Photo by AMP Productions 2017

          In the world where we live very little remains to be classified as typical.  Things continually change.   Fresh knowledge appears daily as we create new ways to do the same old things.  Take better pictures, drive faster cars, connect across borders and the list goes on.  While most things change the mysterious workings of the human brain continues to be a puzzle to me. Unpredictable and unusual, this small, yet amazing organ takes direction from no one.  
   I recently read an article on the Internet about regular folks who developed “super human-like” intelligence they never had before until suffering a traumatic brain injury.  Special abilities developed where they had ceased to occur previously. These individuals became gifted beyond their wildest imaginations.  For the first time ever they could decipher highly complex mathematical equations reserved only for the genius among us or even mysteriously create skillful artistic works beyond their level of endowment.  Acquired savant syndrome is the interesting name given to this rare phenomenon. 

At the conclusion of the article I became amazed that something like this could even be possible and was convinced that it was undoubtedly the most remarkable contraption the brain could devise to impress me.  Then I met Ben Kane, a traumatic brain injury survivor, a great educator and a brilliant man with an IQ that would place him in good intellectual company with the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.   Within the first five minutes of us speaking my brain was brutally whipped and assaulted by the boundless knowledge of a great physicist unexpectedly armed with abundant principles of chemistry and graced with an understanding of every single thing under the universe.   It quickly became clear to me that my own reasonably high IQ had no place in our conversation and would serve better being immediately boxed and placed on a high shelf out of harm’s way. Perhaps I misunderstood when I was told this individual was recovering from a brain injury.  How could I not know that a master educator and a man of such intelligence who suffered a traumatic brain injury would not do everything possible to find a way to make his brain work better.  After all, if someone lacking intelligence could become smarter after a brain injury then the opposite situation is certainly possible.  My interaction with Ben proved once again that the brain is a bottomless pit of wonder and furthermore, that it answers to no one.   

         Ben Kane may be one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.  Standing at a mere 5’1’’ tall he has one of the biggest, shiniest brains and the hugest hearts I have ever encountered.   He is as humble as he is kind.  No one remains a stranger for long to this kindred soul for he has such a genuine love for people and will fight for anyone’s rights.  This is a Jewish man who in the 1960’s was an open sympathizer with the Civil Rights Movement for the rights of blacks in this country and even today supports the rights of Palestinian Muslims for having a home to raise their children and families in peace.  As a devoted advocate of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, he lived his life governed by principals of fairness and equality.  He is respectful of the differences in everyone.  “God created us to be different,” he says.  Negatively affected by anti-Semitic activities in the world and by the realities of the Holocaust, Ben feels strongly against racial and religious discrimination. “Freedom is for everyone—it a gift God has given to everyone,” states Ben.  Well-spoken by a man who was taught by his mom that you can’t have a full stomach while other people go hungry.  He took that teaching to heart.  As an educator he would bring five sandwiches to work every day.  Not that he had a big appetite; the sandwiches weren’t for him.  They were for any of his students who could not afford to buy lunch that day.  He made sure these kids would have something to eat on a daily basis.   Helping people is just in his blood.  An educator for life, he’s always teaching and always sharing.  “Life has something to teach us,” he says.  “You have to thank God every day you wake up and had the opportunity to do right for yourself and for others,” Ben states to all who will hear.

These statements I make are not just for bragging rights either. On the contrary, but for the intelligence and personal philosophy of this man the world would be deprived of an iconic figure of hope and determination for anyone facing any sort of adversity.   To his credit he is a traumatic brain injury survivor, a polio survivor, a cancer survivor, and a heart disease survivor.   He has challenges in his body, yes.  His brain suffers fatigue and he loses his stereoscopic vision at certain times of the day.  Intermittent double vision only allows reading and other vision-dependent activities for four to five hours each day. The possibilities of driving completely ruled out. This being so, will you ever catch Ben pouting over the loss? Never! He’s a smart guy.  He merely adapts.  He takes daily walks and socializes on foot.   No need to drive.   When his vision is compromised he takes a nap or finds alternate activities.  The positive way he chooses to live his life minimizes the impact of these challenges on his wellbeing.   The funniest thing he said to me in our conversation was that each morning when he wakes his body parts argue with each other over who will hurt him the most.  He silently lets them argue then with reckless abandon he rises boldly to begin his day; carefree, unburdened by pain.  Excuse my common expression but, you gotta love this guy! It is his fun, positive attitude, enormous love of learning and staunch determination to never be defeated that makes Ben Kane my hero.  He dazzles everyone he meets with funny joke after joke.  You may think he’s dress rehearsing for a stand-up comedy routine but in reality its deeper than that.   It’s his intelligence at work.  When interacting with him it’s hard to conceive that he has a brain injury.   Never would he call it a disability.  There is a need to exercise his short term memory daily or suffer functional loss of memory.  So this highly intelligent man forces himself to learn something new every day as a neural exercise of sorts to promote learning and the necessary synaptic connections that accompanies it.  If he is not learning something new every day, he is not working his brain.  This level of neural interaction requires much practice.  It’s similar to practicing an instrument.  Any skilled musician can play notes on his/her instrument.   But the musician who commits to practicing on a daily basis is capable of making the same notes sound entirely different and play a much better sound because he has learned to put his soul into the music.   As such Ben commits his days to regularly practicing remembering things.  Hence, the jokes.  Memorizing new jokes and punchlines creates new brain connections that powers up his memory and sharpens his intelligence.  It is as if he has devised his own cognitive therapy.  I told you he was a brilliant guy!  He thinks about how he thinks.  Metacognition.  This has proven to be a key component in Ben’s ability to survive brain injury and a slew of other medical conditions.  

            All his academic life Ben has used one simple educational theory to empower his students and drive their learning.  This one central fact would prove to be vital to his recovery.  His key to life is learning how to learn.   “I think it’s important for people to learn how to learn,” Ben always says, “it’s not the facts of what you learn but your ability to learn how to learn.”  In his own words;

      “In school you never learn ‘things’.  Math and science are things.  What you are learning is a process.   A process of reasoning and putting the brain to work.  You are learning ideas.  How to discriminate relevant knowledge from irrelevant knowledge.  Soon you start using mnemonic devices and other cognitive strategies to help you better learn.  If you get good at this, you can figure things out on your own without a teacher.  Now, once you’ve learned how to learn you are open to learning anything you want to.  With that hope you can overcome every situation.  God expects us to learn.” 

With years of practice Ben successfully mastered this thinking and teaches it to anyone who will listen.  His theory is one of survival really.  Of acquiring the ability to adapt to one’s environment by organizing the fragmented pieces of life and putting it all together.   On January 9,1997 the greatest test of his life would come. Ben would be forced to prove his own theory of learning.  He was involved in a catastrophic car accident that left him in a coma for six months.

           The details of the accident no longer stored in his memory; completely wiped out.  All he knows is what is told to him by others.  Accordingly, at the time of the accident he was a passenger in a small Toyota RAV4 SUV.  Without as much as a warning, a car traveling at a high rate of speed careened violently into the passenger side of the vehicle he was traveling in such a way that only the Jaws of Life could separate him and the car now mangled with his body.  As tragic as this sounds it wasn’t the worst of what Ben would be dealt.  During the accident he suffered a heart attack which further complicated the traumatic brain injury he was now left with. The heart attack lead to pneumonia and life threatening sepsis in his body. With these multiple challenges doctors struggled desperately to keep Ben alive.  He was in and out of a coma.  Ultimately it became medically necessary to put Ben in an induced coma just to save his life.  There he remained for six months.  “I remembered waking up in the hospital wondering why all these people were standing around my bed talking about me,” Ben stated.     

As a result of his traumatic accident Ben would be left paralyzed with severely wasted muscles.  He could not move his arms or legs.   He had to relearn how to walk, how to swallow, even how to have control over how he moved his arms and legs.  And that he did.  Refusing to accept defeat he made up in his mind that he was not destined to become an invalid.  “I wouldn’t accept no for an answer,” he remembers, “I knew when faced with adversity it was the tough that got going.” This is when the man with the 185 IQ proved his own theory that the key to life is learning how to learn.  He began to study how the body worked and how muscles interacted with each other to create movement.  He used his intellect and his drive to “know” to reprogram his brain to make his body work again.  Passiveness and depression were two qualities that never came calling for a visit.  Armed with the belief that there was a greater power than he who could make the impossible possible, he knew if he wanted to fully recover bad enough that he would have to learn how to do it and make it happen.   He kept a positive attitude and pleasant thoughts.  He knew that with hard work, determination and the will to do it anyone could learn anything they wanted to; even to walk again and lead a normal life.   Ben was blessed.  He had his God looking out for him, the love of his family surrounding him and a beautiful, loving wife that held his hand 10-12 hours a day while he laid in his 6-month coma.

“When I came out of the coma I remembered a nurse telling me that I was in really bad shape.  I thought about what she said but I didn’t allow the reality of my situation to hinder me.  I looked the nurse in the eye and told her I would get up out of this bed on my own and walk to the wheelchair she had brought to transport me in. That is when I started rehabbing myself in my own hospital bed before the doctor had even scheduled rehab for me.  Raising my arms was the most grueling pain one could ever imagine and moving my legs was near to impossible.  Yet, I forced myself to do it.  I fought through the pain.   I worked my muscles daily and never gave up.  Within a month I had done exactly what I told the nurse I would do.  I got up out of my bed on my own and walked to the wheelchair that was provided for me.  I wouldn’t accept no for an answer.”
-Ben Kane 

    His lifelong love of learning and his faith in God formed the basis for his recovery.   “We are all unique in our level of intelligence but with God’s blessings and hard work we can do anything.  Never give up!” encourages Ben. If there is any other human being better qualified to make this statement you will have to prove it to me. 
  Ben’s story doesn’t begin with the 1997 car accident, by far.  It goes way back further than that.  It starts in 1946 when Ben was only 4 years old and became a victim of the polio epidemic of the 1940’s – 50’s. He contracted bulbar poliomyelitis, a highly lethal form of polio affecting the brainstem and thus breathing. He was hospitalized at Willard Parker Hospital (closed in 1958) on New York City’s east side with a fever over 109°. He would miraculously recover from this disease (which has a 90% fatality rate), and would be counted among its only few survivors in existence.  The disease did not leave him without impairment however.  He has breathing difficulties and received speech therapy for many years for a severe speech impediment.  In elementary school his non-continuous speech patterns (he has to stop and catch his breath while speaking) lead teachers to believe he had a learning disability because of his difficulties while reading out loud.  Teachers continued to misjudge Ben’s capabilities until the 7th grade when an IQ test revealed his superior intellect despite his speech impediment.  A learning disability was never suggested again.
   Surviving polio makes for a great notation in the Ben Kane story.  It pushed him into believing that anyone can work on being better and can get better.  While his short stature got him picked on in school it never hindered him.  He just got better.  He mastered judo, gymnastics and canoeing.  In fact, he even made the 1960 Summer Olympics team in canoeing.  Unfortunately, he could not afford to attend and chose to pursue his education instead.

 In school Ben went on to do extraordinarily well and later received a Regents’ Scholarship to attend City College in Manhattan. Since City College was free at the time It was as if he had been paid to attend college.  Here he received a Bachelors in physics with a background in electrical engineering. Later on he would attend graduate school also for free on a fellowship.  He graduated from Yeshiva University with a Masters’ degree in physics and education and proud to say he had earned the highest grade in physics amongst his fellow classmates.  He went on to becoming a science teacher in the New York City Public School system until retiring in 1995, working at schools such as Stuyvesant, William Cullen Bryant, Long Island City and Newtown High Schools.  In addition to this he taught as an adjunct at St. John’s University and Yeshiva University.  Alongside his work as a teacher he led a successful career as a real estate and mortgage broker and insurance agent. Talk about wearing multiple hats and specializing in variety! There is another side of Ben I would like for you to meet.  There is Ben the cartoonist, Ham radio operator, baritone saxophonist, life guard, water safety instructor, electrical engineer, TV repair person, New York City Public Schools audio-visual coordinator and the school kid who worked an early morning paper route to make some extra money.  I would be remiss in mentioning the teacher who not only taught science but taught his students integrity, honor and not to lie.  He taught his students the value of interdependency in working together.  His policy of having his stronger students instruct and assist the weaker one proved to be a cohesive one and a tool for improving everyone’s learning all around.

Through challenge after challenge his philosophy never changed.  Whatever hand he was dealt he continued to believe that he could learn how to be better than his situation and overcome it.  In 1995 it was prostate cancer.  The cancer went into remission in 1996.  It then came back after his accident in 1997.  Chemotherapy weakened his heart valves and he had quadruple bypass surgery with valve replacement in 2002.   In 2004 he once again developed sepsis which caused his heart valves to fail.  Mechanical heart valves were put in.  Ben recovered from all of this.  In 2007/2008 he had a tooth pulled.  The Coumadin medication he was taking for his heart was reduced for the purpose of the tooth extraction.  As a result, he suffered a stroke.  Yet again he recovered.  In 2008 a pacemaker was surgically implanted in response to his damaged heart.  If all I have described thus far was not enough you can add ulcerative colitis to his basket of ailments.  In all of these trials his good nature never changed.  When asked if he ever felt he was given more than he could bear his response was commendable.  He said to me, “One can never appreciate life or pleasure without experiencing pain.  Life can be quickly taken from us so we have to learn how to live a good life [no matter the challenges].” He bravely thinks more about helping other people live a better life than feeling sorry for himself.  “When given choices in life do the things that are helpful to other people.  Don’t be selfish,” was the advice he gave me.  Then he told me a joke.  He does anything to make people smile.  To encourage them.  From the first time we spoke he referred to me as friend.   What an honor.

    How does Ben Kane think of himself? He thinks himself to be a flower, still growing.  I think the flower has already grown to be 95 feet tall.  With a wife, five children and 10 grandkids (with two more on the way) his family is also growing.   A dedicated family man; to the world he is a devoted lifelong educator, a walking encyclopedia.  To his family he is simply affectionately known as Papa.  Ben considers himself to be an ordinary guy with extraordinary challenges who pushed himself to be who he is, but better.  With all that he has gone through the person he is now is exactly the person he was supposed to be.   He is his own critic.  At age 74 Ben is still a big dreamer.

“I will continue dreaming until the day I die.  Without a dream you have nothing.  If you can dream you can still do something with your life.  I still have a lot of dreams left inside of me and things I want to accomplish,” Ben proudly exclaims. 

 So what is Ben Kane dreaming about? To see his grand kids grow up, to live to 100, and to relearn how to read Hebrew so he can read from the Torah.  “At age 83 I want to be have a second bar mitzvah,” Ben says, “that will be my thanks to God for allowing me to see 83.”  Well Mr. Kane I hope I will be invited to that event.  Based on everything you have gone through in life I have a sneaky little feeling it’s going to happen. 

Ben volunteers  an hour each day at Living Beyond TBI to help other survivors learn how to become productive again. He  visits  hospitals,  nursing homes and support groups  to share his story of hope with other  TBI survivors.

.                                                                        * Names & places  have been alerted to protect identity.

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Trudy Phillips is a freelance writer and the author of several books.  Her first fictional novel, “Nothing Shall by Any Means Hurt You” is currently available on Amazon and CreateSpace.