"Imagine your brain as an airport control tower. A lively, humming nerve center, where information is sorted, routed, and relayed efficiently. Conversations glide in and out like aircraft landing on time. Memories emerge without effort, summoned from mental filing cabinets. Focus feels like a beam of light you can aim and hold steady. Then an accident of some sort, often in a vehicle, changes everything in a split second."
"Researchers have a name for this: "reduced cognitive efficiency." It's a term you'll find in journals and neuropsychology reports. But it doesn't really speak to the texture of the experience, how it bends time, distorts identity, and eats away at self-confidence. McDonald and colleagues (2002) showed how even mild TBIs can compromise executive function, forcing individuals to rely on deliberate, slow strategies for things that once came naturally, such as planning, organizing, and switching between tasks."
Traumatic brain injury often leaves the brain's structure intact while scrambling internal neural circuits, producing an invisible fracture that impairs how people access their abilities. Cognitive functions such as attention, memory retrieval, planning, organizing, and task-switching become slower and more effortful, a condition labeled reduced cognitive efficiency. Individuals may appear outwardly normal while experiencing internal fatigue, frustration, detours in thought, and stalled processing. Even mild TBIs can compromise executive function and force reliance on deliberate, slow strategies. Recovery is nonlinear and rehabilitation emphasizes adaptation and compensatory strategies rather than simple restoration of pre-injury performance.
Read at Psychology Today
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