Half a Mind to ..

Life after brain injury – one small victory at a time.

Author: Kelvin

  • Proprioception —The Hidden Sense (Insight 002)

    Proprioception —The Hidden Sense (Insight 002)

    Proprioception is the quiet, unnoticed sense that lets us navigate the world without watching our every move. It keeps us balanced, coordinated, and efficient. When it’s impaired, life becomes unexpectedly difficult.

    For example, a foot may land at an odd angle without warning. A hand may overshoot a mug or knock into objects. Even walking through a doorway can feel strangely misaligned. These experiences aren’t due to weakness—they’re due to missing or muddled signals from the body to the brain. A common thing for me is that one leg feels longer than the other; I’m not absolutely sure that this is due to poor proprioception, but it seems to me that it could be. 

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  • Rebuilding fine motor skills (strategy 044)

    Rebuilding fine motor skills (strategy 044)

    When I wrote my post – A Healing Brain, I touched on something that still amazes me every day: the brain’s ability to rebuild itself. Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity might sound like big technical words, but really they boil down to this simple truth — a damaged brain can learn again, provided we keep nudging it in the right direction. That “retraining” is absolutely vital. If we don’t guide the brain towards good habits, it’ll quite happily settle into the bad ones instead.

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  • Visual Field Loss – (Challenge 001)

    Visual Field Loss – (Challenge 001)

    I have left-sided hemianopia (or Hemianopsia, which means I cannot see the left half of my visual field; true for both eyes. To a great extent I am unaware of the issue in for the most part daily life these days. There’s no additional edge or the like in what I see, it simply tails off into nothingness in the same way that a normally sighted person experiences. There’s just less information coming in.

    Seventeen years ago, after surgery required sacrificing part of my vision, I would bump into people or objects on my left side almost daily. Although I rarely bump into things now, certain environments remain difficult to navigate.


    In particular, walking through areas of medium crowd density is most challenging. When people have the space to move and change direction unexpectedly, it is very difficult for me to anticipate their movements on my blind side. Low crowd density situations pose fewer problems, and very crowded spaces can actually be easier to manage because movement is slower and more predictable.

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