not something other than who he is sure these conditions the empty's impairments shape the development of who we are they shape you or assumptions and the choices we make and which choices would be difficult and which choices would be easy I met a new one man who was severely dyslexic he described the types of symptoms he had in terms of not being able to tell up from down left from right he had huge huge problems at dyslexia and like a lot of people with that condition as a young man as a child he would cheat on his tests and exams to stay in school and you know he made a decision that he was really gonna sit down and do the work and overcome the disadvantage and he did and eventually he got a PhD in in English literature and I think he did that PhD just to prove himself that he could do it he was he was over 40 years old when he got that PhD it wasn't some simple it wasn't to get ahead it wasn't for his career now he probably could not have done that work he probably couldn't have got that PhD at age 25 but he did the work he set himself the task and he did it by age 40 guys these are only the disadvantages that are the easiest the most palpable for us to discuss brain damage dyslexia you know what's really hard to discuss the way in which our whole perception of the world our brains our minds our character are shaped by our first language I will never see the world the way someone who speaks Chinese is their first language will doesn't matter how hard I work on learning Chinese is my second language I can never see the world the way someone who speaks Cree or a Jib way or Cambodian or lotion speaks the world as their first language okay the language we speak shapes the development of our character it shapes our assumptions about what's reasonable and what's unreasonable it shapes the development of our emotions and the expression of our emotions even in our dreams even when we even when we sleep our ideas about marriage and romantic love and so many things sure they're shaped by religion and culture you can talk in these abstractions but in a very very real sense if you have some experience studying with different languages so much of that is bound up in language and for me someone who studied different languages and different cultures that's very palpable it's something I'm really maybe maybe more aware of and some of you in the audience but I know I have some people models who speak 3 and 4 languages some of you will be will be keenly aware of that as well and thus the way our political biases and our values what we think is valuable and worthwhile to do with our time what matter is what's visible and invisible its shaped by the place you were born the culture you were raised in the language you speak what's thinkable and unthinkable for all of those things that may indeed shape the conduct of your character that may make you an [ __ ] or may make you very patient and steadfast that may make you very forgiving or may make you very demanding and irascible all of these things may shape it right but they can never be medicalised you can never be diagnosed with them the way you can be diagnosed with brain damage or dyslexia you can never use them as an excuse and it's the suit it's the excuse making mentality ultimately that is so dangerous and that I'm trying to warn you guys against in these videos