When I first started seeing the neurologist shortly after my diagnosis, his main diagnostic tools were a book of portrait photos that he used to check my gaze as I followed the pictures while he moved the book around the room, and a pencil and paper. He would tape the paper to the wall and ask me to follow with my eyes the dots that he drew on the paper.

He would ask me to recite timetables or the alphabet backwards as I walked toward him. I would struggle. He would make some corrections by tugging on my hand and I’d be able to do it. In the absence of any traditional rehabilitative tools or exercises since my diagnosis, the straightforwardness of being incapable of a task and then capable of it after a few tweaks is a relief. Since those recent visits, his office has grown dramatically. He now has a couple of interns, staff who focuses solely on rehab exercises, and another doctor. (The team sees a variety of patients including those recovering from traumatic brain injuries, stroke survivors, and people born with unique brains.)

On my most recent visit, while I was home for the holidays, the doctor suggested that I come back for a week-long intensive in the hopes of making more lasting changes in my brain’s pathways. In order to compensate for how my brain re-organized itself in the wake of the atrophy that I was born with, the plan was to exercise my brain—“waking up” the slower parts of it. I sort of think of it as the neural version of decluttering my desktop; my brain gets easily overwhelmed by an average amount of stimulation (crowds of people, traffic heading toward me), which slows me down. These exercises may help declutter my overworked brain, so that the whole system functions more smoothly. For me, that would mean managing time and getting around without a map more efficiently.

That said, he had mentioned nothing about goggles.

* * *

I arrived on the first day of my week-long intensive naked-faced and nervously curious. As foretold, the rehab specialist strapped a pair of goggles, attached by wires to a laptop, to my head.

“This is like those laser pointers that people use to play with their cats, but just follow it with your eyes,” the rehab specialist explained.

The laptop recorded and graphed my eye movements as I followed a laser-image dot that darted around the wall. These quick eye movements are called saccades, which is French for “jerk” or “twitch.” The data collected about what my brain tells my eyes about how to navigate is especially important given that the right parietal lobe, where my difficulties stem from, plays a major role in how the brain orients the body in space. The test showed that, depending on the location of the dot, I sometimes followed it more slowly than usual or just totally spaced out without realizing it.

After the goggles, the rehab specialist brought out a metal device that looked like a stubby metal tuning fork. The electronic stimulation from the fork would stimulate part of my brain, to juice it up, to in a sense wake up the weaker parts.