Underexplored places: cities and brains

“I would give everything I know, for half of what I don’t know. The little I have learned is worthless compared to what I don’t know. And learning doesn’t despair me.”

This classic quote by Descartes reminds me: learning is valuable, and leads to writing. Such as about the cities we visit, and our brain. We visit few of the unmissable towns, though we see many in books, films, newspapers, at school… We never even heard about many of them. And our brains also keep great secrets. I’m just back from a trip to both topics.

Ely

Early this year, a project at the Oliver Zangwill Centre took me to a 5-week stay at this town near Cambridge. The project and the city are unforgettable. Ely is small (some 20,000 inhabitants), but has a remarkable political and religious history. It was still an islet when an abbey was created there in 673. Two centuries later, Danish invaders destroyed it, but the abbey was back in 970.

It was in the village around the abbey that Hereward, a rebel noble, led the last Saxon resistance to William the Conqueror, who by then had control over the rest of England. William was crowned king in 1066, but only 5 years later defeated Hereward and finally brought Ely to the British world: it was England’s last Saxon corner!

Later, in 1109, Ely became home to England’s first cathedral, with high ceiling and a remarkable architecture. It hosts quality musical events, exhibitions, plus the outside stroll on the walkway on its ridge, around the octagon. Every year, Ely attracts 250 thousand visitors. It has good restaurants and stores. In sport, runners enjoy long, flat dirt trails across farms surrounding it, and in other nearby rural towns. I became a distant member of the Ely Runners Club — just another good reminder of those weeks.

The Oliver Zangwill Centre

The project that took me to Ely was also unforgettable. Correctly, this is how OZC presents itself: “We are the world leader in holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation; our mission is to enhance quality of life for people with acquired brain injury, through holistic interdisciplinary assessment and rehabilitation.”

Usually, holism describes an approach to neuropsychology. But it also exists in two areas closer to me: humanities and languages. OZC taught me about its neuropsychological side. [1]

A brief note: “whole” comes from Greek holos (all). Holism is more recent. It was created by the South African J. Smuts in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution. A quote from the book: “Holism (from holos = whole) is the term here coined for this fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe.”

A thought: when you are writing, do it as if you are creating wholes.

An inspiring approach: “The Oliver Zangwill Centre has provided innovative neuropsychological rehabilitation since we were founded in 1966 by Professor Barbara Wilson. Our approach places the client with brain injury and their family at the heart of rehabilitation, to empower clients to overcome their difficulties and support families”.

I learned a lot from the OZC team and their range of connected areas. And I also had meetings with Barbara herself. What took me there?

My writing history and plans

7 years ago, in sportive cycling, I had a serious accident in Romeiros, a road in São Paulo’s northern outskirts widely used for cycle training. I had a high-speed skid, with no impact beyond the brain. I passed out, and friends who were cycling with me called for an ambulance from the Albert Einstein Hospital. I was in a coma for a few days. Doctors told my family about the risk of death. After 10 weeks, I was back to a life that might be called normal. But there remained nearly imperceptible effects of the traumatic brain injury (TBI). Einstein’s medical team knew of uncommon “quick and full” physical recoveries from a TBI, such as mine. But the good post-accident days made the TBI hard to notice. After all, what had happened to my memory, my relationships, career review plans, etc?

But a sabbatical was under way! A few months before the accident, I had quit a good job as an economist at Itaú, a leading Brazilian Bank, aiming to head to a new career stage. But the new direction was not yet clear to me, and the accident postponed that reflection. Especially because I came out so physically well.

I always meant to keep writing, but maybe not about the economic and political scene, as I had done for years. The accident halted my sabbatical, but those recent weeks at OZC helped me complete it. After the accident, I still wrote for a while as an economist. First at Guide Investimentos — a financial brokerage house where I have good friends; and then as an advisor to Joaquim Levy, when he was Financial Minister. Neither of these two jobs as an economist attracted me for long. I soon quit both. More recently, back to the transition route, I published my first book. On topics that belong to Economics, but rarely or never appear in economic books. Finally en route to maintain a writing career, slightly different from pre-sabbatical days.

As a first non-economics writing project, I may visit these last 7 years. OZC lessons can help. One of their psychologists told me: “Those who spend time with us feel some mixture of being a patient, a student, or in a sabbatical. In your case, I suppose it will feel part of a sabbatical”. So it did.

Summing up that 5-week cycle:

* 1st week — Basics about the brain: how it works? What impact different accidents have? What is its anatomy? How do people recover from an accident, and what are the possible consequences?

* 2nd week — Memory and attention: what types of cognitive talent, attention, and memory do we all have? What strategies can we use to advance them?

* 3rd week — Executive functions: our ability to lead independent and successful lives. Choosing goals, identifying ways to achieve goals, designing actions, and thinking about when and how to adapt to change.

* 4th week — Communication: possible difficulties, strengths, challenges, and the design of strategies for contact and communication after an accident.

* 5th week — Humor: emotions and experiences. How an accident may have affected emotions, and how to start building strategies to regulate them.

The OZC also says: “We are committed to remain a leading provider of innovative rehabilitation, to empower clients to overcome their difficulties and support families.”

What valuable weeks: the town and the people/ideas I met at OZC, including my Scottish classmate.

Understanding the brain and discovering cities are both of wide interest. Beyond OZC and Ely, there are many ways to seek brain knowledge, and many cities to visit, each with its particularity and charm.

Excursions to the brain and to the role mine played in my sabbatical, seem now a welcome route to my writing.

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[1] Holism:

-> From Oxford Dictionary:

The theory or principle of a tendency in nature to form or produce organized wholes which are more than the mere sum of the component units; specially the application of this theory in medicine, involving the treatment of the whole person rather than the physical symptoms alone.

-> From the Houaiss Brazilian Dictionary:

* Approach, in the field of human and natural sciences, that prioritizes the integral understanding of phenomena, as opposed to the analytical procedure in which its components are taken in isolation [for example, the sociological approach that starts from global society and not from the individual.

* Medical doctrine and psychological school that considers biological and psychological phenomena as totalities irreducible to the simple sum of its parts.

* In the philosophy of language, a theory that considers the meaning of a term or sentence only understandable if it is considered in relation to a larger linguistic totality, through which it acquires meaning.