BROKE BROCA

THEME: BRAIN-LANGUAGE-ISSUES

BROKE BROCA

I have had language difficulties for as long as I can remember. I do not know if I was born with these difficulties or if they arose through trauma damage. Not that it makes any difference. I have them and have to manage them. At school, this was an absolute disaster, total destruction. It was also a disaster in the military, and it has also always been a hindrance in later work situations. Coupled with my deep fear of people made working alone preferable, at most with one other person. Although, serving on military ships with extremely large crews taught me how to survive amongst others, but still keep my distance. Surviving packed inside a can of sardines. Escaping whenever I could to the “freedom” of being alone. However, in truth, it wasn’t freedom, just release from the overwhelming stress. I wanted to be with others. I just couldn’t emotionally deal with it. Social situations were not much better. I might at times just scrape by in a one-on-one situation, but “the more the merrier” didn’t work for me. Not that I didn’t want to join in with the merrier, I did. Hated being left out, and it was pure agony.

The result was people came to see me as “strange”. Even if I kept a friend for a while, at some point, this would fall apart, or I would destroy it, or flee in panic and fear. If I ever saw, and only rarely did I find the courage for this, a woman I liked or fancied I would stumble and stutter to get words out of my mouth, but even these would quickly dry up, leaving a cold and frightening empty nothingness of desperation. Often the woman would flee and even if she didn’t, I would. Shame burning and battering me. I would punish myself mercilessly with rebukes for hours and days on end. My highly punishment-trained brain would not let me forget such a moment. Whipping me just like the whipping of childhood. If you could earn a degree in self-whipping, I would get this easily.

However, at the same time, I have taught myself a reasonable amount of three languages. As a young child, I had minimal use of English picked up spontaneously. School hardly made any improvement and I would end up getting thrown out because of my illiteracy. Over the years, I would improve on this minimal by self-educating myself through instinct. It was a difficult, hard slog that took years and many mistakes. However, this long, arduous journey of learning English through instinctual means prepared my brain for learning Dutch, and then German. Also, purely through instinct. I don’t understand grammar in any of these languages. In the same way, I taught myself engineering and many other professions. Perhaps this was also the birth of my creativity. I needed to be creative with teaching myself, unable to learn through grammar or any educational schooling type basis. Although at the time I wouldn’t have thought or known I was being creative. In fact, didn’t even know what creativity was. Didn’t even know the word.

The way we easily throw nasty remarks, insults, criticism, or other such things out, you would think language is simple. Such remarks might be easy to slip out of a mouth, but before reaching that action of mouth, the brain must carry out a very complex procedure. For many of us, that procedure is largely carried out in our left brain hemisphere, the hemisphere we usually call our rational or intellectual side of the brain. Although such remarks are hardly intellectual. However, some people use both sides of the brain equally and some use predominately the right side of the brain. So you see, nothing is fixed, although the teachers of my childhood school thought the brain was fixed and I had been left out with nothing fixed at all, not even my head to my shoulders. Instead, it bounced around the classroom, playing silly games, dodging the teacher, and avoiding any attempt to learn anything at all. At least that was how the teachers saw and reacted to my difficulties.

There is still some disagreement in the various scientific worlds about this language procedure and exactly which areas of the brain are involved, or do what. However, it is known that certain areas of our left brain hemisphere are involved, although other areas within both sides of the brain might also be involved, certainly by some people. The Wernicke area is tasked with determining context and meaning by processing words and strings of words. It does this working with other areas of the brain which go under the names of insular cortex, basal ganglia, and insular cortex, and probably other areas of the brain as well. Each plays a greater or smaller role. For example, if the language is visual, such as text or video, then the optic nervous system plays a role, as will the audio nervous system when sound is involved. The Broca area of the brain focuses on the forming and actual expression of language. Some brain researchers suggest that the Broca area might also be involved with grammar and verbal working memory, but this is not known for certain, as many things aren’t because the brain is still very much a mystery. Some researchers have also suggested that there is some connection between language differences in Autism that might correlate to differences in Broca’s area, but once again, this is not clear or certain. Researchers also found that many dyslexic children had less activity in Broca’s area and less activity in or near Wernicke’s area as well as in other areas of the brain.

There is one thing you see happening time and time again. Let me explain:

At the school where I went to as a child, there was an unbelievably rigid and brutally cruel fanaticism to the belief that all children were the same, learnt in the same way, had to be treated in the same way, and should follow everything all at the same speed. We were carbon copies of each other. As though we were objects designed and assembled all exactly in the same way, and should carry out the designed functions exactly the same way as each other. And woe betide anyone who had a production failing or fault. Then the heavens would deservedly fall down on top of them with all the imaginable and unimaginable wrath of punishments possible. Extremely strict obedient and forceful discipline was of far greater importance than education.

Pink Floyd’s music “The Wall” and especially the film partly expresses this.

Some things have changed since then, some things have just taken alternative forms, although fortunately, brutal enforcement is no longer allowed.

I was one of those schoolchildren who was placed on the Pink Floyd “The Wall” film’s conveyor belt, to be dumped in the rubbish container. And in a certain sense, it feels like I have been buried in that container ever since, despite having done much in life.

Being different was extremely violently rejected. Yet, I didn’t see myself as different. Not in the beginning, at least. I was just a child, like all the other children. Wanted the same things as other children. My brain needed the same things. The being different first started at home long before school age. Then was violently enforced at school. My brain was to grow and develop in this atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, shame, guilt, being treated as different, rejection, humiliation, punishments, violence, extreme discipline, fanaticism, including religious fanaticism, inflexibility, and more. I became a lonely, terrified outsider.

When and how did my language difficulties start? I simply do not know. Perhaps I was born with this. Perhaps it came from childhood experiences that altered and damaged the development of my brain. Certainly, this latter played a major role, if not the sole role. Filled with so much almost constant fear, it is now clear that my amygdala’s fight-flight-freeze response became over-activated, causing me to be constantly alert for threats and danger. I lived in the survival response almost my whole life. The survival response became locked in the active position. Like a ringing burglar alarm, you cannot switch off. A kind of snowball effect. In the survival response, the brain is constantly reacting to perceived threats and dangers. Yet this happens in the animal brain section, which the rational part of our brain cannot control, simply because to survive a threat or danger, the brain has to act super fast. There is no time to think about things. That’s why this survival response only normally switches on during threats or moments of danger and switches off again once these have been dealt with. But just like something can go wrong with a burglar alarm and it becomes powerless to switch off, so too can this happen with our brain’s survival response, but only in extreme situations.

When under threat/danger, the sympathetic nervous system stimulates the fight-flight-or-freeze response, takes control of the body and releases hormones to prepare your body. Areas of the body and brain not needed for the response are shut down and the energy saved is pumped to those areas that are needed for survival, muscles, breathing, heart for better blood flow, etc. The digestion system and major areas of the brain are not required. Everything is focused on the threat response, which could be fighting (if possible), fleeing, or freezing (in the hope of not being seen).

Imagine what this does to your systems if you are almost constantly in the threat-danger survival response!

One thing for sure is that language is not an area of need at such times. Hence, the shutting down of language.

This was something I often experienced. In threat moments I could not think clearly, often felt my brain was empty, and struggled to find words when asked something. Leaving me almost paralysed at that moment, which mostly was not well received. Which in turn only increased the situation due to this turning into desperation and deep, excruciating sadness as well as increased fear. Hence the lifelong tendency to flee or freeze. After freezing, fleeing could still happen.

Early in life at school, this was met by brutal reactions, constant humiliation, punishments, and a fixed belief I was an imbecile and must be treated as such. All this, together with the home situation, and out-of-school reactions from children, just increased the threat-survival response, turning it into a locked situation affecting my whole life.

What started early in life (before birth?) turned into a lifelong nightmare of gigantic proportions. Although this could have been avoided had someone cared and bothered enough.