Jonathan Rottenberg

Thank you.

It's wonderful to be here with you.

I was studying.

I was in a PhD program in history, living in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University.

I studied American history, and I thought I was the smartest guy in the room.

And I was then struck by a series of very bizarre experiences that I had no framework for understanding.

Yes.

And so when I started to feel unwell, I didn't have really much of a framework to go on.

I first noticed physical symptoms that didn't make a whole lot of sense.

I had pain on the left side of my body.

I thought there might be something wrong with my heart.

I felt physically weak, like I thought I might have a fever or some kind of flu-like illness.

I felt incredibly run down.

And I thought that it would just go away on its own.

And then other problems started.

So rather than it getting better, it got worse.

So what started to change was that my ability to focus, read, think, that degenerated pretty rapidly.

So this tool that I used to understand the world, this tool that really defined who I was, my brain, my mind, was not working right.

So here I am in a history program and I'm working on a dissertation and I can't read a book anymore.

I mean, I can look at a page and I see the words and my ability to concentrate is getting to be close to zero.