If you’ve ever met Cole Cohen downtown or out at UCSB where she works, it’s a sure bet you never guessed she has a hole in her brain the size of a lemon. As a matter of fact, she never guessed it, either, until eight years ago when she was about to enter the California Institute of the Arts’ graduate writing program and decided to try one more time to learn to drive. “I figured you can’t live in Los Angeles without a car,” said Cohen.
She failed. Again. Frustrated, her mother suggested medical intervention and, this time, a neurologist, the latest in an accelerating attempt in Cohen’s history to find out why she could be so smart yet wrestle with stubborn handicaps. She got into the prestigious writing program, for instance, but cannot gauge the passage of time without a watch; navigating grocery stores is even more difficult. “It’s my nemesis,” she laughed a few weeks ago over Chinese food, and she wasn’t kidding that much. This new doctor ordered an MRI and a PET scan. After decades of largely theoretical diagnoses and depression drugs, the MRI made the culprit plain: a “black spot the shape of a lopsided heart,” as she puts it in Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders, her book about the hole. Recalling the discovery moment produces one of the most delicately phrased yet broadly funny scenes in the book.
The passage goes as follows: Neurologist Doctor Volt (with wit, Cohen renamed some of the people involved) shows her a computer-screen image and points to an empty spot. This is your brain, he says, and that is a hole. Then this happened.