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with myself for not figuring out what was going on from the beginning. My intuition had told me something was off twice that night—when I noticed how seedy the location was and when I caught the bartender staring at my wallet—but I completely ignored the signs.
    The next day I woke to more incredible visual phenomena. When I used the sink and took a shower that morning, I saw lines emanating out perpendicularly from the flow of the water. The lines extended beyond the basin and the tub and I quickly stepped back for a moment, since some of the lines were heading toward me. At first I was startled, and worried for myself, but it was so beautiful that I just stood in my slippers and stared. I also felt some vertigo as I tried to walk around in the midst of the light show. Despite how upsetting and disorienting it was, I forced myself to clean up, get dressed, and return to the bar to ask, yet again, for help in learning the identities of my attackers. They stonewalled me, just like they had the night before, and it made me feel victimized all over again.
    But I trusted that I would recover. I had no idea that I’d left the old Jason behind, lying in a heap on that sidewalk.

Chapter Four
Gray Matter
    I N MY MIND , I’d play back the attack beginning with the last happy moments when I was whole, before the painful impact with its flash of light, the impossibly low piano note, and then the blackness. I watched myself crumple to the ground. In the days after the attack, I continued to relive the mugging over and over again. I obsessed over every detail, trying to remember exactly where I was struck and how many times. Soon I began to see it as though I were watching from outside myself.
    I began researching traumatic brain injuries (often referred to as TBIs) online. Soon the brutal narrative of that night, still on a replay loop in my obsessive mind, was overlaid with new information at every critical point. A new, richer story emerged as I began to come to grips with the reality of what had happened.
    As I exited the bar, just before the mugging, my healthy three-pound brain was floating in a bath of cerebrospinal fluid, moving ever so slightly with each step I took. Inside my brain, some of my one hundred billion neurons were busy talking to one another thanks to an information network that’s more complex than any computer’s on earth. Electrochemical signals were flying through my brain, some at speeds of more than two hundred miles per hour, across a web of nerve fibers that if stretched out would measure about one hundred thousand miles. The nerve fibers responsible for sending out all these transmissions are called axons, and they look like long, thin tails on the ends of neurons. A protective coating called myelin encases the axons and helps keep the communications flowing at top speed.
    Thanks to all this brain activity, I was able to instantaneously interpret and navigate the world around me as I left the bar—accurately calculating the height of the steps I walked down so I wouldn’t trip, pulling my leather jacket tighter around me in response to the cool night air, and, of course, replaying my rocking Bon Jovi performance in my mind. Believe me, there was nothing extraordinary about what was going on inside my brain. It’s just what average brains do on a daily basis.
    The first punch hit the back of the right side of my head, but that initial impact, or what brain experts call the coup, was only the beginning of the problem. My brain was likely propelled by that force to the other side of my head—the contrecoup.
    During the mugging, my brain likely had at least two points of impact for each blow, but that’s not the only damage that occurred. Brains, I have since learned, are not hard and rubbery, as I once thought, but rather the consistency of tofu or Jell-O, and my fragile brain was slammed violently into a number of sharp, bony ridges protruding from the interior of my skull, causing it even more