The man who lived with no brain
How do you live in a world that makes no sense at all? How do you exist when every second of your life is an unsolvable puzzle, and the tiny bits you do manage to recognize can’t come out?
That was the life of Lev Zasetsky, a man who suffered a brain injury fighting in World War II. The 3,000-page diary Zasetsky kept following his injury became one of the most valuable, insightful texts on the study of the human brain in the history of biological science. Zasetsky suffered from aphasia, a disorder that impairs a person’s ability to understand and communicate. Zasetsky’s form of aphasia resulted in him being able to write, but not read his own writing or even understand all of what he had written.
Alexander Luria, one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished neuropsychologists, was assigned to care for Zasetsky and found that the young soldier “simply could not write and … had suddenly become illiterate.” Luria pinpointed Zasetsky’s injury to “the second major block of the brain located in the posterior sections of the large hemispheres.” This portion of the brain’s entire job is to “act as a block for receiving, processing, and retaining information a person derives from the external world.”
The precise location of the shrapnel injury meant that “a very important function [had] been seriously impaired: he [could] not immediately combine his impressions into a coherent whole; his world [became] fragmented.” And that’s how the world existed for Lev Zasetsky: fragmented. But he didn’t give up. His fascinating story and dauntless attitude can reframe our modern understanding of psychology, history, language, communication, and the human spirit.
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