News:
Face transplant. A woman in France who was mauled by a dog (it bit off her nose, chin and mouth) had a face transplant. Her face will be a hybrid, part hers and partly the donor’s (other parts of her own skin would not match.) If her body rejects it she could be worse off than when she started, which is a risk she accepted. If the transplant is successful she will definitely have some psychological issues to deal with, but will be able to eat through her mouth.
This is so risky and traumatic at present that the prospect of cosmetic surgery of this type is a long way off.
A new mammal has been discovered in Indonesia — a small cat-sized thing with big eyes and a tail.
The police around the corner from me have taken to driving the wrong way up 9th avenue to avoid going around the block. I’ve seen more instances of cops running red lights lately, too. I think this stems from the same lax morality that Condi Rice supports — “we need to be allowed to break the law in order to uphold the law.” Go figure. Can I use that rationale too if I disagree with what someone somewhere is doing?
Phillip K. Dick was right!
I read in the New Scientist that neurologists have discovered a way to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome — wipe the memory. It seems that traumatic events trigger both adrenalin and formation of neural pathways that “save” the memory of that event in case a similar event should occur in the future. The presumed idea is that if a similar ever occurs you’d recognize the signs and then the adrenalin, and other (appropriate) reactions would go into effect. It’s a survival mechanism.
However, as we know, for soldiers and many others, these flashbacks become debilitating. A friend told me of a schoolmate who, on returning from Vietnam, would hit the deck, floor, street, and sidewalk at the sound of any sudden loud noise. A truck backfiring and he’d be face down, instantly. So, the idea is to break this connection, and let guys like this move on. Ditto for rape victims, accident victims, abused children, etc.?
It was discovered that immediately after a traumatic event the neural connections are live and labile. It was also found that certain drugs inhibit the formation of these neural pathways — and therefore the formation of the hot volatile memories — if the drug is taken soon enough. It’s a little hard to imagine the possible scenario in an emergency room or police station where the attendents might ask a victim, “Do you want to remember this?”
Of course, if this option is given to witnesses, the police will be effectively destroying evidence — these people will become useless as witnesses as they won't remember what happened. All we need is for perps to obtain these pills too, and then they can make their victims forget the crime ever happened.
Furthermore, it was discovered that even if one doesn’t take the blue pill right after the event, there are other opportunities for memory deletion. During “flashbacks”, when the memory of the event triggers the adrenalin again weeks, months or years later, the neural pathways become malleable again, so taking the drugs at this point will give another opportunity to forget that violent horror, that boyfriend, that abusive father or those screeching tires. In fact, if we know what triggers these memories — a photo, a sudden sound, a song, a car horn, a voice — we can use these tools to selectively defrag the hard drive.
Artists and Schizophrenia
Read in The Guardian that geneticists now see links between crazy artists and just plain crazies. Geneticists have long been puzzled why schizophrenia hasn’t been eliminated by natural selection. Acute sufferers have trouble functioning, so their chances of producing offspring are low — so why has the percentage of people with this disorder remained more or less consistent (1%)? If they don't reproduce they should dwindle and eventually disappear — with the occasional random mutation occurring now and then.
It seems it was those crazy artists who are to blame. They think that the gene for creativity is one of a pair — and the other one, when present, produces full-blown schizophrenia. It’s been long recognized that schizophrenics are — when functional — creative, inventive, and imaginative. So now scientists think that schizophrenics share this “creative gene” with arty creative types, but sadly, the crazies got the other gene, too.
So here’s where the 1% comes from. Creative types, so scientists claim, have active sex lives — and often produce a fair number of kids, legitimate or not. And I guess all it takes is for both of the parents to possess halves of the creative/schizo gene pair for the offspring to be prone to the disorder. Hence the continued existence of the disorder in the species. If one accepts that wild arty creativity is important for the species as a whole, then the evolutionary reasoning is clear — except why must we have the unfortunate side effect of a percentage of crazies just to have the needed arties?
Maybe it’s like Asperger’s, a matter of degree. A little bit autistic or schizo and you are extraordinarily focused in the former case, or possess surprising insights in the latter. But if it goes too far and you’ve got a full dose you’re dysfunctional in both cases. But both are needed for society and our species, so the percentage of loonies and autistic rockers is the price we pay.
A reply from Dale Morris:
Schizophrenia is a catch-all category covering dissociation from normally agreed standards of reality, ranging from states in which the subject creates elaborate and idiosyncratic conceptual frameworks within which to locate their experience (ones that often clash with their environment) to states in which their capacity to integrate experience (even idiosyncratically) fails, to catatonia and psychosis.
Bipolar disorder is the currently accepted name for what used to be called manic-depression, and the label refers to the twin poles of depression and mania. Bipolar disorder generally allows the subject some (often long periods) of activity in the time is takes to traverse the poles.
So these are different things, and they're different in a variety of ways, not least of which is that people with schizophrenia have been known to spontaneously recover, while people with bipolar disorder haven't. It's also true that bipolar disorder is generally treatable with lithium and variety of other medications, while no-one really knows what's going on with schizophrenia.
I haven't read the article that [David] references in The Guardian, but the generally accepted idea of genetic retention is that the gene for mild idiosyncrasy is valuable and the action of natural selection has been to retain that (schizotypal disorder), in service of the greater good. (Eccentricity in an individual being a valuable commodity, causing as it does, novel responses to their environment, which responses can be mined for selective advantage.) The condition varies in strength of expression, and the point at which it causes inadequate interaction with the world, it causes harm, ceases to be valuable, and we call it schizophrenia.
