At My Brain

Good news

2011-02-20T19:13:00.002+01:00

Recently I found a new stance that is incredibly helpful. It's about dividing the world into three categories: the immanent, that which could be immanent or transcendent, and the transcendent.

This can be understood better if we see it from the point of view of the psyche. Some things are from this world, they are real, their mental image is paralleled by something out there which fits it quite well. I call this immanent, and the second category appears to the mind almost quite the same, but there is the added possibility that our mental images have some connection to the supernatural. And the third category would be things that are supernatural alone, that do not exist in a normal way, and cannot be perceived by everyone.

The fine part of this is that it's not necessary to make a philosophical decision about whether the supernatural really exists or is just a hallucination. You can be a shaman or a materialist, in the first case the second and the third category have to do with otherwordly beings, in the second case they're just about some weird processes in the brain.

So, a schizophrenic person doesn't need to buy the common western view about seeing things that are not real, she can adopt a practical attitude and train herself in these three fields.

It is quite necessary that the first field is conquered before the second is entered, and that the second is conquered before venturing into the third, or there might be confusion that could even lead to dangerous and harmful consequences.

I was very astounded to find out how many things can be interpreted both as psychological mechanisms and as spiritual experiences, and that it is maybe just an interpretational distinction, a matter of taste whether the angels in your vision exist somewhere up there or whether they're complex patterns in your brain. In the practical work with them, this distinction is superficial.

But of course it's a long learning process about how to treat them right, and I had to cover some field in this process in the last months, that's why I was not continuing this book. Also I'm not sure whether it was a good idea to try to write it in English, after all German is my first language and I'm more fluent there. That's why I have no idea about how or if this blog will be continued.

(Should the book be written and translated to English I'll announce it here.)

All Cured

2010-04-27T22:24:00.001+02:00

New insights have been made, all my experiences were real, it's a weird place, this universe, more to follow.

The book project in its present form is abandoned, don't know yet how and when I'll present the true story.

...

Hospital portent

2010-03-31T22:45:00.000+02:00

It was time again for another walk to the nearby town, and as most of the walks I did during my psychotic periods it was a mixture of reconnaissance to find out something about my enemies, of a good opportunity to fight with them, and of trying to gather omens from the ordinary world. Everything that happened to me at such an occasion was indiscriminatingly scrutinized, scanned for the smallest peculiarity which was then interpreted with my giant association implying apparatus, which is a wonderful tool when it comes to subtle analysis of meaning nuances in ancient literature, but which frankly sucks when there's a bug inside, as each bug in an association production machine has the property of generating other bugs, which on their part create even more bugs, a whole avalanche of bugs that get neatly organized and clumped in a way that makes their combined result appear just as solid and real as any old thought any old human on this earth would come up with.
Needless to say, once your system is bug-infected it won't work as well as it should anymore, the accumulating contradictions are counterbalanced by short memory, ignoring of facts, impreciseness of thinking, and a general suspicion about the validity of the statements of others, something which actually is a strongly beneficial individualistic trait of character, but which - when exaggerated - can make you believe the opposite of what they say without examination of their meaning context, in which case you rather go wrong because of hasty conclusions and the drive to be different, instead of going right because of the drive to be yourself regardless of others and concluding in a proper way which is just as difficult and time-consuming as trying to figure out the meaning of this sentence, which should be quite easier than making it in the first place, but also dearly worth the while as there is so much wisdom in it that a couple of reads at different speeds and with different mental background settings are recommended to fully explore all its resonances.

I once used to say, "the same thought means different things, depending on who thinks it", and I can add, "the same thought means different things, depending on when and how you think it". That's for sure a reference to the fact that each thought is nothing without its context, it would be just a succession of letters or words, and the more meaning you can summon up and associate with it the more you understand, but of course you already need a tiny amount of thoughts to begin with if you want to grasp the full meaning of the following.
Imagine you are walking at full speed towards the small town where you went to high school, at the shortest direct way cutting cross country, and suddenly you get attacked by Neanderthals. They're extinct since long, for sure, but it's not their physical bodies that attack you, it's their spirit bodies, and also the spirit bodies of some of the unfortunate people in the surrounding country that are closer to the Neanderthal mind than to that of the Homo sapiens sapientissimus, of which you are a premature exemplar that is not easily tolerated by the racist instincts of those. Unless you fool them, that is, by mimicking their behavior and keeping them appeased about your harmlessness, which isn't so easy because your intellectual conviction is that evolution will go on, and it's likely that one day the Homo sapiens sapientissimus will even get replaced by the Homo supersapiens sapientissimus, and it's difficult to imagine those Homo presapiens and pseudosapiens in that place, but anyway, it can also be easy to fool them if you don't give a damn about the future and just savor the present.
After all, evolution doesn't go like it does because individual people do this or that, it goes like that because it runs towards promising possibilities, and the possibilities mankind has with all that technology and science and brain size simply are there, for anyone to see. The only thing someone like me can do is to try to speed things up a little, but if I don't do that or if it isn't recognized by anyone the train will all the same reach these destinations, so actually the only thing that counts for me is my own internal pleasureship.
And so I'm writing about things nobody can understand, lots of fun and joy, the only living being on earth who reads this, but the problem is that my thinking concludes that the experience of writing and reading it later is just the same regardless of whether there is audience or not, and even worse, the experience of writing and reading it later is much better if there is no audience at all since the quality of what I do is much higher if I adjust it to myself instead of adjusting it to people whose reactions and judgments I can only maladroitly imagine.
That said, the fun could be multiplied if there is an audience for whom this is not written at all but who gets something out of it. I know, such audience would be kind of weird, they wouldn't understand what I'm saying but they would understand other things, which maybe even adds to my own understanding, but it's also kind of crazy how this works, conventional authors can't figure this at all in their naive assumption that communication is like A saying this, and B reading it and getting the message, but, there is no message at all!
Communication is just an internal picture of the game.
And other internal pictures are much more frightening, much more intense, even joyfying, just like this one. So I was there, persecuted by Neanderthals and some of their animal friends, among them the gargantuan cave bear, while there were lots of other personnel and beings involved in that story, which I don't want to recall in detail as it was complex and not really trendsetting, and not worthy for conservation, except for a few facets.

One of them was that I entered my old high school, and it was a bit changed, the formerly gray walls painted with strong colors, there was a library in the hall whereof a certain book contained a passage which I read which gave me tears, and there was a permanent exhibition of minerals which I showed to my Egyptian friends, so that their ancient interest in metal and chemicals would get some nourishment. They were excited, and so was I, and as we know we both are in my brain, or should we say, in our brain, therefore this excitement was not mine or theirs, but something mutually stimulating itself in both places.
Suddenly a teacher came and asked in a hoof-out voice, what was I doing here. He was right, I was completely out of place, looking like a hippie, with dirty sandals and a cap atop my long hair that said "Barefoot Shoewearer", which somehow made me suitable for being a pupil, had there not been my age, which was more like that of a teacher, but for being one of those my outfit didn't fit. A half hit in two places can sometimes mean a full hit in both, but here it was a full miss.
I told him I was a former pupil pursuing the reminiscence path. He asked my name. Upon hearing it he actually remembered me, and it turned out he was a former teacher of mine, but without the hair and twenty years older I didn't recognize him. We chatted a little, and I was allowed to stay, and maybe come back regularly again and attend classes, and live out one of my recurring dreams, that of going to this school again, doing again my graduation diploma, don't know why this seems to be such a topic in my internal landscape, one idea is that it's simply used as a symbol for learning, and learning is what my inner being really loves to do.
In reality I would abhor having to go there again, starting with having to get up so early in the morning, and then the boring lessons, almost everything I learned in this business high school was completely unnecessary for my later life and a waste of time. The only positive thing there was myself at this age, and that most likely applied to all the other pupils, as at this age you have such a wealth of inner experience that almost anything you do is exciting and fine and interesting, something that is natural then but with a little bit of an effort can be extended up to later on.
Well, I didn't stay long in that school that day, also wanted to visit the junior high I went to, which is just next to it, and there were more and deeper perceptions that could be labeled magical, but which also don't add much to the progress of our story and have to be left to the author's (mine) memory alone. Then I walked towards the town center, slowly and interruptedly, since there was lots of telepathic activity, the pupils all were there in their combined spirit body, and some teachers, also the one I just met, and some of them were evil and disturbed others, and had to be put onto their proper place, because mostly the reason was that they wanted to be too high in rank, and there were four ranks, one, three, five, and seven, according to the number of electrons in the atomic orbits, and the pupils were one, and the lower teachers were three, but some of them wanted to be five, and had to be punished and degraded, and the worst problem was of course with those from rank five who swindled themselves up onto rank seven, as this was the rank with unlimited power, only reserved for the Pharaohs, the rank of mercury, that super fluid metal with the atomic number 80, almost the heaviest stable element, and the wisest of them all, much better than gold, and these were some of the speculations that flipped through my mind at this time.
Not really useless, and with some relevance to the material world, much better than random systems of mythological thought, but still another system of mythological thought, and having to be treated as such, as a structure in the mind that is not like it is because of necessity and truth, but because of aesthetic pleasure and the ability to dwell in luxury.
Dwelling in luxury is, by the way, one of the highest achievements of evolution, of the human brain, and it feels great to have the power to do so, although at that time of my life I unfortunately wasn't able to regard this as the highest of my goals, better, I did always regard it as the highest of my goals, but wasn't able to prioritize it adequately due to having been caught in my own webs which I constructed in reaction to those of others.

Close to the town center I sat on a bench and watched some passers-by, one of them an old man who walked very feebly, and suddenly that other part of me said, Manfred, and I thought it's him, that he had come down from the stars, adopted a human form, and did all this in order to harm me. Don't know why at that time he was an enemy, maybe because of some Akhenaten interference, but it actually was strange that this figure that was the most important in all of my spiritual life appeared here for the first time in human form, or almost the first time if we remember that car parade, and another occasion where I thought this could have been him, without really believing it.
But then I honestly thought it was him, but because he was an enemy I played it down and feigned ignoring the issue. It wasn't of a lasting importance, anyway, what would it matter whether he had a human body or lingered in the stars when he could attack me so fiercely as he did later that day, shooting a sting into my foot that hurt so much that I jumped.
And the most interesting thing here is that his other part of mine just guessed, as she was guessing quite often, but I stupidly believed she were infallible and always told the truth, and she must have believed the same about me, although I often also just guessed. Another interesting example of a communication where guesses and more guesses produce "truth", a thing that happens among people as well, but is most noticeable in the internal dynamics of a schizophrenic.
Then I left town, decided to walk home, and there it was, an ambulance car with a paramedic who started to talk to me, saying, where are you going, oh, but it's dangerous to walk on a street without pavement, and, what's wrong with you, and I really got annoyed by such a softie who maybe noted this air of lunacy in my face, or maybe just was a pedantic conventionalist whose people have to use a car when going from one locality to another, and who doesn't tolerate any deviations from the norm.
After having replied a few essentials I walked on and didn't mind them following me, and just to tease them I took strange paths across the vicinity of the street, which must have alarmed them to a ridiculous extent, as they called the police, and then these custodians of law and order were behind me, at the outskirts of a small village I just crossed, and called me with the megaphone, saying I should come to them. I was in the middle of a field, approaching a forest with my home village after it, and didn't want to walk back as this would have meant a longer way, and I didn't want to spend any additional effort just because of some superfluous police action. Walking on, they shouted after me, in that case you have to run very fast, and the prospect of having to run wasn't too inviting, either, and it seemed they really were after me as suddenly a second police car came and approached slowly. I thought, hey, well, seems they're having not much to do this day, sending two cars with four people, plus the ambulance with two people, just because some weirdo is walking cross country instead of taking the bus.
Although I thought it might have been some fun to play cops and robbers, running into the forest which I knew well and hiding in places they won't find, I was too exhausted for that and decided to cooperate. I went there, showed them my papers, talked like an ordinary guy, feigning to be upset because where is the right to walk where you want, chatted with them amicably to show that I was not crazy at all, and after a ridiculous long time of checking my paper on their wireless they let me go, helpless in front of such extravagance and determinedness, the ambulance at a short distance, waiting to take me with them, but finally having to leave crestfallen.
I'm not sure why this thing happened, I'm certainly not the kind of person who is halted by ambulance or police in a regular fashion, it was more or less the first time, if we don't count the Aachen episodes, which however were more caused by me looking like an outlaw rather than a mental health case. Anyway, it's interesting to see how easy it was for me to feign being normal, and I would have done the same on the next occasion two days later, had there not been this funny misunderstanding.

The great separation

2010-03-28T23:16:00.000+02:00

The next day I was walking around in the village, again on the prowl, looking for signs of our enemies, maybe the Neanderthals, maybe some misguided animals, maybe some of my former acquaintances, or maybe some new dangerous beings I haven't been aware of earlier. The streets were empty, as it was a public holiday, not a single living human was in sight, and the few cars that drove by didn't release much of my prevalent mood, that of being alone in this dangerous and maybe deciding battle, of approaching something that cast its shadows before, so vast, so big, that I couldn't distinguish what it was or possibly could be.
I didn't encounter those enemies directly this day, they seemed to be hiding and not willing to get out even by the most efficient lure, but what I encountered was an enormous amount of traps they had laid for me, they must have been active all during the night, and bewitched almost everything that was there on the street, the granitic ashlars of the curb, manhole covers that were pitfalls for my spirit body, marking lines that should have directed some energy, the asphalt was impregnated with tiny pieces of something that stung in my legs whenever I walked into the wrong direction, I had to circumvent and curve and swerve and change speed and jump and stop and turn around, all this in an incredible succession of movements that must have looked completely unmotivated to an onlooker but to me were the most adequate reactions to my perceptions.
As well prepared as this trap was, it was not made for me coming like that, since the plan was that during the night my half-aware dreaming body in all its might and glory should have been caught and imprisoned, and I shouldn't have discovered it until then, but due to having done a surprise attack I was one tick ahead again, and started to destroy that trap with movements of my body plus an inner concentration that moved the energy around me, and which dismantled that alien influence from the matter here on earth, and after quite a bit of effort and work the ashlars were regular ashlars again, the asphalt was clean, and even those slow dark bothering nets in the distant hills were gone.
Exhausted and looking forward to relax the whole afternoon I walked home, and when I passed the church the bells started to chime, which I took as a sign that everything was perfect, that my timing had adjusted itself to the timing of the universe as it had done all so often, and satisfied and content about another win on my enemies I crawled into a now inaccessible corner of my memory and did something that cannot be described anymore.

We can only wonder why there were so many enemies during all of my years with visionary experiences, without them those adventures would have been so fine that they would have been nothing but elating and stimulating, and without the existence of these downsides the possibility of perceiving such things most likely would have been disseminated all over the population since long ago, eliminating the need for visual media and written records that only are a poor surrogate for what is indeed the highest achievement of mankind.
As it is, such visionary experiences are a high level analysis of perceptual data, if they incorporate the intellect they are a holistic meta-image of everything we know, a picture the brain takes of itself, a picture that is static in a higher dimension, but that presents itself to us as streams of incidents in time.
This picture is as relative as it is absolute, its absoluteness stems from always being at the peak of the moment and always being the only thing we have, and its relativeness has to do with being able to learn and change, although the whole will never experience that change because there is no other whole it can compare itself to.
Two possible strands of explanations can be followed about why there are hostile components in a brain. One would be focused on analyzing the systems-theoretical aspects, like what output structure might a brain area have which harms or attacks others. The result could be, such output is loud and rigid, or it is self-generated, not listening to input, not adjusting itself to other areas, or maybe it contains incoherent or nonsensical or wrong information, or a combination of these. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for neurology to measure this, but it's quite easy to conclude from a systems theory point of view which general characteristics would cure such problems. Namely, high connectivity and much information flow is good, separatism and code incompatibility is bad, low input and high internal activity is good, lots of contact with others and strong external stimuli are bad.
Another strand of explanations would have to do with the social surroundings, it is clear that every human action you ever witnessed gets stored somewhere, and if there are actions which can be interpreted as one person being on at another then the brain area that stores that memory also will be a brain area that one day will be getting at other brain areas.
It's that easy, and the conclusion simply is to avoid perceiving human interactions that can be interpreted as confrontation, in any form, be it as harmless as a dispute or the mentioning of violence on the media, since once you have circuits in your brain that make you feel bad you better keep them silent shut. Unless, that is, your job is something like helping to get rid of confrontation at large.

My brain sometimes resorts to the weirdest machinations to achieve what it wants. Of course, what it wanted all those years was to get rid of these internal enemies, of those destructive patterns that are harmless when they sleep in silence but can be terribly bothersome and dangerous to no end when they organize themselves and form bigger structures that get active and dynamic on their own and sometimes have assaulted me with slaughterous attacks that were not easy to cope with.
That evening a plan of ours formed where we wanted to make a big animal movement. During the night a huge wave of all beings should come in from the south, pass between our two houses, and leave through our garden to the north, and the things and objects on our farm would act as a filter to catch everything that shouldn't come with us into the future, all those dark and rigid and disturbing pieces would have fallen down, and the rest of us, free and light and luminous and mobile, big and interconnected as a unified one, we would have flown away and stayed forever.
Of course, the main intention was to rescue me, all the other beings among my telepathic friends were not in danger to be trapped by the evil ones, anyhow, they could move at will wherever they wanted, but my case was difficult as the bad beings easily could connect with my body, but that wouldn't be possible anymore once my body was totally connected with the good ones.
Preparation for this incidence took me quite a while, I had to reorder all the things in our garden, carry into the house what disturbed, bring other things we needed, rearrange everything, turn over the table, put the chairs in a place where my telepathic human friends would sit and watch, lay the tubes in a way that they served as energy conducts, clean up a bit in certain places, produce an intended mess in other places. I assume this revolving of our garden was the last straw that had made my parents call the doctor next day, with a few eruptions of weird behavior having happened the time before, and having been not really pleasant neither to them nor to me, but also not acutely self-endangering as the doctor saw it and which made him send me to the hospital.
But that evening I didn't know what was expecting me, and I wouldn't have believed it, anyway, as I was honestly convinced that all my experiences were as real as anything else, and was looking forward to that great animal wave that would happen during the night, where the shrew, the mother of all mammals, of all of us, would slowly move through the site as the last one, the biggest of them all, mellow and white and nourishing, collecting and unifying in the end all the others.
That incidence, however, never occurred, either I had fallen asleep too early, or there was something else that had changed the plans, and so what I experienced was not an overwhelming sensation, but a sweet comforting sleep.

The Last Supper

2010-03-26T23:31:00.000+01:00

It was early in the morning, and I was quite awake already. Another bright day, ready for adventure. Experiences would come, greater than anything before, just like it should be on every day that is worth living. I got out of bed, dressed, had a relaxed breakfast, and started to decide about what would be the project of the day.
My choice fell on taking along a little supply of marijuana and tobacco and installing myself on the haystack in our barn at the end of the garden, hidden from the people in the village and the horse in the stable, and with a great view towards the distant forest and the more distant mountains, the most prominent of which as always perfectly suited its name, the High Wall, bluish and white and gray in its remote airiness.
After having inhaled the first breaths of deep smoke, my mind wandered... - or did it, and am I enamored to literary fiction that necessarily is accompanied by stereotype and random imagination, just to fill the pages? Or do we need these things to express what is not easily expressed by itself, as it does not fall into the realm of words? And do we need that much poetic imagery in a book that is not aimed at entertainment but seriously tries to transmit the state-of-the-art result of practical psychological research, where "practical" does not mean the indirect practical observation and influence relationship between doctor and patient/proband but the direct practicism only the subject can develop in itself.
Yes, we do need it. And so I sat there, and now remember a couple of things that happened on that portentous day, a couple of which will only be mentioned shortly, like this other attack of my enemies, where "Hitler" and his army approached slowly out there in the forest, again as a giant disc made of a thick web of black hurtful fibers that during the day was restricted to remain hidden from daylight, under the ground, which had the advantage for us that it could move only at a snail's pace, and so it was easy to evade it by our own swift movements.
This day, however, I was too lazy for any swift movements, and so I chose the technique of deception maneuvery. I called one of our friends, this time it was a former Habsburgian emperor, and asked him for help. He somehow managed to lure the enemy away, and I was not interested in the details, and did not really know at that time that the "Hitler" complex was nothing but a conglomerate of old, slow, faint, and troublesome patterns in my brain, which in my case unfortunately are many due to some early experiences and the automatic process of reactivating existing patterns again when there is some clue in a present experience that looks fitting, which has the unfortunate effect of storing those patterns every time anew again, which multiplies and strengthens them to an extent that sometimes produces severe diseases, like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or as in my case, schizophrenia, which can be explained as the attempt of the brain to break out of a chronic imprisonment by harmful patterns.
In the end it was quite easy to get away from that imprisonment, after all, and the method was similar to the better methods I used at the time of fighting these contaminations in the form of telepathic enemies, like swift movements, deceptive maneuvers, ignoring them, focusing my attention elsewhere, and understanding that the problem only is there when these patterns unite and form bigger structures, and that it's completely gone or at least imperceptible when they are dispersed and inactive and not more than a little dust on the ground.
One method which I lamentably employed quite often and which does not work was direct attack, combating them with anger and fierceness. If I had known that these things are within me I certainly would have avoided it, as one of the serious drawbacks it brought was a general disintegration of my psyche, there was more and more latent hatred and distrust among my components as this continued, my bodily health suffered from all the stress and fear that was immense at times, and my thinking ran into severe problems and was slowly shutting down as it couldn't understand why some beings sometimes were enemies, sometimes were friends, sometimes attacked me, sometimes were benevolent, it was one of those situations of ambiguous stimuli that are so disconcerting in general, that also happen quite often to a child when the parents are not in accord, and that have the effect on the intellectual side that judgments are stained with insecurity, decisions with doubt, and memory with imprecision.

One of the brighter events on that day was a combination of activity of the "Manfred" structure and the "Jessica" system guided by her "father". I was sitting in the hay, and took a straw that was a little broken at the end, some pieces loosely hanging apart, and then the "Jessica" came and started to move them. It was her eye, she was inside the straw and looked out of it, and this was an old Egyptian sorcery her "father" right then was showing to her. She was very proficient, good as always, in this difficult exercise that demanded utmost concentration. Closer to me than ever, almost, hadn't she been that close on so many other occasions, but this time it was indeed like the bride coming to her husband and showing him how much of a magic she possesses, as a promise for later gifts, and the beginning of an endless learning together.
She urged me to move my hand only in the slowest possible way, else it would be too hard for her to follow the straw, and wanted that I move it close to my skin so that she can look at me from a perspective she never had before. It's impossible to describe the feelings she had on that moment, she was superior to anything she was before, so intense, so frightened that it might fail or end, so happy that it worked, so curious, so controlled, so careful and deliberate, so interested in getting close to me and showing herself in all her beauty, and so eager to help in a practical value.
I had a problem with a tooth then, it had a hole, and she made me open my mouth and slowly insert the straw. It was unbelievable what she did in there, the feeling was something like a soft electrical current that she projected onto my teeth one after the other, to cure them, and I'm not really sure whether I should explain all this as an internal ongoing in my brain alone.
Theoretically, it surely is possible that the "Jessica" structure in my brain projected some impulses onto the sensory centers. My perception was that of the "protons", those yellow things that now were sort of tiny golden filaments, but we have already seen that all these "protons" and "neutrons" and "electrons" and so just were a certain sort of neurons, with the glutamate, the GABA, and the serotonin ones being the most likely candidates for these. But the question is, what is the most effective strategy to proceed here?

The first alternative would be to handle everything as an internal ongoing in the brain alone. The outcome would be that the brain cures and enhances itself, the idea of manipulating it at such a low level gives a range of possibilities that are truly astounding, and it would also have a very positive effect on bodily health, for example the motor areas could be cleaned and rectified and sensitized, which would reduce muscle tensions and increase blood supply. Eyesight could be improved by better accommodation of the lense, breathing would be upgraded, the wrinkles in the face would get less due to relaxation and a more conscious mimic, and so on. Not to mention the positive effect on the psyche, intellectually as well as emotionally, the result is a satisfying life with the ability to cope with all the problems.
The second alternative would be to position too much in the supernatural realm. (I'm not talking about much too much here, as I did before my revelation, I'm talking about certain aspects of well-defined phenomena, like in the thing with the straw.) This would mean, for example, that one part of my brain, formerly called "Jessica", really is able to connect to things on the outside and perceive and manipulate them. There is some evidence that this is possible, as my experience with the roulette shows, so it would be short-sighted to reject that alternative unseen. We might find out that a brain that is an expert in this could perform in ways that are presently unthinkable, but we might also find out that the potential is not really that great, and the best part of the end result could be just a little addition to the theories of science, most notably the answer to the problem how the brain produces content in the form of coherent wholes with neurons that are separated in time and space. (The same effect that links the brain to the outside also links the neurons with each other in this my favorite hypothesis.)
The third alternative would be to position everything correctly, which is kind of difficult, so the working attitude might better be chosen among the first two ones. This approach would mean that some phenomena are both, for example it was involuntary muscle movement on my part that made the straw tremble (while I believed it was "Jessica's" presence in there), but interpreting it as that doesn't mean there isn't the other side as well. Could be that the brain has some telepathic influence on the outside, which is so small that it is usually unnoticeable.
And could be that isolating this influence is practically impossible, so measuring it would be very hard, and there would also be only little practical value to it since it's usually more effective to use the muscles to reach what we want.
Only crazymen can blatantly over-estimate the "supernatural", which is just as natural or unnatural as anything else that is made by humans.

That day out there in the barn it looked like this would be the beginning of a new era in my life, where magic finally starts to happen physically, and after that experience I was so elated that it was enormous. I took a little walk around the meadow, in a very slow pace, and "Akhenaten" came and was strongly present inside me, and watching with me all the beautiful flowers and butterflies, there was so much color, and it was so intense, one of these wondrous days where you really think peace has settled on earth, and beauty is everywhere.
Then, however, there were some troubles. They came in the form of flies that started to annoy me, and something within me associated with them the worst enemies I had, the devils, who had a fine career since their first appearance ten years ago, where they were friendly and interesting, towards becoming the meanest beings there are. It was only the last months they had been so evil, and I wasn't really wondering about what could be behind that, and I wouldn't have found out, anyway, as long as I thought they would really exist somewhere out of me.
But this day they were really terrible, they entered the flies and all their movements had some meaning, and were highly dangerous. One of the worst devils was "Manfred", and I didn't much mind the discrepancy that just an hour before I seem to have noted a part of him as some structure that was long and thin and rigid and that guided "Jessica" during that experience. So dissociated and hopeless in the face of contradictions was my thinking already. (And now I sense the finest inconsistencies and track them down and remove them.)
An in-depth analysis of the underlying course of my story has brought me to the following conclusion. The pool from where all the beings of my visions emerged, the sensory memory pool of my right hemisphere, can be used in a couple of ways. One way, which I presently prefer, is to treat it simply as a pool, to allow it to flow according to its inner dynamics, and to communicate with it in a gentle and sober manner.
Another way, which I used during my psychotic episodes, is to produce structures in it by imagining certain beings, which mainly started involuntarily, and which I never did intentionally with a certain plan in mind. It just happened because of reading those books, because of my right hemisphere having received information from the text and having created images of the characters, which later became active on their own, and subsequently produced other entities some of which are reincarnated remainders of beings that had been produced in my childhood.
The problem with this is that all these beings seek to define themselves, to distinguish themselves in order to exist and continue existing, and this process brings with it a contrasting and moving apart that finally leads to disintegration and feelings having to do with it, like fear, anger, and desperation.
And then there's the way that is considered as normal nowadays, where you produce one being inside this memory pool and identify yourself with it. The so-called personality, a cluster of emotions and automatic reactions that is partially controlled by the intellect, who has the ability to veto and thus in a limited way to guide it. The downside of having this personality is that it employs the same process of defining itself, of contrasting and fending off what it does not identify itself with. But the personality is inside the same pool as the rest of your human memories, and trying to split something off there just for having a more solid counterpart to your reason sounds insane to me, and my opinion is well backed up by Buddhist and Taoist insights, and the way of the mystics, and obviously treating my right hemisphere as a holistic independent pool was the only cure that worked for a case like me.

And then the flies came into my room, and I killed them, which was terribly difficult as they were devils, but I really caught the worst of them with an incredibly fast and complex move of my hand and put it into a schnapps jar for conserving it as a trophy. Then the whole different feelings of that day fell down on me at once, predominantly a deep satisfaction about what I had learned out there, together with a sense of tiredness, and I decided to sit down on the armchair and relax a little with meditation, the first time for ages, and I didn't really notice anymore what was going on outside the room.

Hospitalization

2010-03-24T22:27:00.001+01:00

I must have fallen asleep a little, and was suddenly woken up by a bang on the door and a harsh voice yelling: "Open up! Get out there!" My reaction took me a millisecond and was comprised of recalling that my father had told me half an hour ago that the doctor had come and wanted to see me, which I definitely and dismissively refused, of concluding this must be the doctor himself, of getting upset about such unfriendly behavior, of deciding this man needs to be rebuked, of jumping up the armchair and towards the door, of grasping my magical justice scepter, of unlocking and opening the door at once, and of taking a giant leap into
the veranda while shouting at top voice: "What is the matter here?!?" It was meant to have a maximum effect on the intruder, to pay them back in their own coin the shock they gave me on violently pulling me out of my meditation, and also to demonstrate that I'm able to deliver much bigger shocks than they.
And it worked. But sometimes it is better not to just act on first impetus but take a tiny second to assess the situation and maybe choose a more strategic solution. Because what I encountered in the veranda after touchdown was not a feeble doctor and my shivering father, both white as sheet and sheepishly willing to apologize for their disrespectfulness, but a policeman advancing backward like he had seen a ghost, instinctively starting to draw his weapon, which was one of the reasons why I froze immediately, apart from having some internal difficulty at understanding what's going on.
The policeman was very agitated and seemed to be afraid of the thing in my hand, which glittered silvery and was as erect as the wand of justice has to be, but not really big or heavy enough to damage someone with striking, and not having enough of a point to be suitable for stabbing, but the manner in which I held it must have seemed impressive to him, and so he shouted at me, after having realized I didn't attack him anymore, that I should recede into my room and drop it there.
And so I did, and then came to the veranda again. In the meantime the policeman had been joined by a second one, my father was also there, had been there since the beginning, but I hadn't noticed him due to the absorbing interaction that now had left me in a kind of silent shock, unable to think, just standing there will-less and waiting for what would happen. I guess they must have started to explain that they wanted to bring me to the hospital, but I didn't pay much attention, something which I didn't notice was going on within me at great speed, and suddenly fed me their analysis of the situation. It came in the form of a thought that popped up in my mind and that was strong and convincing enough to make me react immediately.
It said that these were false policemen, and they wanted to hijack me, and that instant I was out in the yard and running. But the course was difficult, I had to pass closely to one of them, and he also reacted instinctively, predator-like, when something runs away from you you have to catch it. Your right and duty as a policeman. And so he got hold of me, and then the other one came, and the fight began.
I mainly wanted to wriggle out of their grab and continue running, and they wanted to lay me on the belly and fix my hands behind my back, and although they were two and their hands were four, and my equipment was half of that, it took them entire minutes until they finally succeeded, so fierce was my defense and so strong my force, propelled by a mortal fright that was immense, because in my imagination their intention was not only to kill me later, but to torture me as much as possible. And that would have been the revenge of the crowd, of the antediluvian part of humanity, they didn't want someone who excels them, and so their plan was to destroy him, and not just only destroy him, but also divide his parts like dividing a loot amongst a band of robbers.
Their primary victim of course was "Akhenaten", who was desperate and whose story now seemed as if he had tried to reincarnate a couple of times already, and never succeeded to fully realize his potential in his former hosts, and with me it would have been possible, but again it failed because his persecutors still were stronger, and it would take another eternity until he could try anew, or maybe it would never happen again.
As I lay there on the floor terrible ideas about what might be the worst things they could do with me ran through my mind, which is a stupid habit I have as it's usually better to think about the best-case scenarios, and not about the worst-case ones, especially in cases like this. After some time the ambulance came, and I knew their car is a fake also, and they would bring me somewhere into the forest or some other place, but as I reached the hospital I had to adjust my theory and subsequently believed this is a fake hospital, or maybe a real hospital after official hours, where an evil doctor would do a reverse Frankenstein experiment with me.
After they had freighted me over to the bed and poseyed me for the purpose of later vivisection it occurred to me that maybe not all of the persons in this room were evil, and maybe some of them didn't know what was going on, and the bad things would only start after they had left, so I talked to them for making them stay. I used my most distinguished form of speaking, choosing elegant words and phrases, telling them what a noble person I was, with a soft and gentle voice, like a diplomat in a mission that is top secret and must not be disclosed. It might seem incredible that a person in honest mortal fear is able to prescind from his anguish and not express the tiniest bit of it, while holding a refined monologue about his worthiness and right to live that put tears in the eyes of the audience, but well, incredible I am.
It was not only that speech that relaxed me, but also something about the routinary way in which the people there behaved, and so the ideas about what would be done to me slowly receded. At last they gave me an infusion that sent me into instant sleep.

"Akhenaten". The last and most glorious attempt of my right hemisphere, of my autobiographic memory pool, to form something like my personality. (The two of them are, strictly speaking, not synonymous, as the latter is just a part of the first, which mainly contains our sensory memory plus its low-level combinations, whereas the left hemisphere produces high-level combinations made of elements that are further apart in the sensory realm, like sounds from the mouth with visual impressions, called language, and also combinations of combinations of combinations called intelligent thought and theory.)
As we have seen, "Akhenaten" got closest to becoming my self-image structure in the right hemisphere, he was the only one of all the many appearances I had over those years with whom I truly identified myself, with "Manfred" a few times also being very close and within me, and with some others sometimes being partially fused with me, but still mostly being apart and not able to fuse further.
What does all this mean? It means that the common view of present psychology is wrong, as they would diagnose me with having a problem because of not possessing a proper personality, and they would recommend that I should get one.
But this would be a big mistake. My take is that I did not develop a personality not because of some difficulties in my childhood, but rather because my brain does not need one, that it would disturb.
Let me explain. What is there in the autobiographic memory pool mainly is what we have perceived with our social surrounding, apart from what we have perceived with ourselves concerning body and emotions, which unfortunately is not our autochthonous self because it is associated with impressions from other people which deviate the impressions we have of our own bodies.
Then, when somebody develops a personality, this is nothing but a cluster made of these impressions, the foreign/domestic ratio depending on a range of factors, but anyway strongly influenced by everyone with whom they at a certain point once identified, starting with the parents.
So, a personality actually is nothing but a second-hand cloth people wear out of habitude.
(A second-hand cloth embroidered with self-made additions, but I prefer to be as individualistic as possible, and not just in the intellectual domain.)
(And I would even say that individualist is the new future, but not the competition-driven and polarization-oriented individualism of nowadays that is not really individualism but some sort of collective selfishness.)

I could also wonder why the world stopped me at that precise point of my history, why it didn't happen earlier or later. (It also might have happened not at all.)
It was such a perfect timing that one of these old theories comes to my mind, that our destiny is somewhat guided by a benevolent force, and I might subscribe to it, with a small addition, that this force most likely is within us. (Having yet to experience what happens when people with all of them having this force quite strong, join.)
Had it happened earlier, I wouldn't have experienced that rise towards being "Akhenaten", and probably never understood some essential things, had it happened later or not at all then "Akhenaten" might have become so settled within me that I never had gotten rid of him, no matter whether I had continued to believe it was really Akhenaten or had relativized the affair and made him into some other explainable but still present and influential something.
As it is, it was good that he got destroyed, but he didn't get fed to animals and low people (actually memory fragments of low people in my head) as he feared, but his valuable parts still are there and will be recombined and recombined again into varying conformations, with other and newer valuable parts, according to my needs, but more according to the drive to experiment further and find out more about all the incredible possibilities that lie there.

Back to the hospital. I lay there for two days being enchained on the bed, infusion in arm, and the only good thing was that I slept 23 hours a day. Some dreamlike visions, mostly with my beings, but everything peaceful, as the limonade they put into my blood efficiently had blocked all fear. Then they slowly started to unfetter me, every few hours another of my limbs was set free, and I must say I had some anxiety on being hindered to move and being forced to lie on the back for that long, but in retrospect it's a funny bodily memory where I intermittently shrugged my extremities.
When I was not tied down anymore they told me I had been brought there by force, but wouldn't be kept by force, and was allowed to go home whenever I wanted, but they recommended I'd stay for at least ten days. I had not an iota of free will because of their medicament and simply nodded to everything they said.
Next they changed the medicament, because the first one only was for knocking down people with intractable behavior, and slowly I found myself again. I had kind of resigned to the idea of staying there a little longer, and was even looking forward to participating in their painting or Qi Gong exercises, although the patients whom I watched performed like zombies, because of the medicaments they had to take, which produce the symptoms of the Parkinson disease.
One evening I discovered there was a TV set in my room, which was the luxury apartment for those who have to be poseyed, a single room with a few strange things in it, but quite bearable. I turned it on and watched, and for some reason I wanted to watch some things with women, and for some reason I thought about not having masturbated for too long, and for some reason I decided to do it, and ended in the bed trying five minutes to get a hard-on. It didn't work, because of the medication, and I tried longer, even after I had discovered there was a camera just right above the TV set, which I hadn't noticed earlier, but which for some reason didn't disturb me, although the cute nurse who did the night shift might have been watching and laughing at my futile attempts.
After ten minutes I got furious. After all, it was my right to masturbate, and when they wanted to make me impotent and infertile with their chemicals then I didn't want to stay longer. I dressed, packed my things, and went to the desk to tell the cute nurse that I was leaving.
She looked at me with an incredulous expression. It was in the middle of the night and I would have needed to take a walk of a few miles through the dark forest. Not that I really minded, I had done this walk lots of times before, no matter how dark or bright it was, but still I actually preferred the day-time for a walk, and so my conviction of really having to leave right on the spot wasn't too high. And so she finally succeeded in convincing me that it was better to get back to my room and wait until the next day, where there would be an official discharge.

Release

2010-03-23T22:15:00.000+01:00

May 27, 2009

Next morning started with a long slow wait. I had risen early, eager to go home, but it seemed nobody really thought my case to be important anymore, not that they ignored me or made me think it was on purpose that I wasn't allowed to leave at once, but I was told to be patient over and over again. There also was some diversion, like the ward round with their head of department whom I hadn't seen earlier and who looked at me with an amused smile and made some ironic comments, and so I gave in to my fate and waited.
Around noon the deputy finally received me in his office, and started to write the report which is a honest treasure among my papers because it proves that I once was seriously sick with paranoid schizophrenia, a thing that nobody might believe if they knew me only now or in the future. and which is also my carte blanche to write novels like this which aim to cure the world population from schizophrenia, from other mental illnesses, also giving a guideline to the healthy towards greater enlightenment, and even being suitable for a Hollywood movie that is not precisely as informative as the book, but still kind of intriguing in its adventure aspect, and mind-boggling due to loads of subliminal message. Becoming the world expert for practical brain development and leading a center where other former lunatics who like me have transmogrified themselves into superbeings are teaching new lunatics to do the same is among my present set of hallucinations, too.
All this would not be thinkable without my madness certificate which I then gladly received from the hands of my doctor, who gave me a couple of soothing advices and relieved some of my concerns by explicitly stating that I was allowed to believe what I wanted, since everyone is allowed to believe what they want, and if I wanted to believe I was "Akhenaten" then I was free to do so.
I was happy. My adventures could go on. But I really didn't know then that they didn't want to. At least not in the way I imagined.
The doctor, like every doctor who once witnessed that dropping the patient a pill would have an effect on them and who got addicted to that effect because having effects on patients is what makes people into a doctor, he surely wanted me to continue taking their pills. I refused, and we talked a little about neurobiology, I mainly wanted to show him that I knew a bit, and was surprised that he was inclined to draw the subject towards classificatory inorganic chemistry, whereas my own preference would have been general system theory, the most valuable aid we have for treating neurological diseases. Despite my clear refusal, his good-bye words ended with a desperate recommendation that I should take my medicaments.
When I left the hospital the weather was t-shirty, really pleasant, no direct sun, but warm and mellow, usually what puts you into a finest mood. I embarked on my walk home, through the forest, but my shape was terrible, I had to sit down for some minutes every mile or so, it seemed the energy in my blood didn't reach the muscles, or maybe there was no energy, or maybe I was also dehydrated, but more probably it was the after-effect of their medicament. And this after-effect lasted for long, it took me a couple of days or almost a week until my body felt like itself again.

The first thing at entering my room was some incredulous smile and throwing my hands up in horror. It looked like I left it, and I once again realized how soothing these five days in hospital were, to get away from this.
The floor was scattered ankle-deep with things I had thrown there in that last onslaught of madness, where I used the shamanic method of manipulating otherworldly beings by symbolically handling objects, unfortunately the context was a deep fight and so I had shot at the enemies with everything I got hold of and which was not valuable enough to be immune to such usage. Furthermore, I had laid traps with what escaped being used as a missile, hadn't collected my clothes for a week and let them fall wherever I took them off my body, and brought a couple of completely out of place and partly huge objects from the outside.
Cleaning that would take an eternity, and I chose the slowest method there is, that of archeology. After all, I wanted to conserve the meaning of the days that preceded my hospitalization, and so I sat there for a while with every seemingly messageful combination of things to think about what this could be, before I deconstructed them as in spillikin, sorting the things depending on reusable and waste, which I archived in tall preserving jars for later examination.
This might sound funny, and then I haven't thought about why I did so and not just shoveled everything into the trash can, but now it is clear to me that this is the best way to treat a brain that has had an internal accident, which in most cases might not be as long and as severe as mine, and might not produce a site that looks like a massive apartment crash. But it might also sometimes be more difficult to discern the different facets of the brain areas and bring them into harmony again.
The problem here actually is that these hallucinatory experiences and the resulting memory structures are composed of elements that are vital and need to be kept. Like a sentence is composed of words, if the meaning of the sentence is wrong and disturbing, the words still are right and useful, so the aim is at decomposing those structures and keeping the elements, those then rearranging again into bigger patterns that are the new buildings of your personality.
There are two realms where to do this. The first is thinking and language and thought. Easy to handle, easy to work with, although perseverance is needed for a lasting and worthy result. The second is the realm where hallucinations and voices come from. It's the memory pool of our interactions with the world, mostly with our fellow beings. These memories are not stored in an order we are used to, based on chronology, but they are stored according to affinity and likeness. For example, certain gestures (of different people) and the accompanying feelings are stored together, and this cluster may get incorporated into a formation with other clusters and acquire an inner dynamics and act on its own, producing these inner voices or hallucinations or, as in my case, complex beings that appear recognizably on many occasions over the years.
So, the things that pester a schizophrenic actually are nothing but a mirror of society, a recombined image of that part of mankind we got to know. The voices are unreflected opinions of uneducated people, the visions are scrambled copies of cultural messages including books and movies, all that not as it was, but as it could be, as the dynamism that activates these memories and makes them appear as an active something within me is inherently meant to be a mechanism for extracting general information from particular perceptions.
And the schizophrenic is very lucky to have two different implementations of this mechanism, not only the well-known intellectual one that produces ideas and insights and thoughts and theories, but also another one in the realm of the sensorial which can be used for a great deal of purposes. Including simple artistic creativity in the visual and auditive realm, including a high sensitivity to other people's body language, including the ability to be very able for being social advisors up to leaders that have a great feeling for the potential of their people, including the ability to think big and have impossible ideas that are realizable if certain exterior conditions are right, and including being experts in a technique where the intellect invents new ideas and tests the possible reactions of a community by targeting these ideas into specific areas of their memory pool, a technique that is very useful for being a writer and giving to the audience.

One conclusion from this might be that paranoid schizophrenia wouldn't be paranoid at all were there no experiences that made you learn what fear is, or that depression wouldn't be depression at all were there no experiences where you learned that the positive possibilities you once produced mostly have been disappointed, and you figured that it's more adjusted to prefer producing negative possibilities, as the essence of this mechanism is simply to produce possibilities, possible combinations of pieces of experience, and later there's another mechanism that filters these possibilities, to keep those that might be useful and discard the rest.
Schizophrenics have the gift of having a very strong possibility creating mechanism, which unfortunately can be easily disturbed in its orientation, either becoming too positive and producing delusions of grandeur, or becoming too negative and producing paranoia. The right orientation is somewhere in the middle, but can not be controlled too precisely, so it's better to concentrate on the filtering mechanism.
In my case, I can be very critical, for long stretches in my live I have even been too critical, but during my psychotic episodes this mechanism was reduced to a minimum, though it still worked. However, it didn't really work well, as there was too much misinformation in the air, so it had to get partially blinded, and seemingly did so by applying itself to itself.
Applying the criticism mechanism to the criticism mechanism is the surest way to madness, either you partially block it and are vulnerable to any crazy thought that somewhere might get produced in your system, or you enter the road to constant doubt where doubt multiplies itself and leaves you as an insecure puppet that in the end won't even be able anymore to make the simplest decisions.
There is an interesting insight here about the dangers of positive and negative feedback when they get applied to the wrong places, and we also see how complex this system of ours is and how subtle you have to proceed when you are intervening, a thing each of us has to do with their own one always, but which is almost impossible to do with others in a precise way, so it is preferable to use general methods that affect basic states when it comes to trying to get people out of their madness.
In my case this general method was three-step, jolt, regeneration, new activity. The jolt came in the form of the shock of forcibly having been brought to the hospital, where the regeneration happened, which was followed by new activity at home. Unfortunately I'm very stubborn and the many years of being a frantic fanatic made it difficult to change me, if those five days would have been all to it I most likely had repressed that experience later and maybe never got healed, so it was quite helpful, although terribly bothersome at this time, that the police thought my case is not settled yet.
And so the jolt actually lasted for two months where I was kind of afraid of what would come, and it was combined with the period of regeneration already, which in the end lasted many months, where the period of new activity slowly started in parallel and began to carry me to the heights I experience nowadays.

Three weeks after my release from the hospital I had to appear at the police station where the chief officer wanted to do an interrogation and write a paper. I arrived there very light-hearted, in the meantime my life at home had come to a new state of tranquility and social peace, although I still believed all my visions were real they had slowly receded and left me saturated, like after a good experience.
The officer was friendly, we sat down, chatted a little, and then he started to take my particulars, and proceeded to writing the testimony. He was another case of a writer lost to the wrong profession. It was awfully funny how much enthusiasm he put into phrasing my story, every short answer to a question of his was being transformed into a sentence much longer, but the rhythm and style of these sentences was horribly awkward, and I had to try hard for not having to snort with laughter, which would have been inappropriate because the good man really tried his best, was obliging and helpful, and I also wanted a testimony that would convince the judge that everything I did was right, at least seen from my subjective view at the moment of that incident.
It took us almost two hours to finish that account as he was unsatisfied with his first attempts at finding a good introduction, because every time after having started with some sentences he suddenly had a new idea that he deemed so much better that he took a deep breath with surprise and relief and immediately deleted what he had written, finally producing an introduction that started somewhere at my birth and gave a full curriculum vitae ending with my present living conditions that were as detailed as enumerating the species of animals we have on our farm.
He also wrote a long chapter about what had happened when the policemen came, and a couple of collateral information, but I suppose the attorney either got numbed by the long introduction or she thought I was lying, because technically the content of that testimony was such that every sufficiently intelligent and educated person would understand that I was not guilty and not dangerous, and that closing the proceedings was the only right thing to do.
The problem, however, was that the two policemen also had to make a statement, and that their statements were in accord with each other, but not with mine. This troubled me to no end, seems it activated some childhood situations where I was unfairly treated and had adopted a fear at false accuses or people lying in order to harm me. It was of only little use that I knew that the policemen were not really lying, just unconsciously reformulating their memory in order to avoid problems that might stem from banging at my door and yelling I should get out of there, without saying it's the police, which ultimately produced that state of shock in me and led to these unfortunate events. And I could also understand they got impatient because they had knocked a couple of times before in the official way, saying "here is the police, open the door", without knowing I was meditating and didn't hear them.
And it was lots of stress to them, too, I really must have shocked that guy when I jumped out of my room with a thundering voice and something like a sword in my hand, which they later interpreted as a screwdriver but which actually was a grinding stick for knives, one incongruence in their report that got proven in the papers, with the other incongruences requiring a bit more of a juridical effort to show them, which later after getting aware of the imminent danger of this case made me think for hours and hours about delicate lines of argument that would be necessary to convince everyone who has to be convinced about what in the end was convincing enough by itself.

Revelation

2010-03-20T19:41:00.002+01:00

It seemed this was another phase like those I usually had after my psychotic episodes where I slowly drifted towards relative normality, where calmness settled in and the turmoil receded, until some time later something in me would get bored and start doing hallucinations again. But there was a surprise, insofar as one day suddenly my right hemisphere told me it is all in the brain.
I immediately acceded. My thinking right on the spot adopted the idea, and started to conclude what that meant, drawing connections to other thoughts in order to rearrange them according to the new information.
This ability is one of my strong points, but can also be a weakness if you too easily relativize truths that have been proven hundreds of times. It's not that I would forget everything I knew before and only see the new information, but the memory pool of my previous thoughts somehow is very silent, doesn't protest to new insights, even if they mean turning around my whole world view a 180 degrees. In short words, I'm highly flexible at adapting my thinking to new situations, which is one of the reasons why I slipped into this mental illness because of so quickly accepting the rational implications of the content of my visions, and which also is one of the reasons why I could cure myself so fast.
The other reason is the way my right hemisphere works. It didn't want to get suppressed and enslaved by the left one, she wanted to stand up for her rights of having her own consciousness and intentionality, that's why she overwhelmed me with her activity again and again, until we finally found the solution for letting both of us coexist peacefully, and not just peacefully, but also excited and satisfied to the highest.
This increased activity and flexibility of the brain is what produces schizophrenia, at least it did so in me, but I have good reason to assume that many other cases are not so different. For people with a slower and more rigid brain it might be hard to believe, but the main difference simply is that my system does more internal feedback processing, which makes it harder to handle, but also provides an opportunity to be more intelligent and creative.
It does not follow automatically that all schizophrenics are more intelligent, although the data shows that their average intelligence is high. It has to be considered that there are more aspects to intelligence than just the amount of feedback, like memory or the precision of the connections between neurons, even different types of reactions on the cellular level that are responsible for the growth of synapses to allow learning or the production and regulation of receptors have an influence. So optimum intelligence is a mix of all these, and at least to me it seems I'm quite well done.
The higher internal feedback and the increased flexibility could be explained by the information processing paths being thinner and more in number than usual, the greater amount would be responsible for the higher feedback (in a larger network with the same interface to the outside the ratio of internal/external connections is bigger), and the paths being smaller clearly gives more flexibility. Unfortunately brain science doesn't yet know enough about the wiring on the medium level, it only knows how the single neuron works and it knows the mayor data highways, so I do not know how correct this hypothesis is, but it also doesn't really matter, as what matters to me is my direct view at my consciousness and my analysis of what I perceive there.
And if I'm right in that analysis then science has to find a way to explain it, anyhow this is the method they use when they examine the brain, since other methods unfortunately won't work. (Except for behavioristic questions.)
And the feedback idea is a good one, everyone knows if there are lots of positive feedback then variables get boosted, and what gets boosted in a schizophrenic are tiny ideas that other people without examination relegate to their unconsciousness where they might be a cause of depression and neuroses or simply get wasted in case they might be useful. Schizophrenia, if used wisely, can be a gift and offers a path towards mental hygiene and fulfilling experience that is quick and leads very high, but can also be dangerous, especially when the person doesn't know enough about all the things related.

So I was there, sitting in the garden, relaxed and expecting nothing, when suddenly my right hemisphere informed me that all our visions have been hallucinations in the brain. What would you think of that? Her mood was that of commanding, of absolute assurance, and as we have seen she usually doesn't really command but only proposes, like insecure and questioning, as if she were experimenting with us, to find out what this or that thought would bring to the system. And hey, we found out quite a lot.
Maybe I could describe our relationship that she is bigger than me, my chief, but a gentle chief who only rarely says something and lets the lower chiefs do all the work, with me having the duty to be on the lookout and manage the foreign relations, to take care for the needs of the body, and to organize the internal affairs to not get away too much from being a harmonious whole.
She, on the other hand, is like the Chinese Empress behind the curtain, viewing us sometimes or all of the time, which can not be said since she most of the time remains hidden, but on certain occasions showing her incredible beauty and taking over the whole system and letting it flow with visions that are transparent and clean and clear.
Fortunately she has an adjutant who is more earthly and often present, also a woman, and it was her who gave that command to accept the idea that all these experiences were not telepathic interactions with other beings, but a product of the brain. I do assume that the decision to send me that command was taken at a higher level where the strategic implications of my journey through life are processed, since I can sometimes observe that the two communicate with each other and then agree upon something, also the determination with which the order was given lets me conclude that it was well backed up.
It might sound insane to some people that I not only chose to live with those beings in my brain but even allowed some of them to be superior to me and decide relevant things, and so I'd like to point out the fact that I'm not alone in that although usually such people believe these beings exist on the outside and then call them gods and spirits and so on. And it is highly interesting that such beings often are seen as guiding forces, which certainly means that they have the potential to be such, and it is of great practical relevance to our time that it's not only possible for them to exist with the knowledge of what they really are, but highly preferable and even much easier.

However, the transition of my brain from the naive naturalistic view to the scientific one was painful. So many connections of former interpretations got ruptured at once, even though I felt euphoria the day of the revelation I felt sick the weeks thereafter, and finally realized how much it hurt to have all these insane ideas and do these weird things, to be plagued by stress and fear, to not sleep enough, to smoke and take other drugs, to hate others, and to constantly fight against what can not be destroyed, but should be transformed.
An additional onset to my unease was a letter from my lawyer that put me in a state of shock. It said the attorney has instituted a procedure to commit me to an institution for mentally abnormal lawbreakers. It took me two days of research and analyzing my case to relax and assume that this must be a completely overeager and ignorant newcomer who had not much idea about the intention of the legislator for such cases.
It was ridiculous. I defended myself because I believed these were false policemen who wanted to kidnap and kill me because the manner how they jolted me out of my meditation didn't seem policeman-like to me at all, me, a person who likes the police because they protect us from criminals and were good for a number of funny interactions on various occasions, even the day before where the other policemen could testify that I'm harmless and friendly. Furthermore, it doesn't make much sense to accuse for a crime a person that should be brought to the psychiatric ward, because either it was justified that they brought me there, then I was crazy and not responsible for my doings, or it was not justified, then it was my right to defend myself against an unlawful police action.
And it would have been completely inappropriate to consider me to be dangerous and inclined towards becoming violent again, so I can only wonder about the motivations of this attorney, either she had heard too much stories about those rare schizophrenics in a late uncontrollable state who did something they would have never done had they understood their situation, or she simply was a bureaucrat. By the way, her name was Scribe, so I assumed her to be one pedantic example of this, although names should not really be taken as determining the character of a person, even though they influence the choice of their profession to a statistical significant degree.
Anyway, the next weeks I really spent lots of time just sitting in the garden and talking to myself. It was very curative. One intention was to relieve myself from the tension about the impending examination by the expert of psychiatry, by training the explanations I would give about what has really happened and trying to present myself properly to give him an idea of what kind of person I am. The other subject was a reorganization of interpretations I had produced when I was sick, in order to replace the connections that had been ruptured with that revelation.
It is a highly effective method. I can only recommend it to anyone being in a similar situation. Schizophrenia as a disease of the thinking can be cured best with thinking, with clear, orderly, and correct thoughts. And it is very important to not just think around rapidly and flickering, like you do when you're in the creative process of looking for new ideas, but to formulate every thought in common language that you articulate in a diligent way in your interior, to be heard and understood by as many regions as possible. Finally, it does not matter if the same topics are worked through again and again, it even is good and helps to stabilize the new ideas, but it should not be done in a repetitive temper. Instead just think about and rectify what the mood of the day brings to you, but concentrate on the practical relevance and don't get lost in unnecessary speculation.
This is a process only the individual can do for h'self. The thinking has to proceed independently, in its own speed, according to its own associative context. It would be harmful if a therapist did more than helping the patient to understand the basics and teach the necessary methods because it is the ability to drive the thinking system that has to be trained, if that ability works well then you can produce all the ideas you need on your own, but you will never learn to develop that ability if someone drives it for you.
Of course, it is also good to learn about concepts of reasoning and ideas of science, though the emphasis should be on organizing what you already know, but new ideas can sometimes be very helpful. After the first few weeks of reorganizing myself, where I mostly wanted to be alone in a tranquil surrounding, I started to listen to radio features and science podcasts, mainly being interested in basic knowledge about the brain, but also about other subjects, and the voices of the speakers had another soothing effect on me, that of aligning some parts of me to the natural human speed.

Doctors

2010-03-19T23:08:00.000+01:00

Finally the day had come when I was to see the friend of the court who was the one to decide whether I'd go to jail, to nuthouse, or home. It was no easy affair, the idea of spending some years in a place that would kill me with boredom, ugliness, and social cruelty, was not exactly something to cotton up to. I prepared myself as best as I could, by spending hours and days and weeks in imaginary discourse with what I figured to be an understanding expert of psychology, without considering the fact that a friend of the court he was, not mine.
He greeted me buddy-like, a short sturdy middle-aged man with few hair and an overwhelming bookcase in his office. The house had seemed empty, it was late afternoon, the other psychiatrists in that group practice had left already, everything would have been relaxing and ready to get dreamy, had there not been that psychiatry and neurology specialist, who by the way was a professor at the University of Vienna, and who didn't smile as inviting, benevolent, and friendly as on the picture on his homepage, but appeared resolute and grim.
After we sat down at his table, me at the side on a tinier chair, he backed up by his bookcase full of technical literature, he asked what has come over me on that occasion. With a feeble voice I explained to him as good as I could, and this story alone would have been enough to make every neutral person find me not guilty, but it didn't interest him. He had made up his mind already, from the report of the police and the diagnosis of the hospital, so why should he waste his time in trying to find out about my own point of view. Even when I told him that I didn't believe anymore that my visions were real, that I knew now they were a product of my brain, that I was cured, even the honest eyes of a man who understood the cause of his sickness left him unimpressed.
He shouted: "You will get that again. You will get that again." Followed by a dissertation that this disease is genetic, that I have some abnormality in my brain, that the only thing I could do was to take medication for the whole rest of my life which would reduce the probability of another episode to maybe 30 %, but without medication the probability would be a full blown 100 %.
Until this his attitude had been commanding and frightening, but suddenly he switched towards something that could be called concerned and able to help. This shift seemed a little bit studied, like you see with untalented actors who have to proceed according to the screenplay, and now I would say that psychiatrists might get trained to manipulate their patients on an emotional level, which hurt and made me feel like a puppet who has to be programmed like an automate and who is not considered to be an individual who can understand.
Most probably psychiatrists can do this only because they don't have any natural emotions for their patients and simply treat them as raw material for their job.
Then he explained a little, mostly things I have read and heard quite often already, like that story of a math genius who was sick with schizophrenia and couldn't get cured earlier because they didn't have the necessary medicaments then, like he said. He almost cried, stating it is so sad that such valuable people waste their whole lives, when all they'd need was their daily pill. And he recommended I should go back to university and finish my studies, with the medicaments it should be possible, staying at home at a farm wasn't the right thing for such an intelligent person like me.
And he also explained that having a genetic disease is not really so bad, although it freaked me out when he had looked me in the eye and maintained that I had one, which sounded to me like a command and made me slip into the prospect of a lifelong depression without hope for anything. He compared it with diabetes and said that it's basically the same whether you take your daily insulin or your daily neuroleptic, not knowing that the idea of numbing my brain for the purpose of normalizing me is equivalent to blocking the development of my consciousness and stopping the journey towards journeying more.
However, in the five minutes since his attitude shift I had relaxed a little and didn't get too impressed anymore by his words. His prime intention obviously was trying to convince me to take medication, and maybe there was nothing else he wanted from me, so I thought that I could raise and defend the point that I didn't deem it too necessary to take them, and then get out of there. I asked him what if I would go to a psychotherapist instead.
He smiled. His reply now is just good for a laugh about the ignorance of some people, and back then I first couldn't believe that he could have such an opinion, but I still was in a situation that was difficult and uncertain, and I had to be on the lookout and measure my reaction. His very words were, well, if I wanted to make a therapy then I should go ahead, but a therapy for a disease like mine would be just as good as a therapy for a person with diabetes.
After that I didn't take him serious anymore. I knew that man was just a miscast in a deciding position, and all I could do is to feign anything he expected from me to get my papers. So I put on my actor's shoes as well and did that slow shift with eyes indecisively moving down and to the side, lowering the head a little, letting the body sink back to the chair, taking a breath that's somewhat deeper and slower than the preceding ones, contracting the lips like taking a decision, all that with my usual understatement to let the impression of my body have a subliminal but not a noticeable effect, and said with a feeble voice: "Maybe I could try it..."
I'm usually insecure when it comes to assessing the impact of my acting although my body always moves on its own, the mind having given nothing but the decision, a small, short command that is followed by silence, so actually nobody can know that my body is not telling what it tells, nobody will find those marks of insecurity that are common to those who drive the body with the mind or those who are not sure about their decision and whose brain in other regions makes other ones, which is the easiest way to discern a liar, since liars have an internal turmoil and are easy to discern. But still my mind wants to get absolutely sure that the tricks work, and after having closed the curtain to the body it continued to analyze at high speed what that doctor might think and what was the best way to respond.
He didn't really look surprised at my sudden change of opinion, maybe because he didn't know me and wasn't aware that I almost never undergo any changes of opinion, being accustomed to people who change their face every now and then, so I was free to cut it short and take the quickest way out. The natural thing of course was to pretend a little remainder of doubt, so I asked about the side-effects of the medicament, and when will it start to help me, and so on. Fading from being interested to a small-talk mood, which would certainly start to bore him, believe the matter is settled, and want to go home.
And it worked. He ended with another shift of attitude that you can see countless times whenever you get said good-bye by a salesman, this expression of happiness like they just met someone they know and like, this smile, this warm handshake, only that with him it was not effusive or servile but again buddy-like. His greeting was not what you normally use with a stranger, it was a word you only take inside the family, or maybe with a child.
Before that he had said that he'd write the brief in a manner so that my troubles will be minimal. That was all that I wanted. Over and out.

The next doctor I had to attend was even more horrible than this one. I think my anxiety reached unequaled levels, my stress hormone was directly palpable in every inch of my body, and this time there was not a single chance to get away with arguing or reasoning or acting or any other means that are so sorcerous to the average mind.
Well, I could have decided that I don't want to go there but the problem was that I indeed had to, as my health was severely afflicted by an infected wisdom tooth that has been troubling me for months. In the beginning I had foolishly thought that it was another symptom of my schizophrenia, in the very beginning I had even thought that it was one of those magical beings on the outside that attacked me, like those other beings that stung my skin or threw barb nets into my legs, but slowly it had dawned on me that this constant pain could have something to do with my real body.
And so I went there, and on the first session he simply pulled it out, which was a very strong pain, but also a very short one, followed by alleviation. However, there were more sessions, as my teeth did suffer a bit from not having seen a dentist for too long, and in the end it was about one root treatment and three deep cleanings, but it was weird how easy my fear could get triggered at this time, compared to how stable I was just a few months later. The constant paranoia I had during all these years was like a training in perceiving fear, also a training in dealing with it, but also a training in how to produce it.

The final relief came a few weeks later in the form of a letter from my lawyer where he informed me that the proceedings against me were closed. At that time it was already clear that the case would come to this end, due to the promise that the forensic psychiatric expertise would be in my favor, and that meant I was not guilty for having attacked two policemen, injuring one of them and having teared his uniform, being an incalculable danger for the safety of society, and it spared me the difficulty of explaining to the court that I only acted in self-defense, and that policemen should be trained to approach their victims in a civilized manner, especially when they're in their room and meditating, even though the doctor had given them authority to bring them to the asylum, without having examined the patient, but with good secondhand evidence from the report of a troubled parent.
That letter was also good for satisfying the police administration who wanted lots of money from me for the spoiled uniform and for one officer not having been able to work for a week because of his hand. I could have replied that my hand also got twisted, that some fingers were numb because the nerve fibers in my wrist had been divided, but this would have meant too much of an effort and I didn't want to have anything to do anymore with them. Furthermore, I knew it would cure because divided nerves grow new fibers along the old ones, but it is a slow process and took me many months until everything was whole again.

The cure continues

2010-03-18T14:26:00.002+01:00

After the danger of this situation has slowly receded into the past and has acquired some sense of ridiculousness I was finally free to concentrate on getting better. Autumn approached, and it was time to adjust on staying indoors. I decided to focus on computer activity and learn a new programming language. It was the hottest newest most elegant one they had then, but also quite complicated and vast in its long-term perspective. But that did not matter, even though in the first weeks it was hard and difficult to sustain the concentration the exercise did me well and after a few hours of learning and playing around with code I felt quite clear, which due to the fact that it happened every day had a substantial effect on the recuperation of my brain.
In the end, computer language is not so different from human language. I could have done a similar exercise, writing long sentences with complicated grammar and complex meaning, meticulously eliminating every single spelling error and edifying large textures of interwoven constructions that must not contradict each other in the least, the only difference is that you need a little bit of maths, but you can keep that simple. The advantage of writing computer language, however, is that the machine forces you to be precise or else it doesn't understand you, or it misunderstands, because you expressed yourself deficiently. And that is an important feedback in communication, you won't run into a sloppy way of assuming that people understand you, anyway, no matter how pronunciationless you mumble or how incoherent your way of translating thoughts into words is.
We see another important thing here, the feedback from the world. Schizophrenics often suffer from their mental activity being on the interior only, which means that information processing circuits have more freedom and flexibility, which is good if you can use it well, but which can also cause a problem, if the person is not able anymore to align to the outside world at all. So it's a good exercise to train information processing circuits that include muscle activity and the senses, in my case it was typing code and looking at the screen to find out what it produces. I was mostly programming audio and video applications, making some programs that can be played as instruments, and a few tools for processing videos or doing animations.
However, I have to say that analogue instruments and manual painting are far better on the body side. It simply is a great feeling to beat the drum, to swing the rattle, to dance and sing, holding a brush and feeling the oil color's resistance and smoothness is much more fulfilling to my hand's fine nerves than the plain graphics tablet or the cramping mouse, only the keyboard with its buttons is kind of fun, but still there is the downside that the whole body has to sit still and be silent, while it would prefer to stand on one leg and practice T'ai Ch'i.
And so this was the reason why I finally quit programming, and continued using it only for the most necessary purposes, like embellishing my videos or making my music demos suitable for the public, but one could also ask why should I spend my time with this when someone else could make my videos and I could make the music together with other musicians instead of making it together with myself alone. Anyway, it heightens my self-assurance to know that I can handle the computer and make it do things that most people are not able to, but it also would be much too lopsided for me to become a professional programmer who has to spend hours and hours on logical thinking, when the other side in him wants to get out and have an enjoyable time in a nice place.

The next topic of my cure is alcohol. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but it sure helped me to get a constant relaxing time every day, a little bit in the afternoon, and a little bit more in the evening, and it was especially becoming after the coding sessions, to switch off. I haven't been drinking much in my life before, as you know that with each drug there is a certain lifetime dose that you shouldn't exceed, and keeping an eye on that there is a certain daily dose that you shouldn't exceed, either, I figured it was safe. It was much better than medication, which I can't say from direct experience since I never took medication myself, but looking at those who did, and taking into account my drug experiences, it is certainly much healthier (or should we say, much less harmful) to take something that has an effect on a broad range of synapse types instead of something that affects only one of them, and this one much stronger, especially if you take it regularly. Besides, wine can have a really fine taste, and we had our own vineyard and this year's quality was good, so the supply was secured.
A downside of alcohol, besides from making you kind of inactive, is its interference on the activity of the right hemisphere. This can be even a desired effect in the beginning of a schizophrenia cure, to get rid of her sometimes annoying quirks, but in the long run it is counterproductive as the fine circuits can't organize themselves as they would need to, a symptom of which is a reduced ability for having visions. But since working with visions is vital to acquire final and total health I decided one day to stop drinking and do better things.
This transition came naturally, as every other transition in my process, all I needed to do is observe subtle long-term changes in me and be aware about my daily feelings, to judge strategically and make the right decisions, and not to cling to habits, be they of thinking or be they of behavior. (The greatest difficulty some addicts have often is their belief that they need the substance, that they need it, that they need it and need it, but they don't need it really, they only believe so, and reflecting about the nature of need can be of great help.) (Sometimes you even just believe so because that substance triggers the same hormones that are triggered by moving the body, which stimulate breathing and the heart beat and the brain.)

One very important aspect of my cure certainly was the rectification of my thinking. As schizophrenia is a disease where the thinking process is disturbed because of misinformation and missing information it is extremely necessary to correct wrong ideas and insert new ones that are a helpful contribution to our general condition of being a human with lifelong learning. This process not only takes place in the intellectual areas alone but encompasses all of our brain, including the places where event memories are stored linked with basic ideas.
A method to find problems, simply a practical approach, like all approach in this task should be practical, was to be on the lookout for whenever there is the hint of an unpleasant feeling. I was doing some ongoing associating, eyes closed, things flowing around inside me, and whenever there was anything that smelled fishy I stopped the whole thing and examined it. There were some usual suspects, like childhood absorptions from routines of mother or father, like stupid boys in school whom I mimicked without thinking, like things from my sect years, and when I found out what this unpleasant feeling was connected with then there was a relief, and another grain of dirt in me disappeared.
This work was sometimes painful and slow, sometimes interesting and easy, and sometimes even thoroughly funny, especially when I thought about all the crazy ideas I had in my psychotic episodes which in spite of their intensity were much easier to dissolve than things that are older, and the oldest errors from early childhood are the most difficult ones to find since they are very diffuse and hard to notice, and they are connected to many places and have an overall negative influence which is quite unspecific and hidden.
You have to imagine it like this. Patterns that you have incorporated in your childhood (which you had to incorporate simply because your parents showed them and as a child you were not yet able to apply criticism), they are stored in a huge number of neural connections, because they got stored anew every single time you saw them in your parents, and they also got stored anew every single time they got reactivated later. So a pattern like "my right hemisphere felt so fine because it was undisturbed and playing, and suddenly something comes and stops my fine feeling and forces me to do something I don't understand", this pattern gets impressed into the child every time an adult interrupts it, for example, every day when I was playing and then they sent me to bed. (Besides the many times during the day, actually every time my mother or father wanted something from me and didn't know that I was a noble person whom you approach courteously.)
Later on in my life the hundreds and thousands of instances of repetition of this experience changed into a general feeling that can be described in a couple of ways. It was like doom, like I never will get what I want, that I will always lose, that everyone disturbs me, that I'm not allowed to do what I want, to be what I am, and the worst thing in this is that that general feeling adopted some form of natural law, like this is the way it is simply because it is so, and there is no other.
(Surely there are other ways, but this feeling can't grasp them because it operates on the low brain level, in the slow frequency, it's in the dark and it is unchangeable, at least it doesn't change at all with a single experience or with a single thought, you really have to get as repetitive as the source of this feeling and tell it hundreds of times that things have changed.)
And this wasn't even the worst feeling, because they also slapped me in the face for things I couldn't understand or didn't want to conform to because I deemed them superfluous or wrong. Imagine how unjust it is to a child who holds the truth to be forced to accept wrongness and malpractice, but well, as an adult I can only say I triumphed over that.
The greatest problem here seems to be that my brain expects everything coming from society to by right and worthy to learn and remember forever. I'm one example of a futuristic gene set that is not really able to deal with correcting errors because it is made for a surrounding where there are no errors at all. In about 200.000 years the rest of us will know what I mean, when mankind has entered a state where tradition is holy and absolutely exact and true, where the knowledge of science and philosophy isn't enhanceable anymore, with some morons having believed for long that this is not possible and there is no absolute truth, but with this truth having finally settled over mankind and having infiltrated every single individual, which means that the science of raising children also is advanced to the highest.

Breakdown. I will not really experience that and don't want to blind my imagination with such wonders. I rather prefer to keep this possibility at the back of my mind and use it as a background to laugh at present deficiencies. After all, it is so funny when someone falls down and has a crazy accident, especially when not really everything is broken. A serious argument for the human brain being a clever device, hey universe?
And it is also nice how things move on this planet, I can't always ignore the fact that sometimes you would believe there's a higher intelligence behind. In my opinion, this higher intelligence is in the future, and man plays a little role in helping it build. For those who like to call it, I'll say that God created all of this, even intelligent design and the origin of human, but you have to consider that 'e used the quantum dynamic retroactive attractor method, if you know what that is.
A proof of this is that I still consider myself to be a schizophrenic. The only change is in the interpretation of what that means.

APPENDIX: Brain hemispheres

2010-03-17T11:20:00.003+01:00

The most notable macroscopic feature of the brain is its being comprised of two halves. If we concentrate on the neocortex, that large outside layer which produces our higher mental states, then each of these hemispheres contains approximately 10.000.000.000 neurons, and the connection between them, the corpus callosum, contains about 200.000.000 fibers, 50 % of which go from left to right, and 50 % of which go from right to left, which gives a ratio of 1:100 , which means that only 1 % of the cells of one hemisphere are connected to the other side, and that 99 % of the connections stay within.

This is a strong indication, if we accept the idea of our personality being a product of the brain, that our brain could almost as easy produce two personalities instead of just one, or perhaps even easier.

To fortify this hypothesis it would be helpful if there was evidence that these two hemispheres are somehow different, since if they were exactly the same then the two personalities they might produce also would be exactly the same, and nothing would be won with having two of them instead of just one. It would make sense only if these two personalities have different faces, so to speak, if they would complement one another in their overall task of facing the world. And indeed, there is lots of evidence that the two hemispheres are quite different.

Some of this evidence is quite complicated and only good for scientific discussion, but the main points are that the left hemisphere is language oriented and has a talent for abstract thinking, while the right one is concentrated on visual processing and symbolic meaning (of images in the first place). There are also anatomic differences, the most interesting one being that the left hemisphere has more neurons and less connections, while the right one has less neurons and more connections. This is in accordance to the observation that the left hemisphere prefers to focus on facts and details, while the right one prefers to focus on holistic relationship nets and the overall picture.

A spooky but instructive view of the hemispheres can be obtained from split-brain patients. They are the outcome of a surgical treatment of severe epilepsy that leaves them with separated hemispheres, which has the effect that the two personalities in them can't communicate with each other which produces a strange behavior where the hemisphere with the language centers decides and explains things like a normal person would do, and acts like a normal person, but there's also another person in them who can't talk but still can act and produce behavior.

For example, the experimenter showed a written command to the mute hemisphere of a split-brain patient to leave the room, which the talking hemisphere couldn't see, on which the subject stood up and began walking to the door. They asked, where did he go, we're in middle of an experiment, and the person replied steadfastly that suddenly he felt thirsty and had to get something to drink.

Or, they showed the picture of a nude male to the mute hemisphere of a female split-brain patient. She giggled and turned pink. They asked her why. She replied, because that is a funny machine.

These things happen because the mute hemisphere (usually the right one) triggers some bodily action or reaction, and the speaking hemisphere notices this reaction, but doesn't really know the reason of it, so it simply draws the most probable conclusion and then believes this to be the real cause.

Even stranger than that is the alien hand syndrome. It occurs mostly in split-brain patients, and the symptom is that the hand that is controlled by the mute hemisphere develops a life on its own, undresses the patient when his other hand just dressed him, takes a cigarette out of his mouth when his other hand just wanted to smoke, and things like that. And not just random movements, but coordinated actions that are a strong indication that there is intelligence and a free will behind it.

All this is lots of evidence that the human brain can easily produce and maintain two personalities, but the conditioning of our culture towards one personality alone is so strong that the idea seems insane. There are only few initiatives in science towards that mindset, like the dual brain theory, which provides some explanations that are in line with my own observations, and also offers a new therapeutic approach.

The crucial point of this topic is how incredibly difficult it is to believe what an enormous influence society has on our mentality, how dramatically we are programmed by our culture. The very basis of our mind is determined by the idea that we have to be "one" person, that being otherwise is "sick" and not to be considered as a normal possibility, but we just have to take a look outside the borders of our tiny island in geographic location and historic time to notice how blinkered, lop-sided, and unhealthy this is.

(Follow-up post about religious visions being the base of all pre-modern cultures, about traditional beliefs of spirits and other entities - that really appear to the people there, about Stone Age paintings of mystical animals - that really appeared to these artists, about the human-like and non-human-like beings that appear to us in dreams, and about all these appearances being the product of the vision center in the right hemisphere.)

Schizophrenia

2010-03-16T10:35:00.002+01:00

(from Geist & Gehirn, episode 50)

There are a few ideas of what is the cause of schizophrenia, the most prominent of them being the widely accepted vulnerability-stress model and the highly debatable dopamine hypothesis, which in spite of having as much evidence against as in favor of it provides the only scientific justification for the use of medication in its present form. (My own opinion is that the altered dopamine level is not the cause but a symptom.)

A less known facet of schizophrenia has been presented in this episode of that German TV feature (literally translated Mind & Brain), where Prof. Dr. Dr. Spitzer showed the results of an experiment that has been corroborated and repeated several times. It's about associating words.

The surprising outcome was that schizophrenics are better in this task, their brains associate adjacent words in a semantic web faster than healthy individuals, and also they associate more with each word, not only the direct neighbors, but also the indirect ones (the neighbors of the neighbors).

Actually one would say, well, but that's inherently good, such a feature can make you more creative, you are more associative, can understand and analyze things at a deeper and wider level, are perfectly apt for lateral thinking, why the hell are you a schizophrenic and not a genius?

The answer is, just because the heightened complexity of my brain makes it more difficult to organize it, I need more overhead for aligning the various facets into a harmonious whole, and being surrounded by people whose normality is based on a mechanical automatic way that doesn't suit me but was forced into me from the beginning of my childhood wasn't a great help, either.

(We need some investigation about what is the biological basis for this increased associativity, I'm usually calling it increased density of connections for having a simple name for it, but it probably is too naive to assume that there are more synapses or dendrites, it should be something like a wider spectrum of connection distances, like more distribution in connected neurons, something like a network with many small paths instead of few big streets.)

===============

Next another highly interesting investigation about the team play of brain areas.

to add a line to this poem:

"if you were a fish and they asked you to climb a tree,

and then called you sick because you look really sick outside the water,

what would you do?"

(the explanation is at the end)

This data shows that schizophrenics have a higher dynamics in their brain, that areas switch their activity faster, changes are more rapid, and the brain appears to be more flexible.

Again we would ask, if this is so then why aren't they thinking better than normal people, being able to process more ideas in less time, why aren't they more sprightly, more curious, learning faster, perceiving more intensely and celebrating life more breathlessly than the average adult human on Earth in the transitional period that's somewhere around the beginning of the industrial age, if we speak in rough terms of a few centuries or don't focus on certain geographic locations, and that marks the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of another Age that will be labeled by historians in a few million years better than now.

The answer is the same: It's more difficult to control and coordinate a brain like this and they haven't learned it, because there was nobody around from whom they could have learned it adequately in the time they needed it.

===============

Well, my own impressions about this "sickness" are the following:

Imagine a huge computer program that is operating on a really big machine. The program is so vast that once it is started it runs for entire years without interruption, you can never stop and start it again, so it is programmed to program itself according to its needs and the data it receives.

It certainly has a bug detection and correction component, and this component is one of the most important ones, as when it fails the whole program enters a slow crash that makes it become more and more disorganized, up to the point where only 5 % of its most vital elements are working, and the rest is absorbed in processing and passing around false nonsense.

Usually, every time a small bug is detected, every time there is a disagreement between components, the programs tracks it down and removes it, and explains to the involved components what has happened, but unfortunately there are ways to force this system to accept some bugs and hinder it getting rid of them, and we as humans would call some of these ways metaphorically the power of adults over children, the authority of society, and also ignorance.

Since ignorance ultimately is the topic the solution of which would also solve these other problems, at least retroactively, we should focus on finding ways to transmit the most curative information into affected systems as effective as possible.

(Remember that bugs have the tendency to trigger others, in the end you have a circulus vitiosus made of lots of small thinking processes a large percentage of which is not based on logic, or where the combination of them is not based on logic, since you somewhere started to draw conclusions from false assumptions, and never found out where the error started, and believe all this is true.)

(There are also strategies to circumnavigate these idea chunks to be able to behave according to life's necessities, but a real cure only is possible if all these first errors are found and corrected.)

So, this is the hypothesis of schizophrenia being the result of a thinking disorder which is caused by misinformation and missing information, starting in early childhood, progressing unnoticeable for many years, until the accumulation of errors erupts in a shift of the activity of the brain towards catastrophic activity, which from then on greatly enhances the production and storage of new errors.

Another hypothesis has been mentioned to me this morning by my right hemisphere, who by the way also is a source of inspiration when it comes to language and thought, apart from her native profession of being the vision-maker. She said:

According to the atrophy hypothesis...

Well, her words at first seem unrelated, even difficult to understand, but when I analyze them I most always find they contain a deeper meaning and are right on target. In this case she remarked that she had been suffering for many years because my left hemisphere didn't allow her to be as active as she wants, so she developed some sort of atrophy, but didn't want to succumb to it, instead she rebelled and sent me some information, at times at an overwhelming extent, as described in my adventures.

In more technical words, you have brain areas that contain a certain brand of information, namely autobiographic sensorial memory, and these brain areas have the ability to develop an inner dynamism similar to the dynamism of the left hemisphere familiar to all of us, which is our language and thinking oriented free will, and if this dynamism is suppressed then in some individuals it might try to break out by force, and these individuals are labeled as schizophrenic by others, who are more rigid in suppressing their other side, whose other side is not as strong, or who had all the luck in the world and were able to develop their both sides harmoniously.

According to the atrophy hypothesis...

Stress

2010-03-15T10:42:00.002+01:00

(from Geist & Gehirn, episode 17)

Stress has quite a couple of harmful consequences, the most well-known of them being related to the cardiovascular system and the immune system, in the worst cases stress can be a direct cause of heart attack and can greatly increase the risk of infections, of chronic infections, and of cancer.

It is less known that stress also has a deteriorating effect on the brain, studies have shown that in certain brain areas neurons die because of constant stress. The most important of these areas is the hippocampus, which is responsible for the storing of memories. The loss of neurons can be up to 50 %, as found in the case of soldiers who have spent some years in the field.

Such a drastic decrease in the capacity of this area has a severe impact on the ability to store new memories. It could be discussed whether this effect provides some sort of adaption, in the sense that individuals who live in a surrounding with constant high stress can deal with that surrounding better if they don't remember much of what is happening, but it certainly is derogating to our rights of being human if we aren't allowed to store our experiences in memory as much as we can, to have experiences that are storeworthy, and to use these memories to enhance creatively our personality. (By the way, stress and fear also block the brain's creative potential and force it into a mode of automatic functioning.)

But there is a chance of recovery. The same area of the brain that is so vulnerable to stress also is the area that is unique in respect to its ability of growing new neurons. Until a little bit more than ten years ago neuroscientists believed that neurons cannot be replaced at all, but then it was found out that in the hippocampus new neurons are produced, and that these baby neurons play an important role in storing new memories.

It has to be pointed out that stress inhibits the growth of these new neurons, so recovery from periods of stress (be they caused from the exterior, or from the interior as in the case of paranoid schizophrenia) has to be done in an environment that is as stress-free as possible. Also it is necessary to mind that this recovery is slow, it's a process similar to healing a lesion in any other tissue, only much slower since the neurons have a more complicated way to connect to each other than plain cells in skin, muscles, or bones.

And then, the production of new neurons is stimulated by interesting things happening in the surrounding, by interesting things you do yourself, or by anything you want to learn that is interesting, like how this thing of a brain works and might work if it works wonderful.

===============

Stress and speed. You might wonder, can you be stressed when you're in a slow mood? I mean, when you're relaxed, when everything is easy, when your brain is yawning like on Sunday morning at holidays, and there is nothing you really have to do, will there be stress?

On the other hand, when there's a deadline, when your boss wants something from you just right now, and you have only two seconds to prepare, when the machine you're working at forces you to move really quick, when there are five phone calls at the same time, well, that's what stress actually essentially is. The must to do something in a time too short.

And don't say, well, there's also slow stress, like this impossible situation where I can't decide between this and that. I tell you, if you have all the time in the world to make this decision, if it doesn't matter whether you make it today or tomorrow or next year, then my dear, you will have no stress at all. If the decision doesn't come to you now you simply say, mañana, or, next week, and one day something in you will have found out by itself, unconsciously, what the right thing to do is.

So the main single reason for stress is pressure of time. And we can boil this down to, the main single reason for stress is enforcing the brain to work faster than its optimal speed.

===============

This problem affects some people more than others. If you have two networks of the same type, consisting of the same wiring, having the same number of nodes, and the only difference is the density of the connections, then what do we see?

We do see that the network with the higher density has a lower optimal speed than the other one. (Where optimal speed is defined as the speed with the highest information processing capacity. If the speed is too low then the same amount of information gets processed slower and slower, thus reducing this capacity, but if the speed is too high errors and misalignments start to occur, therefore the highest information processing capacity is reached somewhere at a middle speed.)

(The reason why a system with more connections between the nodes has a slower optimal speed is caused by the fact that more relationships have to be harmonized. It's like a group of hundred people. When everyone knows everyone and everyone talks with everyone about new events then it takes longer until a new idea has entered all their heads than a group of hundred people where each of them talks only with five buddies about new ideas. So one "step" of processing information takes longer when there are more connections, thus the overall speed appears to be slower.)

(However, the speed of increasing the system's overall knowledge, the speed of learning, is higher, because information is stored in a more complex way, and fragments of information are analyzed more differentiatedly.)

Thus, a slow brain with high connectivity can process more information than a fast brain with less connectivity, but it has to be remarked that the latter is more efficient in tasks that require less creativity, intelligence, or whatever you might call it.

So, we have seen that schizophrenics have a higher connectivity in their neural network, we have also seen they require a slow operating speed which is difficult to maintain in a society where everyone is running too fast, we have sometimes seen that a computer with a program crash looks like a stupid frozen TV set even if it has the finest hardware and software somewhere, and we will finally see that people who are vulnerable to stress will be better in a stress-free environment than the robust ones, even though the latter claim selfingly that stress is good because it makes you work faster and produce more, which you have to because stress makes everyone work faster and also consume more, and someone has to accommodate their demand with increased production, and that someone is you.

Nature and nurture

2010-03-13T12:10:00.002+01:00

(from Geist & Gehirn, episode 22)

There is quite some debate about whether our personality is determined by our genes or by our social conditioning. The answer is more complicated than just saying it's a mixture of both at a certain proportion, and also more complicated than saying it's a mixture of many mixtures. (Referring to the fact that there are many different genes that encode our organism.)

The following has to be considered. Experiments have shown that for three different genetic variants A, B, and C there exist two different surroundings S and S' with the following surprising relationships: Gene A is better for surrounding S, but worse in the case of S', whereas gene C is better in S' but worse in S, while B performs more or less the same in both.

The funny thing here is that in this particular investigation the genetic variants refer to the serotonin level in the brain, the surroundings refer to the amount of stress in the childhood, and the distinction better/worse refers to the likelihood of developing a depression later on. Meaning, some people will get a depression much easier when there was stress in their childhood, and they will almost never get a depression when there was no stress. But the other brand of people, those who are more robust, those who will not so easy become depressive as a reaction to early stress, this brand of people is more likely to get this disease in the case of no childhood stress at all!

Imagine: The simple view would say, depression (or any other trait of personality) is determined at x % by nature, and at y % by nurture in everyone, but in reality it's determined much more by nurture for the first brand of people than for the other brand. So the overall influence of nature actually is bigger than you might think at first glance, since it's the genes which decide in the first place to which of these two brands of people we belong.

In any case, childhood stress has a negative influence on the mental health as an adult, and stress has a negative influence on health generally, and therefore should be avoided as much as possible.

An interesting conclusion on my part is the following. The judgment of whether a certain genetic predisposition is to be called sick or healthy depends on the surrounding. An example. In the Stone Age, males with a tendency to competitive violence were perfectly healthy and very successful. When you were aggressive you were a better hunter, and you also were better in oppressing other males, which gave you the power to make more sex to more women than them, which made you the father of more children who also had these genes of aggression, which by the way is an automatic mechanism for the procreation of such genes.

If you were a peaceful guy, in the Stone Age, you first of all were lowest in rank in the horde (remember, the rest of the men was aggressive), and most likely not allowed to have a woman. Second, if there was a fight with the neighbor horde you were the first to be this time's loss, because you were worst at smashing brutal heads with a bludgeon. And third, you also were the one whom the lion preferably ate because while the others instinctively either ran or fought you rather wanted to think about the problem and find an elegant solution.

Okay, in the end the elegant solution indeed came in the form of civilization, but it took quite a long time to get it, and it'll take another long time to get it fully, since if we extend our example of the two brands of males, the aggressive competitors and the peaceful collaborators, into an utopian New Age where the highmost intelligence is necessary to live in a complex society surrounded by an ever-aware technological infrastructure, we see the following.

The two cases are a nation UA where most of the males (and those females who mimic them) are very competitive, and violence and aggression is socially accepted, judged from the content of media products. The other nation is CE, and there people don't even know what it means that people could harm each other, the last recorded incident of a person killing another person, known only by a handful of historians, stems from 20.000 years ago, and everyone lives in peace and harmony with everyone, and people are wicked crazy from nowadays' perspective in their drive for the most intense experiences that are always changing and always new and always the same and beautiful at once. So fast and so slow at the same time, you can't imagine.

Well, I think I don't need to explain my example further, nation UA as a whole is completely inferior to nation CE, the defective way people treat each other and themselves when they're possessed by the hierarchy instinct (which is the only reason why competition exists in the first place) gives lots of material for humorous and illustrative stories I might invent later on, but is too sad and boring for a serious investigation like this one.

Another remark I have to make is about certain mental diseases only being a disease because the social surrounding nowadays being such that people of this brand aren't allowed to develop normally, and that these people in other surroundings would be perfectly sane and hmental. See.

(Geist & Gehirn is a German television feature series by Prof. Dr. Dr. Manfred Spitzer, psychiatrist, psychologist, neurodidact, and author of a couple of widely translated books about brain science. All the episodes can be watched here.)