I've had a similar experience. I got out of computer programming because I became ill with West Nile Virus and couldn't think well enough to continue. Even after I recovered from most of the physical aspects of the disease (approximately equal to having mono for a year) I was still unable to continue working on the relatively complex recommendations algorithms that I had been doing before. The math just made no sense to me.
I consider myself generally intelligent and capable, and while ill I was definitely neither. I once failed twice in a row at following the directions to make instant mashed potatoes. It wasn't really a joke that a good day was keeping the toilet seat clean and remembering to flush. It's been about 5 years, and my health is mostly back to normal other than no longer being in decent physical shape. I'm currently doing non-computer work (http://screamsorbet.com) but I'm eager to someday get back to the programming problems I abandoned.
Unlike the author of the article, I didn't find it made me happier. Perhaps it's a general personality issue, but it made me even more depressed. Books and movies were mostly beyond me, and there wasn't much I found to take any joy in. I presumed I would eventually recover (and think I have almost completely) but the overall feeling was one of intense mortality --- a dread of the eventual senility that will probably come with aging, and a realization that when it happens again it will likely be once and forever.
Wow, that is quite a story. I've seen and heard the brain be likened to a muscle, and that you need to literally train it to get it up to strength. If you can, get in to some 'lightweight' programming again until you feel comfortable doing that and then work your way in to harder problems.
I've stopped coding for about 3 years at one point (not the best period in my life to put it mildly) and once I tried to get back in to it I found that the stuff that I'd been doing just before quitting was totally beyond me, I literally had to walk myself through the code line-by-line (even though I wrote it only a few years beforehand) in order to make sense of it.
Now, after slowly working my way up again it's much better than before, I've done some more intricate stuff recently and working on the more complex stuff (for me, no doubt it is still childs play compared to what others achieve) is still tough but no longer impossible.
It scares me how much my skills dropped in that relatively short period through no other action than just doing nothing and the 'use it or lose it' mantra is one that I repeat to myself frequently now in order warn myself to never ever let that happen again to any part of me.
It also was a good lesson about taking things for granted.
"It wasn't really a joke that a good day was keeping the toilet seat clean and remembering to flush."
It sounds as though your west nile had a stronger effect than the author's problems. Perhaps a person becomes happy insofar as their level of intelligence is closer to the population average. This makes sense if people are happy to the extent that they can relate to others.
Probably, although that was at its worst. The recovery was a continuum spread over a couple years, so there were pretty long periods of mild impairment as well.
I think you're probably right about happiness, but I didn't find that my impairment helped me relate to others. Even when well, I feel like I relate to most people in an 'emulation mode': a feedback loop of consciously gauging reactions and continually asking myself how my audience expects me to react. Being impaired just made this less effective and more stressful.
The general feeling was similar to being sleep deprived and unable to focus. Small concepts felt very complicated and hard to grasp, but at the same time I constantly realized that I wasn't operating very well. I suppose if the effect was more like alcohol, where the impairment is more obvious to the audience than to the drinker, that there might be more of a pro-social effect. I'm not much of a fan of alcohol, though, so again this might be just a personality issue.
> the overall feeling was one of intense mortality --- a dread of the eventual senility that will probably come with aging, and a realization that when it happens again it will likely be once and forever.
Reading about these kinds of things is exactly why I donate to organisations that are working on curing the diseases of aging (mostly http://www.sens.org). Nothing scares me more than slow decline and decrepitude.
I'm young right now, but I'm both intrigued and scared about growing old and losing my grasp of my mind.
Awhile ago I've decided upon a signal for myself that, should I see it, means "you're crazy and you can't trust yourself". Hopefully I'll recognize it when I see it later, and also have the forethought to deploy it in time. I doubt it'll actually change anything (i.e., if I have Alzheimer's, I'm unlikely to remember the signal anyway and act accordingly) but I like to think of it as a neat little experiment on myself.
My wife's grandpa had West Nile in the summer of '09. He lost about a week's worth of memory while he was sick with the worst of it. He's just not the same person as we was before. He can't remember things very well. He'll do something and then do it again an hour later. You can hardly talk to him anymore because he just gives you this blank stare most of the time.
He's in his 80's so I don't think he's going to recover much from this. You're probably recovering better because of your age.
I consider myself generally intelligent and capable, and while ill I was definitely neither. I once failed twice in a row at following the directions to make instant mashed potatoes. It wasn't really a joke that a good day was keeping the toilet seat clean and remembering to flush. It's been about 5 years, and my health is mostly back to normal other than no longer being in decent physical shape. I'm currently doing non-computer work (http://screamsorbet.com) but I'm eager to someday get back to the programming problems I abandoned.
Unlike the author of the article, I didn't find it made me happier. Perhaps it's a general personality issue, but it made me even more depressed. Books and movies were mostly beyond me, and there wasn't much I found to take any joy in. I presumed I would eventually recover (and think I have almost completely) but the overall feeling was one of intense mortality --- a dread of the eventual senility that will probably come with aging, and a realization that when it happens again it will likely be once and forever.