Mosaic Brain

At 22/07/26 Chris Lassig reposted Sophia Anna-Faria's Facebook article into Enable Me, and subsequently it was replied to by Nina Wilde at 30/07/26. Initially, I was drawn to two concepts in Nina's response; "feeling so adrift," and the "mouthful of a term [-] Post Stroke Confabulation." I had to re-read Sophia's original article again, this time, intensely.

My name is John Kassoutas. I suffered a heart-attack and stroke (probably concurrently) in October 2007. I've been negotating the more definitive neurological term for Post Stroke Confabulation, "memory displacement," for nearly two decades. For those unfamilar with Sophia's article, the term defines, "the brain[s] struggle to reconcile physical healing with neurological reality." I understand this by another symptom, observed by an occupational therapist in Westmead Hospital's Stroke Unit: "impaired modulation of attention" As I understand the feeling of the symptom, it is a longer (so much longer) than is usual lag between thinking about what one is sensing.

I'm starting to understand, now, Nina's drift. And, perhaps its time for us, now, to own the poststroke condition, and make scholarly inquiries about the experience ourselves. At the least, we can dispel the type of anxiety plaguing Sophia, the gulf between expert objectivity and felt disablement.

And to what ends might a poststroke inquiry fulfil? Sophia writes about reheasing "gather[ing] the scattered puzzle pieces of past conversations and fit[ting] them back together." Why so timid? Might we not fit the pieces back together - differently? Proclaim the Mosaic Brain and free ourseves from empiricism's yoke to collaborate, instead, with different populations of impairment.