12+ hour flights have a way of disorienting you. Your legs, asleep from their cramped position behind someone else’s seat, take a few minutes to wake back up as you mentally instruct them: walk, forward, left, right, left right. You walk past fellow passengers in line for immigration, for baggage claim, sheepishly practicing non-acknowledgement of people you’ve spent the last entire half day with, 12 hours of non-intimacy in an intimate space. Airports in foreign countries ooze difference, subtle. Like a color-blind person who knows something is slightly off, you navigate the throng of people, of new faces and different languages. Continue Reading
There was once a hakim, a wise man, living in a large airy house in the middle of a dusty village. Legend about his wisdom had spread far and wide, stories of his ability to cure people surpassed even his skill. If the need arose, they even whispered, he could bring patients back from the jaws of death…
Memory loss does funny things to people. In Radiolab’s podcast “Loops,” a woman talks about having Transient Global Amnesia – a form of temporary amnesia in which a person loses the ability to form new memories, an affliction that lasts up to 24 hours and which has no known cause. For 3 or 4 hours, her brain was stuck on a 90 second loops – she would ask the same sets of questions of her daughter, and make the same comments and observations for 90 seconds before her brain reset and began again, from the beginning. Once the brain starts to recover however, the loops of time grow longer….90 seconds to 5 minutes to half an hour to a day, until the brain recovers enough to remember things once more.