In 1999, Clark Elliott suffered a concussion when his car was rear-ended. Overnight his life changed from that of a rising professor with a research career in artificial intelligence to a humbled man struggling to get through a single day. At times, he couldn’t walk across a room or even name his five children. Doctors told him he would never fully recover. After eight years, the cognitive demands of his job, and of being a single parent, finally became more than he could manage. As a result of one final effort to recover, he crossed paths with two brilliant research-clinicians working on the leading edge of brain plasticity. Within weeks the ghost of who he had been started to re-emerge.
Clark Elliott tells his harrowing story in, The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped Me Get it Back. The doctors taught Elliott mental “exercises” and the use of a special set of corrective lenses he calls “brain glasses” to regain cognitive functioning. In time, he rediscovered “the me that could think, and feel,” declaring: “I was, at last, and once again, human.” Make sure you do not miss Norman B’s interview with Clark Elliott in the next edition of Life Elsewhere.
Life Elsewhere airs:
Sundays 12 noon ET at The Source WMNF HD3
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