Zasetsky

L. Zasetsky was a technical student completing his education when World War II began and hurled Germany and Zasetsky's Soviet Union into battle. Like many other young men, Zasetsky became a soldier. Sublieutenant Zasetsky was 23 years old on the second of March 1943, the day a bullet entered his brain as he crossed the icy Vorya River. Zasetsky did not die. He received emergency surgery and then began a process of recovery that was to last for the rest of his life. He kept a written record, a pile of notebooks totalling over 3,000 pages and spanning three decades. These notebooks describe the effects of a terrible brain injury. Of his earliest days, he later wrote:

Right after I was wounded, I seemed to be some new-born creature that just looked, listened, observed, repeated, but still had no mind of its own. ...Because of my injury I'd forgotten everything I ever learned or knew. ...Mostly because of my memory that I have so much trouble understanding things. You see, I'd forgotten absolutely everything and had to start all over trying to identify, recall and understand things. ...

I'm in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep. My memory's a blank. I can't think of a single word. All that flashes through my mind are some images, hazy visions that suddenly disappear, giving way to fresh images. But I simply can't understand or remember what these mean.

Again and again I tell people I've become a totally different person since my injury, that I was killed March, 1943, but because of some vital power of my organism, I miraculously remained alive. Still, even though I seem to be alive, the burden of this head wound gives me no peace. I always feel as if I am living in a dream - a hideous, fiendish nightmare - that I am not a man but a shadow.
                                                                                                                  (Luria, 1972, pp. 10 - 12)

The story in Zasetsky's notebooks tells of a courageous, continuing effort to restore his lost mental functions. Zasetsky's torment illustrates clearly the critical importance of learning and memory in the normal activity of the human brain.
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''Every man's memory is his private literature''   ~  Aldous Huxley