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Our possibilities of experiencing are infinite and infinitely beyond that splinter of awareness we acknowledge, call “normal,” and disclose to others.

“A functioning police state needs no police.” — William S. Burroughs “ Shock Therapy ” is that ugly dog collar and backpack combination that they use in some detention centers to control kids with behavior problems. Yes, read that to mean psychological problems. Don’t get me started on behaviorists. It is used as a behavior modification technique, often without the use of psych meds, to create an aversion to the undesirable behavior. However, we are talking about ElectroConvulsive Therapy – ECT. ECT is a pretty drastic measure. They put you under general anesthesia then give your head a big jolt electricity – so big that it would induce convulsions if they didn’t knock you out and paralyze you first. It is one of the last remaining vestiges of a truly brutal era in psychiatry. There are less extreme modalities available these days. Transcranial Magnetic Therapy is one. See if you can find the IEEE Spectrum at your library. ...

I had a very fruitful discussion with my shrink Saturday morning. I wanted to know why it is that some of the folks on the bipolar lists who are obviously far more stable than I am are on disability. It has been suggested that I have force of will, a concept that is complete and total <useless substance>, as is evidenced by my lack of control over my weight. I’m in a weight loss program. Forget WW, they are amazingly ineffective. But at least they’re inexpensive, eh? This one was $550 for a 17-week program. My goal is to lose at least 30 lbs by the end of the program. F*cking expensive 30 lbs. But you know, you do what you have to. This one is going to work – the emphasis is on identifying triggers and modifying behaviors, and it builds in the changes on a week-by-week basis to avoid an overwhelm. The goal, then, is not weight loss, per se, but creating new habits to replace the old, dysfunctional habits. What I walked away from the shrink’s office ...

When I was around 3 or 4 years old I saw a commercial on TV about alien registration. It blew my mind. I watched scifi even then and I knew what an alien was. And that spacemen and martians didn’t really exist. So I went to my mother, kind of freaked out, and asked her about these aliens that seemed to exist outside of the TV. She told me “I’m an alien.” Boom! Head explodes. I asked her, “Where are you from, Mars or Venus?” This must have been before my first trip to England – when I was 3-1/2 or so. We spent the summers at the shore and I used to stare out over the ocean for hours trying to see England where my grandmother lived.

To insist that the world has one meaning rather than another is politics .

Gimmicks, gadgets and techniques are the genius of America.

Being can be likened to a projective test.

Man can experience himself and the world in myriad ways.

This is an expansion on a comment I left on The Zucchini Patch . I think they use PET scans for what you want to do. An MRI isn’t capable of telling the difference between a live brain and a dead brain. It can, however, spot a shrunken hippocampus or amygdala or anomalies in the blood vessels. An fMRI can see more. They can use tagged glucose or neurotransmitters, whatever they want to study. The fMRI shows where the substance concentrates in the brain, where it is used the most. The NIMH has information about this. It’s all still under investigation, though. The fMRI is not ready to be used to diagnose. Did you know that in ADHD, the harder the person tries to concentrate, the more the prefrontal cortex shuts down? Oddly enough, motor areas of the brain work harder at the same time. Can’t we just find a way to teach these kids that will fit with that kind of brain response? Running around in circles shouting out calculus problems, perhaps? Apologies to my fr...