Down memory lane

HEALTH

If you're going to get hit on the head, do it in Iraq.

Sometimes I can't wipe out a decidedly ghastly Reshammiya tune from my head, hard as I try. Having fretted enough over "How can I be humming this," et cetera, I discover there's a medical reason why one remembers those annoying songs.

There's a way out. To break this "repeated recall and reinforcement" activity of the brain, you could try introducing other, presumably pleasant sequences.

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang's recently released book, Welcome to Your Brain: The Science of Jet Lag, Love and other Curiosities of Life, spells out some striking facts.

Like, did you know why you can't hear phone conversations in a noisy room? Or that the brain has a joke centre? Or that frequent jet lag can damage your memory? Even so, the brain remains one of the most complex organs in our body.

Sadly, dealing with post-injury behavioural problems, and the trauma that follows, is still a challenge in an alarming number of cases, especially due to relatively insubstantial recovery support given to patients.

Writes author Michael Paul Mason in his 2008 book Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and its Aftermath, head injuries are often described in medical records "as an insult to the brain".

So it's not with any pride that traumatic brain injury (TBI) is called the signature injury of the Iraq war. It's the best country in which to suffer brain damage, for, in Mason's words, "in the same instant that the blast unleashes chaos, it also activates the most organized and sophisticated trauma care in history".

At the Balad air base near Baghdad, a soldier has a 96 per cent chance of survival. In the "brain-injury capital of the world", with the best critical care, top-notch specialists in the ER are hell-bent on saving lives. Hundreds come out alive, but it's also often the beginning of many new nightmares.

With symptoms such as memory loss and olfactory hallucination, the importance of post-injury therapy, unfortunately, is often not realised, even by doctors themselves.

"Any scar that doesn't show is pushed under the carpet," says alternative therapist and psychologist at SRL Ranbaxy Limited, Anubhuti Rattan.

Even a small knock on the head can have a detrimental effect over time. And because the brain is very pliable, the damage may not be obvious. "You may be able to do the same work but not as well as you used to," she says. A little clumsiness after, or a bit of unsteadiness, could have more to it than you think.