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there are two sentences I can't understand while I read a book. It is about brain injury. Please help!

  1. The catastrophic effect of my injury was such that I was shattered and then remolded by the experience, and I emerged from it a profoundly different person with a different set of convictions, values, and priorities.

-> If I remove such that - emerged from it, then it says the catastrophic effect of my injury was a profoundly different person and it doesn't make sense to me. Either, I emerged from it a profoundly different person doesn't make sense.

  1. On his journey, Linge learned how his injured brain affected his behaviour, he relearned many skills, and he learned to compensate for "the impairments his changed brain" imposed on him.

-> The impairments his changed brain? What is this list of nouns and what does "imposed" mean here?

Thank you in advance!

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  • You're parsing the sentence improperly (not surprising, given this sentence). Put a period after "experience", delete "and", and start a new sentence with "I emerged from the experience [it]". Now, does it make sense?
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 14:50
  • Your reading of the first sentence is only possible if you remove the words ", and I". So you remove a comma and a conjunction, which both clearly indicate the beginning of a separate phrase. And then you delete the "I", the very subject of that phrase. So of course what you get as a result makes no sense. Do not delete the ", and I". Your basic approach of removing things you don't understand is fine. But you do know what "and I" means. So leave it in. Then what you get is "The catastrophic effect was [something], and I emerged from it [something else]".
    – ЯegDwight
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 15:17

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The catastrophic effect of my injury was such that I was shattered and then remolded by the experience, and I emerged from it a profoundly different person with a different set of convictions, values, and priorities.

Let's break this into three sentences to make it easier to understand:

The injury had a catastrophic effect on me. I was shattered and then remolded by the experience. As a result of the injury, I became a profoundly different person with a different set of convictions, values, and priorities.

On his journey, Linge learned how his injured brain affected his behaviour, he relearned many skills, and he learned to compensate for "the impairments his changed brain" imposed on him.

There is an optional word missing from this sentence. The sentence may be easier to understand if we put the word in: "he learned to compensate for the impairments that his changed brain imposed on him." This part of the sentence means: "His brain had changed. Impairments were imposed on him by his changed brain. He learned to compensate for these impairments." The word "that" is often omitted in sentences like this.

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