Unable to rest my brain, I thought about N.F.L. players and the progressive loss of identity and mental aptitude common to those who experience consecutive concussions and C.T.E. (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). I thought about memory and the loneliness of being unable to recall names and places that are the road marks of a communal life. I thought about the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease whom I helped to care for when I was in high school. I would arrive each morning at her door only to have her greet me with the same wide-eyed gaze and question: “Who are you?”

Though my condition was transient, it highlighted the degree to which the brain serves as an anchoring center of control. For months, uncertainty accompanied my every move. In the immediate days after the concussion I mustered all of my energy to read my daughter several pages of a Daniel Tiger storybook (against my doctor’s orders), only to fail to reach the end. I felt embarrassed and demoralized. I recalled my grandfather, late in his life, describing his own failing mind as a library where all of the books were shelved too high to reach.

Over time my symptoms subsided. I started to read again — not only Daniel Tiger, but Henri Bergson and Toni Morrison — and eventually I began to write. But how does one know when the brain has healed? I’m not sure where my identity resides or even what my identity is or consists in, but I am sure that my brain is crucial in the continuing orchestration of a world that feels inhabitable and a life that feels livable. Brain and body cannot be separated, and yet there are episodes when they fall out of phase, the one wounded and diminished while the other projects a picture of health and ability.

Philosophers tend to make terrible patients. I’m fairly sure that by thinking so much about brain rest I have prolonged my own recovery time. I also suspect that my thinking about my own brain and the specter of dualism is symptomatic of the injury itself. Perhaps when I recover fully, dualism will seem as ridiculous as it once did, receding into the background along with the muscular effort required to read. But I suspect I am altered.

On the bright side, philosophy has been relentless in my life as a thinking person, and a little brain rest was long overdue. Without a doubt, philosophers have to remember and insist upon the dignity and complexity of embodied life. We have to attend to our bodies, to care for our fitness and psychosomatic health. But we also need to care for our brains. I wish someone had told me that long ago, and that my education into philosophy included more common-sense doses of rest for the primary organ of my thinking. It would not have saved me from the injury, but it would have better primed me for the work of recovery.

Now more than a year since my injury, I am grateful for neural plasticity. I am alert to a difference between the everyday phenomenon of forgetting and blanks that intercede like dark matter in a brain laced with gaps. I remember the date, my address, my children’s names, with intention, holding them in place like precious stones in a ring. And I know that rest and recovery are as complex and meandering as thought itself.

Megan Craig (@waterstreetprojects) is an associate professor of philosophy and art at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and the author of “Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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