https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCWuPMUPyRk
During World War II, a Russian soldier named Leva Zazetsky suffered a wound from a bullet that penetrated his skull and severely damaged his brain. For the rest of his life, he experienced the world in a bizarrely fragmented way. Although he appeared to be normal, he could remember neither the names of objects nor the meanings of words. Although he could talk, when he tried to speak he couldn't find the words to communicate his ideas and feelings. Before the war he had been a fourth-year student at a technical university; after his injury he couldn't read or perform simple addition.
The unfortunate young man's sense of space and his physical orientation to the world were severely disrupted. He could see only out of the left sides of both eyes. He simply had no visual awareness of things on the right side of his field of vision. He would see only parts of objects or sometimes not see them at all. For example, if he had a bowl of soup in front of him, he might be able to see merely a bit of the spoon, or he even might lose the spoon entirely if it was on his right side. In addition to leaving him able to see only parts of objects, Zazetsky's brain injury also caused him to have hallucinations. Ugly faces and rooms with odd shapes would appear when he closed his eyes, so he would open them immediately. This made it very difficult for him to sleep.
Neuropsychologist A. R. Luria worked with Zazetsky as he struggled valiantly to piece back together his disintegrated life. For twenty-five years, Zazetsky kept a journal, using it to try to recapture the thoughts, experiences, feelings, and memories that had been ripped away by the bullet that tore into his brain. In The Man with the Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, a book first published in Russian in 1972, Dr. Luria explained: "His only material consisted of fragmentary recollections that came to mind at random. On these he had to impose some order and sense of continuity though every word he recalled, every thought he expressed required the most excruciating effort. When his writing went well he managed to write a page a day, two at the most, and felt completely drained with this. Writing was his only link with life, his only hope of not succumbing to illness but recovering at least a part of what had been lost. This journal recounts a desperate fight for life with a skill psychologists cannot help but envy."
Dr. Luria tried to comprehend as a neuropsychologist what Zazetsky described as an existential trauma. At their first meeting, three months after the bullet wound, Zazetsky couldn't recall what had happened at the battlefront where he was injured. Finally, he remembered that it was the month of May. Then he was able to retrieve the names of the other months, but he couldn't remember, for example, which month came before September, and he couldn't remember the seasons.
Although he could see, Zazetsky couldn't interpret the things he saw. In order to learn how to read again, first he had to relearn the meanings of letters. Because he saw the visual world in shattered fragments, he could read only a few letters at a time. He had to retain these as he moved across the page, picking up other letters to combine into a single word.
Writing was easier, especially after Zazetsky realized that he could write quickly and automatically, getting a whole word down without thinking about the letters that made it up. Apparently the part of his brain that allowed him to write hadn't been destroyed. Eventually he could write as well as he had before his injury, even though he remained unable to read what he had put on the page.
Zazetsky's confusion about spatial relationships caused him to get lost even a short distance from his house and made him unable to comprehend directions. He didn't recognize places with which he'd been very familiar before his injury. In his journal, Zazetsky described how his visual problems and lack of spatial orientation would cause him to lose track of whole parts of his body: "Often I fall into a kind of stupor and don't understand what's going on around me. I have no sense of objects. One minute I stand there thinking about something; the next I lapse into forgetfulness. But suddenly I'll come to look at the right of me and be horrified to discover half my body is gone. I'm terrified. I try to figure out what's become of my right arm and leg, the entire right side of my body. I move the fingers of my left hand, feel them, but can't see the fingers of my right hand, and somehow I'm not even aware they're there."
The details of Zazetsky's story are unusual. Certainly his determination and persistence are rare. But medical history is replete with cases in which traumatic brain injuries have robbed their victims of some mental faculties but not others, and there is a simple reason for this: different parts of the brain coordinate different functions.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/winslade-brain.html
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