Brain Fog (Getting to Know Our Brain) By Julie Hope Each part of the brain has been allotted different duties to do and none of these jobs can be easy.  If these jobs are not done right or get confused in some way then that section goes on strike … so to speak.  Let’s pretend it is librarian.   The three main areas that they attend to are: Attention and encoding Storage Retrieval. Doesn’t this all sound like the jobs of a librarian to you?  It now depends on what kind of Epilepsy you have and which section of the brain is affected. Attention - Let’s start with this, namely the short attention span which is often found in people who have Epilepsy.  Give the section of the brain that looks after the attention and encoding epilepsy and it can greatly reduce the attention speed or rate of information processed.  Have you ever noticed that if you can only work at a slow steady pace (each has his/her own rate at which they can go) things go quite well.  Speed it up a little, or start multi-tasking especially over an extended period of time and it can look like you are working so very hard and then note that at the end of the day, not much as been completed or accomplished?  One good saying here for you to hang on to, is ‘slow and steady’. By doing this the brain will not get the chance to get ‘spaced out/confused/fogged up’ or anything else.  Think of the brain as the body’s computer.  Get it all scrambled and things start to freeze up on you.  This could be likened to the Epilepsy Seizure you are about to witness.  All the tiny wires in the brain sending messages to all parts of the body are by now so mixed up and entangled, it is like that outer voice saying ‘wow, something has to be put on hold so we can get straightened out and back to normal’. When I refer to being ‘spaced out’ you might be able to relate to this:  you have just been asked if you saw your friend Joe just drive by in his new red sports car and showing off his new blue suit.  In this one sentence you have a friend, you have Joe, something about driving, something new, something red, a sports car, something blue and also something about clothing.  WOW….what a lot to remember if the brain is spaced out and used to going at a slower pace.  The brain has all this information now but how does it begin to process it.  You might pick up only two of the words … friend and Joe and that is it, nothing more.  The rest of this sentence becomes a complete blur or not there at all.  Given a few minutes you may then remember something about skating as the TV was on at the same time and you have now associated skating with the word “sports”. Storage -  That is a big job for the Librarian and should they have gone on strike then relate it to having Seizures that affect this area. You can just imagine trying to find something you needed quickly with no one there to help you.  It would be next to impossible. What does this Storage look like in the person with Epilepsy from an out-siders viewpoint?  It may look like the information given in the above section has gone in one ear and right out the other.  You had remembered something about ‘your friend Joe’ from that previous sentence.  You may not be guaranteed to remember even that if there are difficulties with the storage.  To some people it will appear as if the memory has gone.  To others looking on it may also appear as if you have suddenly become deaf. Now we have the problem of retrieving the memory we did keep.  You know it is there, it has even been coded properly and stored adequately, and the problem is you can not gain immediate access to it.  It appears to be gone … vanished.  What happened here?  Have you ever noticed that when someone asks you something where an answer is needed quickly and immediately that no matter how hard you try you know the answer and the word may be right on the tip of your tongue but no matter how hard you try the word is just not there?  Sometimes we say or use the word ‘it is on the tip of our tongue’, but where did it go?  The harder we try to think of the word needed the further away it goes.  This happens when asking for something ‘on the spot’.  Then forget about it completely, change the subject or thought in your mind, and  what happens then?  Everything is so clear and the word/answer is right there hitting you in the face.  You may even blurt out the word in the middle of a sentence.  Now other people wonder why that sentence didn’t make much sense?  Two or three subjects in one sentence is nothing new.  At least it wasn’t for me.  It was as if you had to blurt out that word quickly no matter what you were speaking about or you might forget it again.  Sometimes you automatically think the other person will catch on but this is definitely not always the case.  Everything sounded completely normal to you and made perfect sense but not to the other person and you may find them either ignoring you or looking at you very strangely trying to figure out what you are meaning.  These are three main jobs the brain has to do.  It has many others as well but these three are used a lot and can cause many problems if not functioning efficiently. You can now see how important they are and how if Epilepsy/seizures attacks any one of them how much damage it can do.  We often hear of people saying things like: ‘I feel like I am in one big fog and can’t get out’, ‘today my brain is so cloudy, I’d better just relax and stay home’, ‘It feels as if my head were stuffed with cotton balls’, ‘I feel as if I were on another planet looking down on earth, or even ‘I am just a walking ghost’.  Even though these thoughts and feelings are so real they can’t readily be described by some people.  You see the look on others faces, you yourself become more confused, but a shake of the head does not help in getting all those cobwebbed feelings out.  Your self esteem has just hit the bottom of the ground and as a result you become very depressed.  One thing we must remember is that we quite often refer to this as a memory problem when in fact it is associated with other factors that come with Epilepsy.  We have had many possibly hundreds of seizures in a lifetime and with each one of them some of the memory has vanished. At some point too we have had our Anti-Epileptic Drugs increased or changed and possibly added to many times. Again too, in several of these areas one leads or is connected to the other.  All of us were given a perfect brain at conception.  It was somewhere, somehow along the way that changes began to take place.  A brain, young or old now begins to have seizures.  Once this happens, so far as has been researched there is nothing that can cure this for good.  During this time we have taken many different types of Anti-Epileptic Drugs, is the brain used to this?  Not at all.  Do you not think this is going to add to the confusion that is going on in the brain?  It was not born taking all those drugs, and it was certainly not born with all the other toxins adding to it that are part of our daily lives. There is a  saying that 'once an you have epilepsy, you will always have epilepsy', but you can learn to live your life healthy and be strong enough to deal with the consequences.