Into the Void

The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve, a honking big nerve that runs from your skull, down your chest and into your abdomen. The punch-in-the-gut feeling of a jolt of adrenalin/the start of an anxiety attack is carried on the vagus nerve.

The usual paradigm for emotions is they start in the brain. Most of the body’s hormones have a dual purpose as a neurotransmitter. The vagus nerve helps coordinate the physical feeling with the emotional feeling – they are one and the same. The mind-body connection.

Most of the body’s serotonin is in the gut. A squirt of serotonin doesn’t just happen in the brain, it happens in the whole body. Ditto adrenaline. The vagus nerve conducts information in both directions. I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to blame anxiety on a brain malfunction.

An interesting treatment for anxiety is “Vagus Nerve Stimulation.” In VNS, a device is implanted that applies current to the vagus nerve is to overwhelm it. It’s kind of like a TENS unit for pain. VNS is a last resort for intractible anxiety.

One implication of this is that if you can control the physical aspects of anxiety – relax your muscles, slow down your breathing & heart rate – then the emotional component will follow. Once the emotions are managed you can work out whatever brought on the anxiety.
Candace Pert, Ph.D. discovered opium (endorphin) receptors in the brain. She wrote an enlightening book Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine.

Also check out Timothy Leary. One of his more interesting ideas is that we have receptor sites for chemicals that haven’t been invented yet. Alexander Shulgin was a chemist who formulated a lot of them, but I don’t recommend you try it.

“Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.”

Tuning into your pet’s needs – BlogPaws

My cat turned me on to a new blog for pet owners called BlogPaws. There is some mention of a conference for bloggers, writers and pet supply companies. The first emphasis brought to my attention was the SEO aspect of writing a blog.

kittehboi.com is a fun blog, and though we make sure to mention others’ blogs, etc. for google juice, I don’t want it to end up looking like a Peruvian circus, full of multicolored flashing and dancing adverts.

The first requirement for SEO is to have content that brings readers back. I’m trying to wrap my brain around it, to come up with an idea that goes further than “funny pictures of cats.”

I have a personal interest in evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology, so my personal focus is on animals as intelligent, rational beings. Cats and dogs have the IQ of young children, but much more impulse control.

“C’mon, admit it – we all do it. Some of us talk to them as if they can actually understand us (I’m one of those).”

Did you catch that? The writer said “as if they can actually understand us.” Apparently this person has some doubts.

Dogs (and probably cats) have a Broca’s brain or Wernicke’s area, meaning they are capable of understanding speech. In practice cats have a vocabulary of around 20-30 words while dogs may be able to understand 100 or more. Animal behaviorists will tell you it’s “training.” 40 years ago human psychologists were behaviorists too, and explained all human behavior as learned responses to stimuli. How different *are* training and learning?

This rather chilling video demonstrates through video clips and interviews that children’s programming can have a profound effect on them, from predisposing them to subliminal messages to changing their entire worldview. The depth of dark manipulation by Disney is a definite must-see for parents and professionals alike.

If you haven’t read Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament” run out and get a copy. She is a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins and is bipolar herself.

“I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those who have particularly passionate temperaments and questioning minds leave the world a different place for their having been there. It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. Intensity has its costs, of course — in pain, in hastily and poorly reckoned plans, in impetuousness — but it has its advantages as well.”
Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Author and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University
in “The Benefits of Restlessness and Jagged Edges”
NPR Morning Edition, June 6, 2005

There is a video of a speech she did about Exhuberance on YouTube that was quite inspiring. She wrote a great book about the love of life called Exuberance: The Passion for Life
.

Positive deception is when you change the parameters so that you don’t have to lie.

Throwing the ball easy to a little kid so that he succeeds and develops a good attitude toward the game.
Giving every kid a trophy so they don’t get discouraged.
Putting everyone in the school on the Honor Roll so that they all feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, this instills the kids with total lack of concern for quality.

A few weeks ago there was a vehicle in front of me at the coffeeshop window with a phone number and link to The Evolutionary Brain. I called the number and got the guy in the truck, we waved at each other, and he gave me a DVD of the above video, Dr. Robert Scaer on Brain State Technologies and Trauma.

I had a theory about this 18 years ago when I worked for an EEG company and was getting into brainwave synchronization. Doesn’t it seem obvious that if you can “read” brainwaves, then you can also write them? It would be tricky. We’re not looking for ECT, which is more like an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes the whole thing clean. We just want to defrag the mind.

The main site for the technology, Brain State Technologies™ Brain State Conditioning™.

Imnsho, information like this is an absolute necessity if you don’t want to drown in your own drool. YMMV, of course.

A few nights ago I was looking into self-hypnosis and hypnosis. Sure, I’ve had many self-hypnosis tapes and CDs over the years. Not that I’m immune to suggestion, but most of them just don’t work. Often there are glaring errors. The facilitator says the stereotypical “sleep, sleeeeeeep” so much that it is comical. The facilitator tells you what not to do, which is practically guaranteed to make you think of actually doing it.

Don’t think of an elephant.

While researching self-hypnosis, I went off on a tangent and learned about some less well-known techniques.

Ideomotor Signaling is based on the concept of a split brain. The seminal book on the topic of a split brain, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, is a must-read for anyone curious about the importance of left brain to right brain interactions. I suspect his theory was sparked by research into surgery that split the corpus collosum to prevent seizures in folks with epilepsy. The surgery had a number of interesting side effects, including what I’ll describe in the next paragraph. There are some excellent materials on split brain experiments on the Nobel Prize web site, and even a game. We love games.

The theory is that since the left half of the brain controls speech, the right half of the brain has to use other means of communication. To access information that isn’t available to the speaking side of the bicameral mind all you have to do is tell the right brain to signal its answers, perhaps by a finger tap. If Ideomotor Signalling is the force behind dowsing, magic pendulums, and ouija boards, a lot of mystics are fooling themselves.

Whether ideomotor signaling really works or not remains to be seen. According to Quackwatch, Ideomotor Action, is a well-known phenomenon that occurs so deep in the subconscious that the person experiencing it is totally unaware that their action is volitional. Often the movements are attributed to some supernatural force. Hence the spirits “talk” using the Hellboy Talking Board Ouija.

In more complex variants of ideomotor action, a person may be completely unaware that they’ve lost their objectivity. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest. This is the major flaw in religion, especially with regard to absolute morality. It is also a major flaw in the scientific method.

Essentially “Ideomotor Communication” is a modern phrase for the old concept of unconscious behavior.

Can ideomotor action be used to access information that we wish to hide from ourselves? It seems rather dangerous. We erect walls in our memories for a reason.

Continuing to surf the idea that we might want to hide information from ourselves, I came across Robert Anton Wilson’s concept of the fnord.

A fnord is a word marks any fact that the powers-that-be wish us, the great unwashed, to ignore or trivialize. After reporting an Inconvenient Truth, print the word “fnord.” Children were conditioned to feel extreme anxiety when confronted with a fnord. For the rest of their lives they will avoid sensitive issues by forgetting not only the fnords, but also the news item that preceded it. Politics, environmental issues, economics, all can be hidden in plain sight.

Of course this led to Steve Jackson’s fnord generator. Try it out.

A related concept is that of apophenia. Apophenia is the tendency to find meaning in noise. This is how we see constellations in the stars, faces on Mars, and Kaziklu Bey’s visage grinning evilly from a slice of cinnamon toast.

This would make a good premise for a game.

Apophenia is the human mind’s ability to see connections and patterns out of random noise, so I figured it would be a good title for a game in which I’m trying to make both the appearance and the rules as random as possible.

Each game is generated by a seed title, covering the appearance, soundscape, and behavior of the player, an NPC, and a swarm. You control the player with only the mouse, potentially leading, pushing, or controlling it. Each game ends when either the player or the NPC shrink into nothingness. If you have trouble understanding the symbolic value of each game, a “pretentious mode” is provided to explain the concept behind each variation.
– Noyb, author of the computer game “Apophenia.”

The Apophenia game can be downloaded from Noyb’s web page.

Found this in an archive from 2005.

I have come to realize that some folks, in order to maintain a very narrow belief system, no longer allow themselves to evaluate other belief systems. In essence, other points of view dangerously threaten their fragile little world. In essence, their own opinions seem like Universal Truths to them, because no other opinions impinge upon them. Sadly, they become desperate to eliminate diversity from the world – diversity that in their narrow minds seems to be life-threatening aberrations.

It’s a very easy way to live your life, uncomplicated by consideration of other aspects of the Truth. It’s all black and white. It is the basis of hatred. Jung talks about this concept quite a bit. He saw it as the basis of evil. The evil can’t be in *me* you see. The evil is out there somewhere – shrinks call it “projection”.

You can’t have a meaningful debate with a person who doesn’t see your side well enough to come up with convincing rebuttals. You can’t have a meaningful debate when your esteemed opponent finds the very need for debate to be a personal threat.

For the most part, folks with this impairment are in my kill file. And it doesnt matter one small bit whether they are Democrats or Republicans, though the latter seem, in my personal Truth, to be more prone to it.

Oh, this is a good explanation of one illness that results in the sort of black and white thinking I’m talking about. It is called Dry Drunk Syndrome.

Where I come from, we don’t stone people to death any more.

Well, we are losing ground. There are a number of groups that are fighting for more humane treatment of mental patients, except that by “humane” they mean “treating the poor benighted bastards whether they want it or not.”

Although there are are indeed patients who are unaware of their illnesses, it is unacceptable to treat all of the mentally ill that way. It opens the door to unimaginable abuses. By the way, anognosia is also found in stroke victims with damage to the frontal lobes. And on a more chilling note, some psychiatric treatments induce anosognosia.

NAMI is once again at the forefront in this growing threat.

Anosognosia Keeps Patients From Realizing They’re Ill
A growing body of evidence points to the fact that for many people with serious mental illness, lack of insight is a medically based condition.
About half of the people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may not be getting the treatment they need because of a brain deficit that renders them unable to perceive that they are ill, according to one expert.
Xavier Amador, Ph.D.: “People will come up with illogical and even bizarre explanations for symptoms and life circumstances stemming from their illness.”
Anosognosia, meaning “unawareness of illness,” is a syndrome commonly seen in people with serious mental illness and some neurological disorders, according to Xavier Amador, Ph.D., who spoke at the 2001 convention of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Washington, D.C., in July.
People with this syndrome do not believe they are ill despite evidence to the contrary, said Amador, who is director of psychology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Treatment Advocacy Center
“The Treatment Advocacy Center has been the catalyst for many positive changes in our laws and a shift in our perception of the importance of intervention. Their unique advocacy is restoring the important balance between individual freedom and caring coercion.”

Legislation
These issues of “involuntary commitment” and “assisted outpatient treatment,” are labeled in academia as “controversial”, a concept interpreted by many as too difficult for the average person to understand. Without the support of scientific research, we all felt until now, intimidated and afraid to be rendered guilty of tampering with everyone’s civil rights. To continue protecting their civil rights only allows our loved ones to remain psychotic, addicted to substances, wandering the streets of the USA, wasting their lives in jails and using, over and over again, most of the economic resources available to treat ALL mentally ill persons. We cannot forget that, not too long ago, freeing the slaves and fighting for an end to discrimination were also considered “controversial” subjects.

Bill mandates treatment for mentally ill (phillyBurbs.com)
Others, though, contend there is little evidence the court orders are effective, and the laws deflect attention from deeper problems plaguing the mental health system, such as a lack of funding for expanded treatment and support services.
Patient advocates fear that law could be abused by applying it whenever a patient disagrees with a doctor’s recommendations. A 2005 state law allows for psychiatric advanced directives specifying treatment preferences when a person’s decision-making is impaired, patient advocates added.
“I believe that the bill has grown out of a sincere desire to help people with mental illness,” said Joseph Rogers, president of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, if it became law, it would have the exact opposite effect.”

Be afraid. Be VERY Afraid. If you disagree with your caregivers, they can pull out the anosognosia label to get you out of the way.