Alt Left: “Child Molester” and “Pedophile” Are Not Synonyms

~7

There is nothing wrong with these non-pedophilic molesters sexually and probably even psychologically – their sexual interests are quite ordinary. They are “normal” in the way that most criminals are “normal” – that is, they are not the slightest bit crazy. The fact that criminals in general are not crazy and in fact are often remarkably sane is in part what makes them so dangerous. If they were crazy we could protect ourselves from them better. The fact that they are so sane is what enables them to get away with their crimes and also makes them hard to catch.

Rather these are simply bad men who are opportunistic and will have sex with females in general – women, children, no matter. A female relative or child is also a very easy target for these very manipulative men. In some cases it is an alternative if the wife has cut off the sex. The best description of these men is that they are simply criminals. They are users and their behavior is part of a pattern of control and abuse, often combined with verbal and physical abuse.

It is hard to say how girls how girls are effected, for it is mostly girls who are effected by intrafamilial child molesting in part because most gay men do not have children nor do they have access to them. Most molesting of boys does not occur in the family, and in fact such molesting is not very common.

Instead most boys are molested by homosexual pedophiles. And of course there are homosexual pedophiles  – the woke crowd claims that homosexuals and pedophiles cannot be one and the same and yet they can.

They tell this lie because sadly gay men do have a pretty high rate of child molesting, mostly probably of the pedophilic variety.

A logical explanation for this is that both homosexuality and pedophilia are probably developmental disorders, as is biological transsexualism. Something goes wrong developmentally with the fetus in the womb, hormonally in the case of male homosexuality and biological transsexualism but due to unknown factors in the case of pedophilia. It would stand to reason that developmental disorders might tend to overlap due to a common cause.

Pedophilia may be caused by subtle brain damage. Neurological soft signs – typically evidence of subtle brain damage – are very common in pedophiles. Furthermore, pedophiles tend to have lower IQ’s than non-pedophiles, once again suggestive of mild brain damage. 

In some ways it is worse if your own father is doing it to you. Nevertheless, most seem to get over it with time. The behavior of non-pedophilic molesters is outside the purview of mental health because we just talk about whether behavior or persons are crazy or not. And these men are not crazy. They’re just bad. We are talking about matters of morality and law, not matters of psychology and psychiatry.

There is often significant Cluster B Axis 2 Personality Disorder pathology as is the case with most men who use and abuse others. These men are fairly easy to rehabilitate absent significant psychopathy because significant guilt is not uncommon, and they are not pedophilic, so they can easily fulfill their sexual needs without resorting to children. Probably in India, Morocco and most of the Third World, most molesting is by non-pedophilic molesters because pedophilia proper is not well known in these places, and most men, even gay men, tend to marry and have children due to societal pressure.

Alt Left: Four Types of Transgender People

Interesting post from Claudius about transgenderism. I don’t completely agree with it, but it’s more right than wrong.

Transgenderism is mostly a fad because not all gay men who “transition” become hookers. In fact, many are too ugly and masculine for straight men. These I would call “fad trannies.” Not technically insane though the cult itself is suffering from collective insanity, mostly as a form of political and emotional rebellion against conservatives.

So there are four groups:

  • Gay hookers
  • SJW gay fags
  • Autogynephiliacs
  • The vanishingly small number of people truly suffering from gender dysphoria

The latter two groups are truly insane, but only the last one is deserving of our sympathy and collective medical and legal effort, to wit, they should be legally considered the gender they feel like and actually be encouraged to take hormones and chop off their dick. I doubt even 0.

Autogynephiliacs should not be legally considered their gender of choice under any circumstances. Why? Because they are straight and thus attracted to the opposite gender. These trannies are potential rapists of women, although I don’t think they pose an overall large threat to anybody save themselves. But you’re right about them having many comorbid paraphilias. These are truly sick fuckers. Look at ContraPoints’s YouTube channel..

“She” is a lesbian tranny. Lolz.

Also note that the first group, gay hookers, don’t chop off their dick. Almost all tranny prostitutes here, in Thailand, or wherever keep their dick because men like to play with it and sometimes be fucked by it. The economic incentive is quite strong, casting doubt as to whether these tranny hookers ever even had gender dysphoria in the first place.

From what I’ve read, men with gender dysphoria are appalled by their own penis and truly want to get rid of it. The prospect of keeping it to make a few bucks on the side by forming non-emotional relationships with straight men doesn’t add up.

RL: It seems to be an extreme form of homosexuality, and their brains are actually female-shifted. That is, they don’t have female brains or male brains.”

I didn’t know this. Interesting. It matches up with what I said. They are just super-duper gay. I like these trannies. They seem very nice, albeit a bit gold-diggerish, but whatever. I could be friends with these people.

Psychotic autogynephiliacs like ContraPoints or Caitlyn Jenner who killed someone with “her” SUV while escaping paparazzi, Hell no! BTW it was an accident, the SUV crash, but still.

Alt Left: More on Trannies, November 2020 Edition

Claudius: They (trannies) are gay hookers fighting for their libertarian right to transition so they can get straight male sugar daddies and clients. It’s a booming business. Just look at Thai ladyboys making a living off sex tourists.

That’s only 1

Their male brains are shifted halfway towards the female brain structure, so in the areas where male and female brains differ, these men have brains halfway between male and female brains.

It’s absolutely a biological syndrome and I would give them the right to transition. There’s something clearly off with their brains. Also this type of tranny is very nice and even a lot of the TERF radical feminists don’t like them too much. They’re appalled by the belligerent and menacing behavior of the autogynophile kooks. Also, they love the word tranny. They call each other trannies all the time. They think it’s a funny word. It’s the autogynophile snowflakes that have decided that tranny is some evil bigoted slur that means you’re a Nazi.

But no one is born in the wrong body. No man is born with a female brain and stuck in the wrong male body and no woman is born with a male brain and stuck in the wrong female body. That’s just part of the crazy lying tranny propaganda, but a large percentage of the population actually believes this bullshit.

Claudius: The only crazy trannies are the straight males who are turned on by cross-dressing, the so called autogynephiliacs.

Yeah, but that’s 8

They are also extremely loud, belligerent, and vindictive and even aggressive and menacing. They have taken over whole corporations. For instance, the Twitter moderation team has been infiltrated by this type of tranny and this person(s) uses their power to ban people from Twitter. We even know their names. This is the guy that got me banned from Twitter for life for telling the truth about trannies:

RL: There’s no such thing as transgender people. They’re all just mentally ill.

That’s what I said. For that crime, I now have a lifetime ban from Twitter thanks to some crazy autogynophile tranny piece of shit.

Insight, Defenses, and the Ego-Syntonic/Ego-Dystonic and Crazy/Sick Binaries in Axis 1 and 2 Disorders

For the first time in my life a week ago, I experienced the thing that a lot of depressives experience. They actually want to be depressed. They like to be depressed. The depressed mind tells them that depression is simply normality. They don’t want to get better because they’re already normal. Some deeply depressed people don’t even realize they are depressed.

They’re on the verge of suicide, cutting themselves, with a mood blacker than a redfish in a steaming New Orleans kitchen, snapping at everyone, paranoid that all the happy people are secretly making fun of them, but they’re completely normal. They stand up and scream at psychiatrist after psychiatrist who tells them that they are deeply depressed. They are not, dammit! They’re perfectly normal! And they storm out of the office until the next time with the new doctor.

Finally someone slips them a handful of pills, and they start popping them. The permanent night goes away and the sun comes out for once. As the dawn begins to clear into the sharp light of day, the reality hammer hits them hard, and they realize just how sick they were.

The problem with these disorders is the part of the body that is sick is the brain. A working brain is necessary to figure out if you’re ok or not, and when you’re brain isn’t working, you’re incapable of recognizing that you are ill.

One former employee told me that once, this person asked Musk if he ever worried about losing his mind.

Musk replied: “Does a crazy person ever look in the mirror and know that he’s crazy?”

There you have it. Straight from the mouth of the Devil Himself. And of course Musk is nuts. He’s Bipolar. Almost all of his crazy behavior is happening when he is manic or hypomanic or whatever. I can look right through that article about him and see the mania raging through his life, unacknowledged, and of course consequently unhindered. There is a connection between mania (hypomania) and creativity, and Musk is nothing if not creative. One wonders if he treated his illness if then his creativity might decline in tandem with his (hypo)mania. Many people with Bipolar Disorder report just that.

Mania has the curious characteristic of not only making you nuts, but blinding you to that fact. As we just saw, depression can do that too. And I’ve finally figured out firsthand what I have been observing for years now – that depressed people actually like to be depressed and literally do not want to get better. The depression makes them incapable of wanting to get better.

Of course in psychosis no one thinks they are ill. That’s why they call it psychosis.

Axis 2 disorders also blind the person to the fact that they are ill but they do so in a different way because in personality disorders, the brain is usually fine, it’s more that the person’s true character is ill. People with personality disorders aren’t even crazy or mentally ill in a sense. Instead, they are sick. Sick at their very soul, at the very essence. Soul-sick.

Think of a psychopath. Is he crazy? Give it up. Of course he’s not nuts. Crazy as a fox, sure. But anyone who has spent any time around these people realizes that somehow there is something terribly wrong with them. It’s almost as if they are not quite human. They are more like animals, or better yet, machines. While they are surely disturbed, it’s clear that they aren’t the slightest bit crazy. The psychopath is one of the sanest people you’ll meet. So what is he if he’s not nuts? He’s sick. What is sick? His soul is sick. We are almost outside of crazy/sane here into the other binary of good/evil.

People with personality disorders never think anything is wrong with them because it is the core self, the true you, the real personality, that is sick. No one wants to think they’ve got a crappy personality. Deep down inside, everyone is just fine. Or at least that’s all they know. How can you be anything other than yourself? You can’t. So how can being you be wrong? It can’t. You don’t know how to be anything other than you so your true core self can never be sick, and you couldn’t figure out how to not be yourself anyway even if it was.

Personality disorders, along with paraphilias, are typically ego-syntonic, and the characteristic of ego-syntonic disorders is that people don’t think anything is wrong.

On the other hand, the anxiety disorders do not seem to be ego-syntonic in general. They’re quite ego-dystonic. It’s like you’ve got a monkey on your back. The person with the anxiety disorder says, “Get these thoughts/feelings out of my head/body! Make them go away! I hate them!” These disorders are quite painful but their ego-dystonic nature makes people want to seek help.

The anxiety disorders have always been a stick in the mud for Freudian pleasure principle theory because they make the person so miserable. But that only works if you see them as defenses, and I don’t think anxiety disorders are defenses.

Want to talk defenses? Personality disorders, right this way, in Display Number 2 over here. A wild bundle of defenses crafted into the the most Rube Goldbergian fortress you’ve ever seen with trap doors, stairways to nowhere, fake walls, hidden rooms, booby traps, decoys, the whole nine yards. The fortress is so huge and fortified that it’s not even working to protect the person anymore.

This is a person that has constructed a fortress so huge and complex to protect themselves that, while it’s protecting them for sure, it’s also causing more problems than it solving. A case of the cure is worse than the disease. Sort of like a country that spends itself bankrupt on defense and doesn’t have enough left over for food.

In fact, the person themselves tends to disappear in Personality Disorders, and all you see is this wild swirl of defenses. Now and then you can glimpse the real person when they surface a bit for some air before plunging back down to the Axis 2 depths, but it’s usually pretty well hidden.

It’s often quite shocking to glimpse the real person because you’ve been looking at the personality disorder so long that you’ve come to think that the disorder is the actual person. On the other hand, it’s a good question. Is the personality disorder the person themselves? Is there a true self down there somewhere amidst the whirlpool of defenses? I’m not sure.

Of course anxiety disorders are not defenses. They thought psychoses were defenses too. People were “activating psychotic defenses.” Well, for a defense, I must say that a psychosis has to be one of the lousiest ways to protect yourself that I can think of. Of course psychoses are not defenses. Nor are mood disorders. The manic is not engaging in “flight into reality.” How on Earth depression defends against anything on Earth is beyond me.

The Axis 1 Disorders – the mood, anxiety, and psychotic disorders – are simply illnesses like the illnesses you get in the other parts of your body. Only these illnesses affect your brain. When you get physically ill, is that some sort of defense? No doubt in that case cancer must be the biggest defense of them all.

Bipolar Disorder: Manics Are Literally the Worst People on Earth

Bipolar Disorder is a mental illness formerly called Manic Depression. Bipolar people alternate between episodes of mania, characterized by high energy, little sleep, elation, excessive or frantic activity, wild spending, promiscuity, heavy alcohol and drug use along with aggression, rage, hostility, menacing behavior, extreme irritability, wild rages and temper tantrums, and even crimes, at times even violent crimes, as we shall see below.

The other periods are the down periods characterized by Depression. You all know what that entails so I won’t go into details.

In between, the manic is typically fine or at least goes back to their premorbid personality,  whatever that was like. It’s as if the illness has vanished altogether.

The episodes can may occur within a day or be up to three years apart.

If untreated, there is a tendency to worsen over time. This is because untreated mania actually causes physical damage to your brain. Every time you have a manic episode, your brain gets damaged. Then when you have another one, it’s gets more damaged, and on and on, accumulating over time.

Then the illness worsens. The manic episodes last longer and seem to worsen in quality. The time between episodes shortens. Finally, they reach the point where they are no longer normal between episodes and instead they are mildly manic or hypomanic between episodes.

In my family’s case, the person went from 5 to 3 to 1 1/2 to now where they come only 6 months apart. 9-10 months of mania, 6 months of hypomania, and then another 9-10 months of mania. So they are literally spending  a majority of their existence now in major manic episodes.

The drugs used are mood stabilizers between episodes, which seem to calm them down and prevent new major episodes, and antipsychotics for a Major Manic Episode because they’re so nuts that that’s the only thing that will bring them down.

The Angry, Aggressive, Irritable, and Violent Manic

Although the stereotype is of the happy manic on top of the world, that may not be typical. I heard a psychiatrist speak once and she said that among her male Bipolar patients, there were about 10 angry, irritable,  etc. manics for every happy one. The women may be more of the happy manics.

I’m living with one of these monsters right now, and it’s pure Hell. When he goes manic he’s basically Charles Manson. Pure evil. It’s like paranoid schizophrenia in the sense that they’re not just nuts, but they’re also aggressive and dangerous. They’re angry, hostile, hateful, abusive, aggressive, menacing, destructive, and even violent assholes from Hell.

And of course when they go manic, they lose all insight. If you confront them and tell them they’re having an episode, they flip out, scream and yell like a maniac, throw things, and get very menacing like they’re going to hit you. And they may indeed hit you.

In addition, because of stigma, there is often a lot of resistance to accepting the fact that they are ill. Our family member denied that he was ill for 38 years, from age 17 to age 55. Even now, in the midst of an episode, I guarantee he will deny being ill. That’s just how the illness works and also this person has one of the most extreme Denial defenses I’ve ever seen built up.

We have a family member with this illness and he has had many manic episodes over the years. Every time he has an episode, I’ve always been around. And every time, we got into at least one fist fight. Plus I usually get into a fistfight a year or so even when he’s not manic, except he’s never not manic.

When he’s not having an episode, he’s hypomanic, or a little bit manic. He’s literally been manic all the time, either hypomanic or manic, for ~15 years now. This is not a pleasant person to be around.

If you criticize, correct, or attempt to enforce any rules on them, you get met with a wild, screaming, violent tantrum and possible violence of some sort.

Angry, irritable manics are the literally worst human beings on Earth. When they go manic they turn into narcissistic psychopaths.

Of course in our case, his worthless therapist and psychiatrist won’t listen to me to up his meds. I contacted them and told them that he’d gone into a major manic episode, and they blew me off, said I was incapable of diagnosing mental illness, called me paranoid, denied that he was ill, and made me out to be the bad guy.

They’re so stupid and incompetent they can’t even figure out he’s nuts, and they refuse to believe me.

This is a typical scenario. The therapist has little or no understanding of the illness –  I know the disorder far better than he does (very common) – which is typical. The psychiatrist does worthless telemedicine, so I guarantee she won’t be able to diagnose him. Plus I’m not allowed to talk to her due to some crazy misinterpretation of the HIPAA law that was passed  recently.

If you have this diabolical illness, for God’s sake, accept your illness, and get on meds right now. And listen to your loved ones when we tell you you’re going nuts because you won’t be able to tell. The worst thing about these satanic illnesses is not just that they make people dangerously insane, but they blind the sufferer to that fact.

Manics are dangerous as Hell. They often commit crimes in episodes, and they are commonly arrested and jailed, often many times, typically at least once per episode.

They are also extremely aggressive and, yes, violent.

They have a very high rate of being arrested for violent crimes, like 2

The Myth of Illegal Drugs Frying Your Brain and Permafried People

In response to Jason’s post here about drug use frying your brain, I have written this response. In general, the notion that the use of illegal drugs will fry your brain or make you permafried even after you quit is nonsense. In general, once you quit you go back to the intelligence and sanity level you were at before you started. Few people get permanently lowered intelligence or permanent mental illness from former drug use.

Most illegal drugs do not cause any permanent damage to your brain that would affect you permanently after you quit.

In all of my years using drugs, I have met 10,000’s of drug users and I never met one person who had used so much drugs that they were “fried” in the sense that they were permanently stupid or crazy after they quit using.

Cocaine

There may be some consequences far down the road – say, with Parkinson’s.

Jason’s article discusses an increased risk of Parkinson’s in former cocaine users. But it’s not really due to brain damages so much as changes in a certain receptor that make someone more vulnerable to a toxin. That’s not the same thing as having a fried brain.

I knew a heavy cocaine user who appeared to have neurological problems from the drug. But I am not sure if it persisted after he quit, if he ever did quit. But he’s the only person I’ve ever met like that, and even he wasn’t fried at all. He was still very intelligent and completely sane. However, he did appear to have some sort of brain damage. Whether it was permanent or not is not known.

LSD

I have known people who took LSD up to 700 times, and I know a number who took LSD 300 times. LSD doesn’t damage your brain anyway. It can cause some changes in the visual system due to permanent changes in serotonin receptors, but that just causes some perceptual problems, and this is mostly in people who have taken it 50+ times. It doesn’t change effect you in any way that changes the way you think or feel, in other words, it doesn’t make you stupid or nuts.

There are some very heavy former LSD users who seem to have permanent hallucinations, but those people took a lot of acid over a short period of time – like way, way too much acid. It’s not known what’s going on with them, but I suppose they are permafried in a sense.

LSD is a dangerous drug.

Cannabis

I know many people who have been smoking pot for 10, 20, or even 30 years, and there’s nothing wrong with any of them. You wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with them if you met them. They’re not damaged at all.

The pot lowering IQ discussed in Jason’s piece is only for use before you are 18. If you start using at age 18 or after, there’s no effect on IQ. People under 18 need to be very careful about pot because it can indeed lower their IQ’s a bit.

Pot doesn’t give you schizophrenia, period. The most it can do is trigger it if you are already vulnerable, but even then, most of those people would have gotten it anyway. But it can definitely bring it on sooner than it would have otherwise.

The rate of schizophrenia has been flat for 60 years, all through the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s and 2010’s, and all sorts of drug use rates for different drugs skyrocketed at various times in that period. In other words, neither cannabis nor any other drug is going to give you schizophrenia with one exception discussed below.

MDMA

MDMA is a very dangerous drug and it can definitely cause physical damage to your brain. It permanently lowers scores on a few aspects of intelligence tests such as vocabulary, but you mostly can’t notice any changes and there do not appear to be any changes in mental stability. In general, it doesn’t make you stupid or nuts.

However, there are some people called e-tards out there who took a lot of MDMA very frequently over relatively short of periods of time, and these people appear to be permafried. Mostly they seem a bit stupid.

However, I have heard that even these effects of MDMA go away after ~7-8 years if you stay away from the drug.

 

Speed is another matter but even that tends to clear up after you quit. There are some very heavy methamphetamine users, especially people who shot the drug, who have developed an illness that looks a lot like or possibly is paranoid schizophrenia.

There are some recorded cases out of Japan, and a friend told me about another case here in California. This is not a common outcome and even with all the heavy meth abuse that is going on nowadays, you don’t hear much about people being permafried in the sense that they become permanently mentally ill with paranoid schizophrenia.

Heavy Polydrug and Alcohol Abuse for Decades (30 years)

I have heard of one person who used huge amounts of drugs and drank very heavily over many years, starting as an adolescent. They are now off of everything, and they have a rather poor short-term memory and forget stuff a lot, but other than that, they are still extremely intelligent.

They are also a bit suspicious and paranoid, but not at the level of a paranoid psychosis. I suppose this man is permafried in a sense, but if you met him, you would not appear stupid or crazy.

Conclusion

Bottom line is a lot of that stuff can mess you up pretty bad while you are on it so you seem stupid, crazy, or even brain damaged. But most if not all of that tends to clear up when you quit. Permafried people who are permanently stupid or nuts from heavy drug use must be awfully rare because I haven’t met one in my entire life. The fried brains and permafried nonsense is mostly mythology.

Alt Left: The Dangers of Medical Transition for Transsexuals, Especially During Childhood

I hope to do quite a few papers on this subject. In general there is no such thing as transsexualism and there is no such thing as transsexuals. Nobody is born in the wrong body.

~1

And a recent flood of new cases, mostly in teenage girls, is simply a mental illness being caused by social contagion. In this sense it is quite similar to Anorexia Nervosa and in fact, these girls resemble anorexics in  many ways. All of this is completely fake. None is real at all.

I have to have some sympathy for some transsexuals, mostly gay transwomen. These boys have stubbornly insisted that they were girls from an early age such as two or three. Such cases are intransigent and resistant to treatment. I am just fine with transition for these folks.

The rest are just mostly very effeminate gay men who are so effeminate that they think  they are women, sort of an extreme form of homosexuality.

Many transmen are simply very butch lesbians. Whereas in the past they would simply have identified as lesbians and lived their lives this way (something I am just fine with in these cases as I feel it is biological), now they are insisting that they are really men and transitioning. As might be expected a lot of lesbians are pretty mad about this. They hate men enough anyway, and now many of the recent crop of lesbians are insisting that they are the hated gender. Oh noes!

Puberty blockers are catastrophic and they are being given out en masse to very young children nowadays. The results are disastrous and I think this should be done seldom if ever.

Risks of puberty blockers: Sterility and permanent loss of sexual function. Very high levels of sterility. Impairment of bone mineralization, hence weak bones that easily break. Impairment of proper hip development (females only). Results in a male hip instead of a proper hourglass shaped female hip.

Risks cross-sex hormones for MtF only: 5X rate of throboembolic disease. The estrogen causes blood clots in these men’s veins, how I have no idea. Gynecomastia, rarely reversible. These men develop female-type breasts or moobs that never  go away.

Risks of cross-sex hormones for FtM only: Hirsutism, very difficult to reverse. They will have hairy bodies for the rest of their lives even is they detransition. For instance, even if these women go back to being women, they will still have to shave their faces for the rest of their lives. Deeper voice – this is permanent.

Risks of cross-sex hormones only: Elevated heart attack rate, possibly in both sexes.

Transition unnecessary in childhood – no need for immediate transition to prevent suicide: No evidence that transition with drugs and surgery before adulthood reduces the trans suicide rate.

Fake disorder – transsexualism is not real – they are all just mentally ill: Rates of mental disorder and autism among FtM transsexuals are very high, mostly Borderline Personality Disorder and autism.

Unnecessary – goes away on its own: 8

Narcissism and Psychopathy Are on Continua Too

Very good book.

I just finished reading this book.  It it titled The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

Author is a well known neuroscientist who discovered while looking at his brain scan that he is a psychopath himself! His scan looks exactly like that of a criminal psychopath. He is what is called a prosocial psychopath. These types or even a lot of the antisocial noncriminal psychopaths types are everywhere in politics, business, law enforcement, the military, law, and medicine. Psychopaths are attracted to all of those fields and all of these areas of work are swarming with those jerks. Most antisocial noncriminal psychopaths never spend one day of their lives in a jail or prison. They are what I like to call legal criminals, always skating  just on the edge of the law. Our government (see Mr. Trump) and many corporations are full of these “legal criminals.” I don’t think too much of them honestly.

I’ve met a few apparent antisocial criminal psychopaths in my life. The last one was a 23 year old woman! You really need to stay away from them.

Every psychopath who entered my life ended up harming me. For the most part, they all stole from me. You won’t be able to befriend these people without getting used and harmed because that is exactly what they do to most if not all other humans. Nobody emerges unscathed from befriending a psychopath. You’re not going to get away with it!

Psychopathy is also a continuum, just like…everything! The PCL scale ranges from 0-40. 0’s and 40’s are not common. For instance, I assure you that I am absolutely not a 0! But I am not a psychopath either, although my score is  for sure somewhat elevated above that of  goody-goods, cop-lovers, authoritarians, and choir boys.

On the other hand, I don’t really victimize innocent people, unless you count women, but that’s debatable as all’s fair in love and war! Sexual relationships are generally outside of morality. They can be immoral but they have to be pretty bad to get to that point. Players, pump and dumpers, easy women, etc. are generally not behaving immorally.

30+ is a psychopath and 20+ has serious psychopathic traits. Even in 0-20, if you score a 6 on the scale, and someone else scores a 12, they will appear more psychopathic to you. If we look at the scale that way and pick out everyone who clearly has elevated psychopathy, we are talking about 10-2

Most everything else in the world that is a subjective quality  is a continuum too. Philosophically, qualities and objects are different things. Objects are objective and generally are not on a continuum. An object either exists or it doesn’t, 100 or zero. There’s no such thing as part of an object or an object that is only there a little bit but not completely there.

For instance, all humans are narcissistic and you can score that on a scale too. Narcissism and self-esteem mean the same thing! So low narcissism means low self-esteem. And high narcissism means high self-esteem, which is considered to be normal and is actually thought of as good mental health, although some folks might find people with big egos like this a bit much.

Here we are into people who are vain, conceited, self-centered, etc. but nevertheless normal. None of those three things are indicative of narcissism.

Sure narcissists have all of those in spades, but narcissism goes far beyond that. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is pathological narcissism (Trump), and if you have been around anyone like that, trust me, they are real bastards and get on your nerves real fast if you are reasonably sane.

They are very annoying people and actually they are rather mean, ugly, and hostile in many ways. NPD’s are not very nice people!They are also profoundly selfish. They really don’t care about you! It’s all about them. What’s all about them? Everything. Face it, you’re either a taker or a giver in life. Narcissists are takers, not givers. They don’t necessarily take from everyone, but they definitely don’t give to much of anyone either. All of their stuff, material and otherwise, is for them.

Alt Left: Transgender People Are Obviously Mentally Ill, But Some Are More Mentally Ill Than Others

In 9 There is an incel on an incel board who identified as transgender in adolescence and went on hormones. He lost 3-4 inches in height and there is something wrong with his face as a result of the hormones. He now describes his transgenderism as a delusion, which it was of course. Of course it’s a delusion if a man insists he is really a woman. How could it not be a delusion? 1 Now that does not mean that they have women’s brains in men’s bodies, but their brains are somewhat feminized. And yes, it does seem to be related to hormonal aberrations in the womb. This transgenderism is more valid because it involves actual changes in brain structures. Nevertheless, if these men insist that they are really women, that is a delusion in my opinion because it’s just not true. I know little about FtM transsexuals except that 9 There is a new phenomenon called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria which is hitting teenage girls in an epidemic form. It spreads like anorexia as a social contagion in emotionally susceptible teenage girls. This is simply a mental illness like Anorexia and in fact, it may be closely related to Anorexia because it resembles Anorexia in many ways and it also involves distorted body image.

Alt Left: The Transgender and Transtrender War

Recently the 1 The 1 The transsexuals realize that they do indeed have a medical/psychological condition, which is a fact. They tend to be much more science-minded than the other group, which is just another Cultural Left Identity Politics that plays fast and loose with facts and truth like they all do. These transsexuals often have very early onset of gender dysphoria, sometimes as early as age two. And transsexual brains are in fact different. Transsexuals are not women in men’s bodies, but their brains are female- shifted, that is, their brains are more feminine than the typical male brain. Transsexual brains are about halfway between a male brain and a female brain. The autogynephiles on the other hand have brains that look like a normal man’s brain in the areas in which men’s and women’s brains differ. In other words, the autogynephiles are not men in women’s bodies either, and they do not even have female-shifted brains. Instead they have a normal male brain with some differences. Their brains are different in 4-5 areas that are the same in men and women. So there are two types of transgender people that can even be differentiated on brain scan. There is a war brewing between people who consider themselves real transsexuals or transgender people and others who this former group derides as fakes or pretenders. This war is being called Transgenders versus Transtrenders. The autogynephiles are seen as faddists by the transsexuals, and the transtrenders often don’t even have gender dysphoria, although for decades they have been lying and saying that they did, driving clinicians crazy in the process. The transtrenders also hate the word transsexual, apparently because it implies a medical condition, and they say they are fine. The transtrenders are much more anti-scientific than the transsexuals. In fact, the word transsexual is now apparently a transphobic slur! You might see a lot more psychopathology in the transtrenders too, as they are basically faking it. I have heard people say that 9

Gender Is Biological and Given, Not Social and Constructed

The view of radical feminism and in fact all of feminism is that gender is socially constructed. From a radical feminist or radfem website:

There is no such thing as biological gender! Seriously dude, do you even know what radfem is? From your comments here you seem to think we are a bunch of sexless, genderless, manhating, violent women. Sex is biological. We are born either male or female (with a small percentage intersex). Gender is a social construct with attributable stereotypical traits, behaviours and presentation. Please educate yourself on the basics.

All you have to do is wander around the planet a bit for while with your ears and eyes open to realize that that’s not true. Recent advances in neurology indicate that there are vast differences in male and female brains in terms of the number of structures effected, which typically differ in size, shape, etc. Look also at the experiences of transwomen,  men who became women. On female hormones, their behavior and  thinking changed radically and even their entire view of the world became radically  different. Some transwoman’s on those hormones have reported changes in emotionality and even entire worldview. I realize radfems reject biological gender, but these reports are very interesting. One transwoman was a very masculine, almost stoical, hard-type man. On the hormones, he reported that he was wildly emotional, all over the place all the time, and frequently out of sorts via being confused by all this mercurial emotionality. And this guy was John Wayne before. I figure the pills caused the changes. And one more thing, radfems will hate this too – he said he started giggling. A lot. Not sure if I have ever seen a man giggle. Another transwoman was on the Reddit Redpill MRA group (I know you hate them but I read everywhere). He reported that on the hormones, the world felt very frightening and confusing and he has a strong sense of weakness and wanting to be protected, specifically by a strong, powerful figure. He also become quite emotional, often for little reason. He noticed that his “cis” boyfriend pretty much ignored the emotionality and this transwoman felt that men often ignored a lot of women’s emotionality because a lot of it was not based on much and its too tiring to respond to weathervanes all day. I know feminists don’t believe any of this stuff, but those pills are very powerful and surely hormones can have some psychological effects? Isn’t this obvious evidence that gender is biological? Give a men female hormones and his behaviors, emotions, thinking and even epistemology change dramatically in ways that remarkably resemble stereotypical female behavior. How can feminists explain this away? .

Shouldn't One's Confidence in Their Intelligence Validate Itself, Since Intelligence Is Defined in Some Spheres as the 'Ability to Discern Similarities & Differences?'

Answered on Quora. Well, I am supposed to have a genius IQ, but even I cannot understand what the person asking this question is trying to say. First of all, if critical thinking is anything, it is intelligence. Intelligence, more than anything else, is pure brain speed. And in fact, that is exactly what an IQ test tests for. Let us say that I have a higher IQ than someone else. Mine is 147. The other person’s is 120, almost a full two SD’s below me. For some people around this level, I seem smarter than they are, but on the other hand, they are no dummies. We can communicate very well. It’s the difference between a smart person and a really smart person, which doesn’t boil down to a whole lot in the real world. For others at ~120, I hate to say it, but I simply cannot see how I am smarter than they are, even at a near full two SD difference. Now why this is, I am not sure, but maybe we are comparing smart with very smart, and it’s hard to see a difference there. Nevertheless, according to an IQ test, comparing me to the 120 IQ person:

  • I have a faster brain.
  • I have a better and bigger memory. I can remember more stuff and keep it around better.
  • My memory recall is faster and more accurate. I can pull stored knowledge out of my brain faster and more correctly.
  • I have better verbal and nonverbal analytical skills. I am better at “seeing the whole picture” and “tying it all together.”
  • I can analyze a problem in terms of vocabulary and make sense out it and see patterns and connect them together better and perhaps faster.
  • I can see patterns in objects in space and connect them up more faster and more accurately.
  • I can find the answer to a new problem that I have never seen before faster and more accurately.
  • My critical thinking skills work faster and more accurately.

Bottom line is simply that I have a faster brain. My brain also utilizes glucose better and faster. In addition, my brain itself may well be larger, and I may have more cells and especially connections. I may not be more creative, and I may well have worse musical or artistic skills. These are all subtypes of intelligence. My kinetic intelligence may well be worse. This is “physical intelligence.” It is a real thing. The best athletes actually have “intelligent bodies.” They are better and faster at moving their bodies the way they want them to than I am. I may have worse social intelligence. Social intelligence is a very real thing. It is definitely a type of intelligence. I may have worse street smarts, or crafty, foxy, sly, clever, or sneaky type intelligence. This “smart like a fox” intelligence is a very real thing, and it is a type of intelligence. I may not be as wise. In fact, I may have little or no wisdom at all, and I may live my live in a completely idiotic or para-suicidal manner. Wisdom indeed is a type of intelligence. I may well have worse mechanical skills. Mechanical skills are absolutely a type of intelligence. I may have poor skills at higher mathematics. IQ tests only test low level mathematics. Quite a few very high IQ people barely got through high school math and struggled with Algebra 2 and Geometry, including me.

  • An IQ test does not test for artistic, musical, or creative intelligence. Not at all.
  • An IQ test does not test for kinetic intelligence of course. You would test that on a playing field of some sort.
  • An IQ test absolutely does not test social intelligence at all. You test that out in the real world with real people, and they will be the judges of your social intelligence, not you.
  • An IQ test does not test crafty, sly, or street smart intelligence. Street smart people will judge you on that on their own, and they will always be right.
  • An IQ test is absolutely not a wisdom test! So many people cannot seem to figure this out as they constantly conflate raw intelligence and wisdom. They are two different things.
  • An IQ test does not test mechanical intelligence at all.
  • An IQ test absolutely does not test for higher math skills at all.

I hope this clarifies for people exactly what an IQ test checks for and how indeed it leaves out a number sub-intelligences which may well be very important for you and society.

Can a Person Have Above Average IQ 125-135 SD=15 and Still Be a Slow Thinker?

Answered on Quora. That would not make sense at all. IQ more than anything else (at least fluid IQ) is a test of raw, pure, brain speed and efficiency. Studies have found that as IQ rises, the brain works more efficiently. If you have spent time around bright people, one of the most striking things about them is how lightning fast they are. This can be seen even in conversation. Have you ever met people so fast that they almost finish your sentences for you. You get halfway through the sentence, and they are already reacting to the sentence because they have actually predicted what the rest of the sentence is! That’s pretty damn smart. Some very bright people have fast moving eyes. If you watch them when they talk, you see their eyes flitting all around very rapidly. Sometimes there are also a lot of micromovements with their faces. In fact, I think I can see this even comparing a 110–115 IQ person to a 95–100 IQ person (I am guessing at their IQ’s). The latter are noticeably slower, and the former are often strikingly fast. The slower people are often very nice and pleasant, but they’re just not as fast. You have to admit it.

Kundalini Binaural Beats

Here. This stuff is pretty trippy. Scientists poo poo it, but I believe there is something to it. The binaural bets are set to mimic various brain waves: Alpha waves, Beta waves, Delta waves, Gamma waves and Theta waves. Of course you have all of these waves in your brain. So you put in Theta binaural beats and you get more theta waves supposedly. The same with Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, etc. It sounds like a reasonable hypothesis anyway. This stuff is called brain entrainment because supposedly it actually changes how your brain works (via manipulation of existing brain waves). They also work with your chakras. Chakras are an Indian medical theory. Supposedly you have chakras in your body that do various things and you can mess around with these chakras to achieve desired ends. A lot of yogi types swear that they are true and a lot of folks who listen to these beats have had experiences suggesting of chakras. For instance, people who listen to the Kundalini beats report that they feel a warmth at the bottom of their spine that goes all the way up to the top of their spine. These people who report this have no idea that this is one of the things that Kundalini is supposed to do. It is called Kundalini rising because it supposedly turns on the energy levels in your body. The Kundalini is said to be like a snake that moves up and down your spine. It’s all pretty wacky and insane, but who knows, maybe there is something to it. I have no idea if chakras exist or not either but I would not take the word of modern scientistic medicine about whether there is anything to this stuff. There are supposedly dangers that can occur when you awaken Kundalini, but I am not sure about that either. If it’s all nonsense, how could it have ill effects? I put this Kundalini stuff on very low and then I go to sleep in the other room. I put it on so low that you can hear it but only barely. I also have a fan in my room and often have windows open so there are other noises. I try to make sure that the other noises are louder than the binaural beats. Nevertheless you can sense them if you listen hard because it feels like the whole room or apartment is vibrating in this strange way like the hum you hear of highway workers at night or an electric plant that is nearby. One thing I noted is that I crash hard as Hell with that stuff on. I sleep maybe five hours and I wake up and think I slept for 18 hours. I get up and feel like a slab or wood or concrete, but that feels very good. It reminds you of the feeling of whenever you had some very good hard sleeps. It’s like as hard as the hardest crash you have ever had. I also noticed that some of the pains I have in my neck and back diminished after that very hard crash. In addition, the first few nights I had this stuff on, my dreams changed. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I had sex in my dreams! I know you are thinking so what, but the thing is, I do not know if it is a hangup or what, but I never or almost never have sex in my dreams. Even when I have a girlfriends and we are going at it for hours a day, I still never have sex in my dreams. And with this Kundalini stuff, I had sex in my dreams for maybe four days straight. That’s pretty weird right there. This stuff might effect you more than you think it does.

Football Is Inherently Dangerous

There’s apparently no way whatsoever to make the game safer. They have tried everything at this point, and nothing works. The only way to make the game safer is to not play it in the first place. They are talking mostly about head injuries. No matter how they make the helmets, football players still get head injuries. And those who play it for a long time apparently end up brain damaged, just like boxing. There’s new data on this just starting to come out now.

Choking Women Out Is a Bad Idea

Interesting piece from a BD/SM enthusiast who is also a medical professional. You see guys choking out women all over porn these days. And on PUA sites, a lot of guys like Roosh are really into choking women out when they have sex with them. I must say that this is completely sick. Why would I want to choke out the woman I am screwing?  Maybe if I wanted to fantasize being a serial killer? Anyone who does this obviously is fantasizing about being a murderer or a rapist. I don’t feel like pretending to be Ted Bundy when I am in bed with a woman. Not only is it sick, but it’s also dangerous. You can kill a person or give them a heart attack at any time. And there are a lot of other injuries that can and do occur also. I have heard that a number of women in porn are getting TIA’s from getting choked out all the time on porn sets. Those are Transient Ischemic Attacks. They are like mini-strokes. The thing is, if you have enough of these as a young person, you may damage your brain and make a real stroke more likely when you get older. These choking fetish is insane. Don’t choke out your partner! Ever! Former ambulance medic, former law school professor, expert witness on BD/SM matters, Jay Wiseman has over 35 years of experience in BD/SM and was one of the early pioneers and builders of the BD/SM community in the San Francisco area. He continues to be heavily involved, both in his local area and nationally, as an S/M author, educator, mentor, workshop leader, video producer, expert witness, and activist. Noted for being both an exceptionally knowledgeable and highly entertaining presenter, he is very much in demand and has given hundreds of presentations on various aspects of health, relationships, and sexuality in more than 70 cities in the United States and Canada. In 2007, Black Rose presented him with the Vaughn Keith National BD/SM Educator Award.

The Medical Realities of Breath Control Play

For some time now, I have felt that the practices of suffocation and/or strangulation done in an erotic context (generically known as breath control play; more properly known as asphyxiophilia) were in fact far more dangerous than they are generally perceived to be. As a person with years of medical education and experience, I know of no way whatsoever that either suffocation or strangulation can be done in a way that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest (There are also numerous additional risks; more on them later.) Furthermore, and my biggest concern, I know of no reliable way to determine when such a cardiac arrest has become imminent. Often the first detectable sign that an arrest is approaching is the arrest itself. Furthermore, if the recipient does arrest, the probability of resuscitating them, even with optimal CPR, is distinctly small. Thus the recipient is dead and their partner, if any, is in a very perilous legal situation. The authorities could consider such deaths first-degree murders until proven otherwise, with the burden of such proof being on the defendant. There are also the real and major concerns of the surviving partner’s own life-long remorse to having caused such a death, and the trauma to the friends and family members of both parties. Some breath control fans say that what they do is acceptably safe because they do not take what they do up to the point of unconsciousness. I find this statement worrisome for two reasons: (1) You can’t really know when a person is about to go unconscious until they actually do so, thus it’s extremely difficult to know where the actual point of unconsciousness is until you actually reach it. (2) More importantly, unconsciousness is a symptom, not a condition in and of itself. It has numerous underlying causes ranging from simple fainting to cardiac arrest, and which of these will cause the unconsciousness cannot be known in advance. I have discussed my concerns regarding breath control with well over a dozen S/M-positive physicians, and with numerous other S/M-positive health professionals, and all share my concerns. We have discussed how breath control might be done in a way that is not life-threatening, and come up blank. We have discussed how the risk might be significantly reduced, and come up blank. We have discussed how it might be determined that an arrest is imminent and come up blank. Indeed, so far not one (repeat, not one) single physician, nurse, paramedic, chiropractor, physiologist, or other person with substantial training in how a human body works has been willing to step forth and teach a form of breath control play that they are willing to assert is acceptably safe — i.e., does not put the recipient at imminent, unpredictable risk of dying. I believe this fact makes a major statement. Other “edge play” topics such as suspension bondage, electricity play, cutting, piercing, branding, enemas, water sports, and scat play can and have been taught with reasonable safety, but not breath control play. Indeed, it seems that the more somebody knows about how a human body works, the more likely they are to caution people about how dangerous breath control is, and about how little can be done to reduce the degree of risk. In many ways, oxygen is to the human body and particularly to the heart and brain what oil is to a car’s engine. Indeed, there’s a medical adage that goes “hypoxia (becoming dangerously low on oxygen) not only stops the motor, but also wrecks the engine.” Therefore, asking how one can play safely with breath control is very similar to asking how one can drive a car safely while draining it of oil. Some people tell the “mechanics” something like, “Well, I’m going to drain my car of oil anyway, and I’m not going to keep track of how low the oil level is getting while I’m driving my car, so tell me how to do this with as much safety as possible.” (They may even add something like “Hey, I always shut the engine off before it catches fire.”) They then get frustrated when the mechanics scratch their heads and say that they don’t know. They may even label such mechanics as “anti-education.” A bit about my background may help explain my concerns. I was an ambulance crewman for over eight years. I attended medical school for three years, and passed my four-year boards, but then then ran out of money. I am a former member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a former American Heart Association instructor in Advanced Cardiac Life Support. I have an extensive martial arts background that includes a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. My martial arts training included several months of judo that involved both my choking and being choked. I have been an instructor in first aid, CPR, and various advanced emergency care techniques for over sixteen years. My students have included physicians, nurses, paramedics, police officers, fire fighters, wilderness emergency personnel, martial artists, and large numbers of ordinary citizens. I currently offer both basic and advanced first aid and CPR training to the S/M community. During my ambulance days, I responded to at least one call involving the death of a young teenage boy who died from autoerotic strangulation, and to several other calls where this was suspected but could not be confirmed. Family members often “sanitize” such scenes before calling 911. Additionally, I personally know two members of my local S/M community who went to prison after their partners died during breath control play. The primary danger of suffocation play is that it is not a condition that gets worse over time (regarding the heart, anyway, it does get worse over time regarding the brain). Rather, what happens is that the more the play is prolonged, the greater the odds that a cardiac arrest will occur. Sometimes even one minute of suffocation can cause this; other times even less.

Quick pathophysiology lesson # 1

When the heart gets low on oxygen, it starts to fire off “extra” pacemaker sites. These usually appear in the ventricles and are thus called premature ventricular contractions — PVC’s for short. If a PVC happens to fire off during the electrical repolarization phase of cardiac contraction (the dreaded “PVC on T” phenomenon, also sometimes called “R on T”) it can kick the heart over into ventricular fibrillation — a form of cardiac arrest. The lower the heart gets on oxygen, the more PVC’s it generates, and the more vulnerable to their effect it becomes, thus hypoxia increases both the probability of a PVC-on-T occurring and of its causing a cardiac arrest. When this will happen to a particular person in a particular session is simply not predictable. This is exactly where most of the medical people I have discussed this topic with “hit the wall.” Virtually all medical folks know that PVC’s are both life-threatening and hard to detect unless the patient is hooked to a cardiac monitor. When medical folks discuss breath control play, the question quickly becomes: How can you tell when they start throwing PVC’s? The answer is: You basically can’t.

Quick pathophysiology lesson # 2

When breathing is restricted, the body cannot eliminate carbon dioxide as it should, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood increases. Carbon dioxide (CO2)* and water (H2O)* exist in equilibrium with what’s called carbonic acid (H2CO3)* in a reaction catalyzed by an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase. *Sorry, but I can’t do subscripts in this program. Thus: CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 A molecule of carbonic acid dissociates on its own into a molecule of what’s called bicarbonate (HCO3-) and an (acidic) hydrogen ion. (H+) Thus: H2CO3 = HCO3- and H+ Thus the overall pattern is: H2O + CO2 = H2CO3 = HCO3- + H+ Therefore, if breathing is restricted, CO2 builds up, and the reaction shifts to the right in an attempt to balance things out, ultimately making the blood more acidic and thus decreasing its pH. This is called respiratory acidosis. If the patient hyperventilates, they “blow off CO2” and the reaction shifts to the left, thus increasing the pH. This is called respiratory alkalosis, and has its own dangers.

Quick pathophysiology lesson # 3

Again, if breathing is restricted, not only does carbon dioxide have a hard time getting out, but oxygen also has a hard time getting in. A molecule of glucose (C6H12O6) breaks down within the cell by a process called glycolysis into two molecules of pyruvate, thus creating a small amount of ATP for the body to use as energy. Under normal circumstances, pyruvate quickly combines with oxygen to produce a much larger amount of ATP. However, if there’s not enough oxygen to properly metabolize the pyruvate, it is converted into lactic acid and produces one form of what’s called a metabolic acidosis. As you can see, either a build-up in the blood of carbon dioxide or a decrease in the blood of oxygen will cause the pH of the blood to fall. If both occur at the same time, as they do in cases of suffocation, the pH of the blood will plummet to life-threatening levels within a very few minutes. The pH of normal human blood is in the 7.35-7.45 range (slightly alkaline). A pH falling to 6.9 (or raising to 7.8) is “incompatible with life.” Past experience, either with others or with that same person, is not particularly useful. Carefully watching their level of consciousness, skin color, and pulse rate is of only limited value. Even hooking the bottom up to both a pulse oximeter and a cardiac monitor (assuming you had either piece of equipment, and they’re not cheap) would be of only limited additional value. While an experienced clinician can sometimes detect PVC’s by feeling the patient’s pulse, in reality the only reliable way to detect them is to hook the patient up to a cardiac monitor. The problem is that each PVC is potentially lethal, particularly if the heart is low on oxygen. Even if you “ease up” on the bottom immediately, there’s no telling when the PVC’s will stop. They could stop almost at once, or they could continue for hours. In addition to the primary danger of cardiac arrest, there is good evidence to document that there is a very real risk of cumulative brain damage if the practice is repeated often enough. In particular, laboratory studies of repeated brief interruption of blood flow to the brains of animals and studies of people with what’s called sleep apnea in which they stop breathing for up to two minutes while sleeping document that cumulative brain damage does occur in such cases. There are many documented additional dangers. These include, but are not limited to: rupture of the windpipe, fracture of the larynx, damage to the blood vessels in the neck, dislodging a fatty plaque in a neck artery which then travels to the brain and causes a stroke, damage to the cervical spine, seizures, airway obstruction by the tongue, and aspiration of vomitus. Additionally, there are documented cases in which the recipient appeared to fully recover but was found dead several hours later. The American Psychiatric Association estimates a death rate from this practice of one person per year per million of population — thus about 250 deaths last year in the U.S. Law enforcement estimates go as much as four times higher. Most such deaths occur during solo play, however there are many documented cases of deaths that occurred during play with a partner. It should be noted that the presence of a partner does nothing to limit the primary danger and does little or nothing to limit most of the secondary dangers. Some people teach that choking can be safely done if pressure on the windpipe is avoided. Their belief is that pressing on the arteries leading to the brain while avoiding pressure on the windpipe can safely cause unconsciousness. The reality, unfortunately, is that pressing on the carotid arteries, exactly as they recommend, presses on baroreceptors known as the carotid sinus bodies. These bodies then cause vasodilation in the brain, thus there is not enough blood to perfuse the brain and the recipient loses consciousness. However, that’s not the whole story. Unfortunately, a message is also sent to the main pacemaker of the heart, via the vagus nerve, to decrease the rate and force of the heartbeat. Most of the time, under strong vagal influence, the rate and force of the heartbeat decreases by one third. However, every now and then, the rate and force decreases to zero and the bottom “flatlines” into asystole — another, and more difficult to treat, form of cardiac arrest. There is no way to tell whether or not this will happen in any particular instance or how quickly. There are many documented cases of as little as five seconds of choking causing a vagal-outflow-induced cardiac arrest. For the reason cited above, many police departments have now either entirely banned the use of chokeholds or have reclassified them as a form of deadly force. Indeed, a local CHP officer recently had a $250,000 judgment brought against him after a nonviolent suspect died while being choked by him. Finally, as a CPR instructor myself, I want to caution that knowing CPR does little to make the risk of death from breath control play significantly smaller. While CPR can and should be done, understand that the probability of success is likely to be less than 1 I’m not going to state that breath control is something that nobody should ever do under any circumstances. I have no problem with informed, freely consenting people taking any degree of risk they wish. I am going to state that there is a great deal of ignorance regarding what actually happens to a body when it’s suffocated or strangled, and that the actual degree of risk associated with these practices is far greater than most people believe. I have noticed that when people are educated regarding the severity and unpredictability of the risks, fewer and fewer choose to play in this area, and those who do continue tend to play less often. I also notice that, because of its severe and unpredictable risks, more and more S/M party-givers are banning any form of breath control play at their events. If you’d like to look into this matter further, here are some references to get you started: Emergency Care in the Streets by Nancy Caroline, M.D. (I’d recommend starting here.) Medical Physiology by A.C. Guyton, MD The Pathologic Basis of Disease by Robbins, MD Textbook of Advanced Cardiac Life Support by American Heart Association The Physiology Coloring Book by Kapit, Macey, and Meisami Forensic Pathology by DeMaio and Demaio Autoerotic Fatalities by Hazelwood Melloni’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary by Dox, Melloni, and Eisner People with questions or comments can contact me at www.jaywiseman.com or write to me at P.O. Box 1261, Berkeley, CA 94701. Regards, Jay Wiseman

Sapir Whorf Reversed

The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is a very interesting hypothesis in Linguistics that states that the language you speak actually effects your brain, or at least the way you look at and see the world. Since its publication, the silly Linguistics profession has torn this fine hypothesis into a million pieces, but I still believe that there is something to it, and Everett’s very controversial work on the Piraha language in the Amazon seems to have revived Sapir-Whorf. At any rate, Benjamin Whorf was a very smart man. How about if we reverse the hypothesis, and say that instead of language shaping the brain, the brain shapes language, even worse, that your genes in part determine what type of language you may speak. This is raw HBD stuff, so the ridiculous Linguistics profession is going to go insane with rage over this, but it seems there is something to it. Tone languages and genes. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

"The Noise in Their Heads," by Alpha Unit

It’s one of the most common disabilities among returning war veterans. Construction and factory workers often end up with it. KT Tunstall got it in 2008 by sitting too close to the speakers at a concert. Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas has it. He says he doesn’t know what silence sounds like any more, and that music is the only thing that eases it. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich developed it early in his career, when the loud noise from his shows would follow him offstage. It worsened over time. He’d get up in the middle of the night to turn off the TV, only to realize that the TV wasn’t on. Other musicians reported to suffer from it include Al Di Meola, Jeff Beck, Danny Elfman, and Andy Partridge. All of these people and millions more suffer from tinnitus, a constant ringing or buzzing sound in the ear. There is really no way to treat it so far. Different people describe it different ways: ringing, hissing, whooshing, roaring, buzzing, crickets, screeching – even music. It can be intermittent or constant. In one ear, or both ears – or even throughout the entire head. From soft to extremely loud. Some people suffer from it so badly they can’t work. One retired firefighter told The San Francisco Chronicle that his tinnitus made him suicidal at one point. He says it’s like hearing a “high-voltage electrical buzzing” in his head all the time. Erin Allday, reporting on findings by UC Berkeley scientists, writes:

Doctors have known for several years that the cause of tinnitus is not in the ear alone, but in the brain. In research released last week, the UC Berkeley team found that tinnitus may be similar to the “phantom limb” syndrome that amputees sometimes experience – neurons continue firing in parts of the brain associated with hearing, even though they’re getting no input from the ear.

Shaowen Bao of UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute suggests that exposing tinnitus patients to frequencies near the ones they are no longer able to hear might coax neurons to accept input from frequencies similar to ones they lost – remapping the brain, so to speak, and providing relief. Drugs might also be helpful in preventing the neurons from constantly firing, but it doesn’t appear to be a good idea so far, since the drugs have serious side effects, including blindness. But these research findings out of UC Berkeley are some of the most promising to date for effective treatment of tinnitus, which can be debilitating for some of the people suffering from it. Michael Merzenich, professor of otolaryngology at UC San Francisco, has been studying brain remapping for years, and says that several patients reported improvement for tinnitus after their brains were retrained – and this was even before Bao and his colleagues reported their findings.

“The Noise in Their Heads,” by Alpha Unit

It’s one of the most common disabilities among returning war veterans. Construction and factory workers often end up with it.

KT Tunstall got it in 2008 by sitting too close to the speakers at a concert.

Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas has it. He says he doesn’t know what silence sounds like any more, and that music is the only thing that eases it.

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich developed it early in his career, when the loud noise from his shows would follow him offstage. It worsened over time. He’d get up in the middle of the night to turn off the TV, only to realize that the TV wasn’t on.

Other musicians reported to suffer from it include Al Di Meola, Jeff Beck, Danny Elfman, and Andy Partridge.

All of these people and millions more suffer from tinnitus, a constant ringing or buzzing sound in the ear. There is really no way to treat it so far. Different people describe it different ways: ringing, hissing, whooshing, roaring, buzzing, crickets, screeching – even music. It can be intermittent or constant. In one ear, or both ears – or even throughout the entire head. From soft to extremely loud.

Some people suffer from it so badly they can’t work. One retired firefighter told The San Francisco Chronicle that his tinnitus made him suicidal at one point. He says it’s like hearing a “high-voltage electrical buzzing” in his head all the time. Erin Allday, reporting on findings by UC Berkeley scientists, writes:

Doctors have known for several years that the cause of tinnitus is not in the ear alone, but in the brain. In research released last week, the UC Berkeley team found that tinnitus may be similar to the “phantom limb” syndrome that amputees sometimes experience – neurons continue firing in parts of the brain associated with hearing, even though they’re getting no input from the ear.

Shaowen Bao of UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute suggests that exposing tinnitus patients to frequencies near the ones they are no longer able to hear might coax neurons to accept input from frequencies similar to ones they lost – remapping the brain, so to speak, and providing relief.

Drugs might also be helpful in preventing the neurons from constantly firing, but it doesn’t appear to be a good idea so far, since the drugs have serious side effects, including blindness.

But these research findings out of UC Berkeley are some of the most promising to date for effective treatment of tinnitus, which can be debilitating for some of the people suffering from it. Michael Merzenich, professor of otolaryngology at UC San Francisco, has been studying brain remapping for years, and says that several patients reported improvement for tinnitus after their brains were retrained – and this was even before Bao and his colleagues reported their findings.

High-nutrient Diet Causes 8 point IQ Gain

Repost from the old site. In a a truly amazing study, Pediatrics notes that premature infants fed a high nutrient diet for only one month after birth showed an increase of 8 IQ points, in males only and only on verbal IQ, at the late age of 16. Further, there were actual significant increases in the volume of a brain structure called the caudate, values which were associated with the verbal score increases. The regimen was not specified, but was only identified as moderately higher protein and calories and more micronutrients (presumably on the order of a Once a Day type multivitamin of the sort that science insists is absolutely useless). Blacks have a very high rate of premature infants, and it may be genetic. Although this regimen would not benefit Black females, they already have a higher IQ anyway. Black female IQ (=87) is higher than Black male IQ (=83) at adulthood. I cannot think of any possible genetic reasons for Black females to be smarter than Black males. But if you go into schools in the ghetto, the honor roll will be almost all Black females, with scarcely a Black male in sight. In 1990, I taught school at Compton High School in Compton, California. I had a Chemistry class filled with almost exclusively Black females. They were calm and well-behaved. This is in part because after Grade 10, even terrible Black ghetto schools improve incredibly. In most cases, there is still an utter and absolute refusal to learn anything, but at least they are good-natured about it. You sit there in your teacher’s chair all hour and give them an assignment that the whole class refuses to do, laughing all the time. This is known as a joke. You fight them for a bit, then you give up and just get in on the joke. You sit there and read a book all hour while everyone laughs and jokes and has a good time. This is best because this way the mostly-Black class is almost completely warm, pleasant, friendly, and well-behaved. By 11th grade, except in the most horrible heart of the ghetto, the bad ones are all long-since dropped out, dead or in jail or juvey. They’re just gone, and that’s all that matters. There are Samoans there too, but they don’t want to learn either. The school Administration is just trying to survive. The cute Black girls, 18 year old seniors, come up to the teacher, sit down next to his desk, and ask how old he is. Informed, they say they have been looking for a boyfriend right around that age, and they write their phone numbers down and give it to the teacher “accidentally”. Teacher contemplates whether or not to call the number when he is home alone after work. If he does, his credential is pulled, if not, nothing lost. Anyway, the all-girls Chemistry class at Compton High was a good bunch of girls. They informed that they were all in gangs, but that just means if you are in a Crip neighborhood, everyone there claims Crip so as not to be killed, and also to root for the hometown. As these days I actually claim Norteno for similar reasons, I can relate. The girls are bright, quiet, polite and hard-working. All of the crappy lies you had about Blacks are getting blown away every minute you teach these Compton High Chemistry class girls. These days, at age 16, the US Black IQ is 88.4. The US female Black IQ at age 16 must be 90.4, and the Black male IQ must be 86.4. With a rise of 8 points in verbal in those males who were preemies, their full-scale IQ’s would go up by 4 points, since there is no effect on performance IQ. Blacks are better in verbal than on performance IQ anyway. The Black male IQ of the ex-preemies would be 90.4 at age 16, the same as Black females of that age. With time, the Black female IQ will decline at age 24 to 87. It is unknown if these supplemented Black males will also decline to age 24, but normally Black males would lose 3 IQ points from age 16 to age 24. Even if this still occurred, Black male IQ in the supplemented males would decline to 87.4 at age 24. Not exactly the greatest thing in the world, but as an IQ fetishist, let us now praise not only great rises, but mild ones too. I suggest that a rise in Black male IQ from 83.5 to 87.4 at age 24, 3.9 IQ points, would hold some real and significant consequences for those males who benefited.

Facts and Nonsense About the Brain

Repost from the old site. Like most things, there is much nonsense spoken about our brains. Our brains are very interesting to us, even to stupid people, because we use them to think. Yes, even dumb people do use their brains to think. We don’t really understand how our brains work, so some of us try to sound smart by pontificating about our mysterious brains. Here are some widespread myths about our brains: We only use [choose one: 1 It’s one of those feel-good statements that is complete nonsense. We use all of our brains. Even total idiots are using all of their brains most of the time, strange as it may seem. There are parts of the brain that are emotional and parts of the brain that are dedicated to cognition. This one is not nearly as silly as the first one, but it’s still not true. I know this because 15 years ago I was acquainted with a neuropsychologist. He did various sorts of cognitive testing, and he also worked with people with various forms of brain damage. He was also a strange guy, but he was nice enough, and he did have a PhD. I assumed that getting the PhD had probably driven him partly crazy, and he was neurotic as a result. He informed me that there were no emotional or thinking parts of the brain. He said that all of the brain engages in both thinking and emotion. Sure, some parts, like the amygdala, are more dedicated to emotion and other parts, like the prefrontal cortex, are more dedicated to thinking, but all the parts do both. Every drink (or joint) kills a few brain cells. I can’t believe even physicians tell me this crap. It’s nonsense. Yes, alcohol is one of the few drugs that actually kills brain cells, but you have to drink alcoholic-style for years before it happens. Cannabis, like many drugs, does not kill brain cells at any dose. Unfortunately, drugs don’t need to kill cells to mess up your brain. They can damage cells and destroy connections between cells. Male brains are better at math and science than female brains. Actually, they start out the same, but worldwide studies show that at about age 13, when massive male hormones kick in, males all over the world start to surpass females. A personal observation is that females who do well at these subjects are more likely to be more masculine (not necessarily lesbian) than other women. The President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, was recently massacred for stating this obvious fact. Female brains are better at verbal than male brains. Apparently the case, though there are arguments about which type of verbal we are talking about. If you think about it, there are evolutionary reasons why females would end up better at verbal (needed to raise young kids) and males are better at visuospatial (needed for hunting). There are some more facts about the brain that you may find interesting. We have a maximum number of brain cells at age 23, and after that, there is a steady decline. This is correlated with what is known as fluid IQ, a rough measure of brain efficiency. This is why mathematicians, physicists, novelists, poets, songwriters, musicians, artists and others like them tend to do their best work when they are still pretty young. On the other hand, only an insane person would put the 18-22 year olds in charge of a country. This group has never been put in charge of anything in any society, with good reason. Their brains are going like gangbusters, but they don’t have any sense. They think they know everything, but they don’t know shit. They are supremely self-confident, and they have not even reached the stage of self-doubt. Other than passing their classes, they are contemptuous of learning and knowledge in general and never admit there is anything they don’t know. If they can’t figure it out, it’s worthless. This age group is a prime example of the notion that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. They have a grotesquely poor understanding of their fellow man, and they are horribly intolerant. Also, they are very much group-thinkers who are terrified to defy group-think and peer pressure. If we put them in charge, it would be a nightmare. They would hold public executions and would probably torture people in public. There would be stupid wars all the time. Everything would be legal, and no one would care. There would be private armies all over the place and probably some form of fascism would be the flavor of the day. We occasionally put them in charge of some stuff, like being Presidents of fraternities, but often they even fuck that up. Mind you, I was an 18-22 year old too, and those were the best days of my life. I remember myself as being supremely mature and with-it, but I assume I had my head up my ass like the rest of them. Yes, the brain declines with age, but wisdom is good. The crystallized intelligence of age does have advantages over the rarely-used super-brains of the young. Our brains are slower, but with the gifts and harsh lessons of time, we are vastly superior at making decisions. Any tribe or civilization of any worth always put middle-aged to old guys in charge and revered its elders. We are cautious and careful, and we already did most of the dumb things there are to do, and we are not likely to do them again. Crystallized intelligence is more or less the stuff you know. As you age, you accumulate knowledge and theoretically wisdom. You don’t get a hardon with every passing breeze, but you’re much less likely to do stupid shit. It’s called a trade-off. A process called pruning occurs in which there is actually a massive loss of brain cells and connections. Most folks do not know this, but there is a massive overgrowth of brain cells in childhood. At adolescence, the brain decides to clear out all those stupid dirt roads that don’t go much of anywhere and make some superhighways instead. The result is like pruning a tree, and the brain works much better as a result. There is quite a bit of loss of brain structure in the process, but it’s all good in the end. In fact, pruning is an essential process for the adolescent brain. If you observe most adolescents, it would not seem controversial that they are experiencing massive loss of brain structure, but a lot of folks still refuse to believe this. There is a window in the brain for language that starts to close at about age 7. If you wait until later, you never really get language right. We have folks born deaf who got hearing at age 33 and have still never picked up language right. You can learn a foreign language in adulthood, but you will always have an accent, and you will never get 10 There is a blind cave fish that has a window for sight. If it is exposed to light before a certain age, it can see. If not, it just figures there is no light down in this cave, so it just goes blind and turns the visual portion of the brain over to something else. The brain seems to open up windows, so to speak. The brain opens a language window that says, “Any language here?” as it waits for input. If there is no input, the brain just closes the window, figures there is no language coming, and turns the area over to something else. The brain is plastic. That does not mean it is made out of polyurethane. It just means that it is smart. For instance, if one part gets damaged, your brain will try to reroute connections around the damaged area. Also, other areas of the brain will try to take over for the damaged area. Brains are smart! They actually think about how to fix up messed up brains! Cool!

Psilocybin Doesn't Cause Brain Damage

Repost from the old site. Told you so. Hell, I’ve only taken it, what, 30 times or so? It never fried me, or at least I don’t think so. I never noticed any long-lasting harm after taking this drug. One time, I had bright colors for about six months after I took it. Another time, I got depressed and sat around alone on Saturday night feeling sorry for myself. Next morning, I woke up and was not depressed anymore. One time, I took some, got in my car, and drove from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley, then turned around and drove home again. I think the whole trip took me about 12-14 hours. You can drive great on the stuff if you have a nice, clear, open road in front of you, and the towering Sierra Nevada sure looks great when you are frying. Plus, the stuff keeps you awake for many hours somehow. I used to sell these mushrooms, and boy was it fun. I was a student, a schoolteacher, a paralegal and a drug dealer. I would sell quarter pounds and pounds and make insane profits like $300 for an hour’s work or so. Plus you get to feel like a spy and feel some real terror when you carry the dope around and do the deal itself. You get to drive past lots of cops with a car full of dope that could send you to jail for a long time. You look at the cops and just drive right on by like nothing is happening. You carry the dope in a briefcase and dress up like an office worker, or you carry it in an athletic bag and dress up like you’re going to gym. There’s nothing like the rush you get being out in public with a car full of felonious dope or a wallet full of tainted drug money. My friends and I dealt dope in the smart way, and most of us never got caught. We were not all totally White, but most of us were raised in a mostly-White beach town. We dressed up like college kids, office workers, gym enthusiasts, and conformed to White middle class society in every way. Yet we sold dope right in front of the cops and society’s noses for years for years and never got caught. There’s a luscious feeling in that. A friend of mine made so much money selling coke that he bought two homes in San Fransisco, one to store the coke and another to live in. He was so hot I didn’t dare even look him up. You don’t even want to hang around some super-dealer like that. I just checked him out and he’s resurfaced in Southern California, fit, healthy and fifty, selling real estate. A survivor. I guess he never got caught either. Even my Mom shakes her head in admiration of him. White society always respects someone who can outsmart the cops in a not-too-evil way. Why? It places a premium on not being stupid, and not being caught. I often wonder if other ethnics share this value. Sometimes I think that these young Blacks and Hispanics nowadays place a premium on getting caught, and therefore being a moron. This I will never understand. These Hispanic kids around here are the biggest idiots on Earth. They do dope deals, albeit for small amounts of pot, right out in the open in front of everyone. They seem to take special delight in doing an obvious drug deal right out where anyone can see it happen. I guess it’s a macho thing. White middle class me says it’s not a macho thing, it’s a stupid thing. No wonder they are always getting hauled in on dope-selling charges. They dress up like gangsters and criminals and then wonder why they get stopped by the cops. Duh. There really is an art to being a criminal. All in all, psilocybin is a fun drug. You keep hearing horror stories about this stuff, about people who took too much of it and are mentally ill, or people who took too much and are fried in some way or another. Problem is that there is not the tiniest evidence that this stuff damages your brain, unlike almost other drugs of abuse. Yes, the drugs that make you feel the most insane of all do not do the slightest harm to your brain in any way. All those stories floating around about people taking too much hallucinogens need to be taken with a grain of salt. If it’s harmless to the brain, how is it supposed to create fried-out acidheads? Answer: it’s can’t. I’m not saying take them every weekend. I haven’t taken the stuff in about 23 years, and I’m not sure if I will ever take it again. Taking these kinds of drugs is one of the most bizarre experiences that one can have on this Earth, though, and you can have some really terrifying bad trips. Psychological harm can occur from traumatic experiences. By the way, it’s not harmful to any other organ in your body either. Plus there are long-lasting positive effects, apparently. On the other hand, this drug can cause HPPD , so I’d advise against taking it. I have HPPD, but I only have bright colors, and it’s really not so bad. You’re living in a Technicolor world, and if you just accept it, the world looks a lot better this way.

Cannabis, Teens and Schizophrenia

Repost from the old site. I received a mail today from someone who attended an interesting conference in the Midwest. At a Mental Illness and Criminal Justice Conference today in Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Frederick Frese, who is the Coordinator of the Summit County Recovery Project and Assistant Prof of Psychology in Clinical Psychology at NEOUCOM and Case Western Reserve U, and on the Board of Trustees for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, gave a session on teenage cannabis use and schizophrenia. He has been a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic for 40 years. Frese stated that use of cannabis between the ages of 15 and 18 in persons who have a variant allele of the COMT gene will lead to an almost certain psychotic break by the age of 25. He said it’s because of the formative time that the brain is in during those years, in combination with that certain allele, together with cannabis use. He said that if you have do not have the variant allele, no problem. Frese is so concerned about this that he and his team are going to start setting up genetic testing booths for kids at rock concerts because of the very real danger that the studies show exist. I applaud Dr. Frese for the very real efforts he is taking to try to prevent schizophrenia in vulnerable youth. I am dubious about how many kids this will save. The rate of schizophrenia has not gone up since the cannabis era began. This suggests that use of cannabis if anything will cause schizophrenia to occur sooner than it would otherwise occur, and it would occur anyway, just later. The number of folks with this variant allele is high in absolute numbers, and many of them use MJ and don’t get schizophrenia. But it does cause a 10 times elevated risk. I think that Frese is wrong to say that it’s almost certain that these kids will get schizophrenia by 25 after smoking one jay between ages 15-18. As I’ve said before on this blog, I have known 1000’s of cannabis users over my lifetime, many heavy users. The number who went on develop schizophrenia? Zero. This is why this whole subject makes me yawn. I wish Frese good luck with his experiment though. Ideally, we could construct a good experiment this way. We could follow kids with the variant allele who wait til 19 to start MJ (Is this protective?) or avoid it period, with another group who did not avoid cannabis and see how many of each develop schiz and at what ages. Tell the truth, I am quite concerned about use of cannabis by minors. I wish they would not do it. Period. Wait til you’re an adult! I have OCD (another, though vastly less devastating, mental illness), and I have found that cannabis is actually a superb psychiatric drug for this illness. It works better than almost any med I have ever taken for this (The drugs work great at high doses, but nuke my sex drive, so what good are they?), and I have suffered for 26 yrs. No clinician believes me when I tell them this; all insist that pot makes you mentally ill or worsens all mental illness or caused my problem in the first place (The gall of them!?), and all try to steer me to drug treatment or drug counseling when I tell them I use. I’m really getting tired of this shit. I’m 50 years old, and I’m being treated like a child. I have some opinions about the mental health profession, but in general they are extremely low. For such a bunch of super-smart people, there sure is a lot of bullshit groupthink, scaredy-cat thinking and just general lack of an empirical outlook.

Cannabis Is Good For You

Repost from the old site. Well, not necessarily in general, but if you are a regular methamphetamine user, there is a suggestion that you get less, not more, brain damage, or cognitive impairment (whichever it was) if you concurrently use cannabis than if you use methamphetamine only. The fact that there is a drug that gets you high that might actually be protective of brain damage in some cases is downright fascinating. Keep in mind that this study found only a trend, and did not prove that cannabis protected against the damage caused by meth use. However, if you read the study, there was a linear trend that showed that the meth + cannabis users had scores intermediate to the controls (no drugs) and meth only groups. The meth only group scored worst, the controls scored best, and there was a trend for the meth + cannabis group to score intermediate. The trend was not significant enough at the .05 level to be probative, but there was a suggestive trend towards better scores if meth users used cannabis also. What was found was only cognitive impairment, or worse scores on a test, but with meth use, at some level, say 1/2 gram a day for 1 1/2 years, there is definitely brain damage, and it does not completely clear up with abstention. There is anecdotal evidence for permanent damage after only 2-3 weeks of very heavy use, but it’s not proven. We don’t yet know when structural damage to the brain due to meth use begins. Meth can probably be used up to a dozen times or so in a lifetime with no problems, but after that, all bets are off. If anyone has some good data on meth and brain damage, please comment or email me the links.

Those Brainy Asiatics

Wow. Breathtaking snippet:

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions

Damn.

Latest Scary Marijuana-Brain Damage Study

Repost from the old site.

A new study of cannabis and brain damage is continuing to get a lot of publicity.

Study Strengthens Marijuana Brain Damage Case is the title of the accompanying headline.

Marijuana users who had smoked more than 5 joints a day (average of 11 joints a day) for more than 10 years (average use of 20 years) were tested.

They found that there was shrinkage in the amygdala and the hippocampus related to how much cannabis the person used.

The shrinkage was not large in either structure. The damage is described as “equivalent to mild traumatic brain injury or premature aging.” The article:

Doctors have known for years there is nothing “soft” about the drug cannabis. Professor Jon Currie is the director of addiction medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne.”This is a very exciting study because it proves for the first time what we have been really worried out. That brain problems are real and that people who smoke cannabis over a long term do get problems.” he said.

It’s also equivalent to drinking over 2 drinks per day. It’s equivalent to severe stress. It’s equivalent to having PTSD. It’s equivalent to all sorts of stuff.

This study was done by Nadia Solowij out of Australia. For whatever reason, every single study done by Solowij and colleagues seems to find pretty serious brain damage.

This study is pretty scary, but so far there have been four other studies of heavy cannabis users that did not find damage to the hippocampus or the amygdala.

An MRI study from 2005 of very heavy cannabis users who had used cannabis on average of 20,100 times found no damage to the hippocampus at all. A study of cannabis-using young adults from 2006 found no damage to the hippocampus, or to any other structure. And a third study also found no hippocampal damage .

The study of users from 2006 also found no damage to the amygdala. This study actually found that the hippocampus-amygdala was

So there you have it. There are some pretty scary new findings coming out about cannabis and damage to the limbic system, but things are still far from proven. The single study so hyped by the media nowadays has already been contradicted by four negative studies. You would think that the media might have noted that. You would think wrong.

The road forward? More studies, I guess. You could always try smoking less than five joints a day too, just to be on the safe side.

“Older Really Is Better,” by Alpha Unit

When I was a kid, my idea of what it might feel like to be old had been captured in this Beatles song:

When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

If I’d been out till quarter to three Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?

Sixty-four was ages away in my mind. It was something my grandparents might have been. Whatever it was, it was old. You’d practically had it by then.

Sixty-four isn’t old. If you’re between 40 and 68, you’re doing better than you were twenty years ago.

The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain lays it all out.

Barbara Strauch, the author, explains that middle age is practically brand new in our species, a product of our increasing lifespan in the West. Scientists have only recently begun studying it.

Surely by the time you’re pushing fifty, it’s pretty much downhill from there, people might have once thought. It’s only a matter of time before parts of you are all used up, broken down, and ready to be replaced or given up on. Maybe not today or tomorrow – but the decline has set in, and there’s no turning back the clock.

Completely baseless, according to research cited in the book.

In middle age, your brain is actually still developing. In no way is it static or inevitably turning to mush.

Myelin is the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers. It increases the speed at which signals move around your neural network. Myelin levels actually increase the older you get. Its growth takes off in middle age.

Your brain is improving in other ways as well.

First, though, the big difference between your brain at 20 and your brain at, say, forty-five is processing speed. It’s slower, so you’re more easily distracted when your start to focus on something.

According to Strauch, processing speed mainly affects the beginning of your concentration on something. That’s why researchers recommend that you consciously focus at the very beginning when you set out to complete a task.

This slower processing speed, allowing for distraction, is how you end up in a room with no idea why you walked in.

Strauch says scientists used to think processing speed underpinned every aspect of brain functioning. But they now know it doesn’t. So the decline in processing speed doesn’t really matter that much in middle age.

There’s also no disputing the struggle with memory as you get older, particularly episodic memory and names.

What the author points out is that in spite of the fact that you’ve drawn a blank, those memories haven’t vanished. It’s just that your brain struggles now with requests for names and facts that it can’t associate with anything else.

It’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library, says Strauch. It’s not a storage problem; it’s a retrieval problem.

Sound and meaning are stored in different parts of the brain, and over time, the link can decline. But these memories can pop up if someone gives you a hint.

To help yourself remember names as you get older, she says try to attach the name to something else. For example, when meeting Joe, who happens to have bushy eyebrows, giving him the name “Joe Bushy-Eyebrows” (in your mind, of course!) will help you remember his name. The simple word “Joe” might be too arbitrary for your brain to retrieve easily.

And to help yourself remember a task you need to do, she suggests imagining yourself doing it. This will create a neural footprint that will actually help trigger your memory.

Distraction and memory loss are common concerns the older you get, but what’s good is that they in no way signal any major loss of brain cells. Strauch says brains shrink about

What researchers will tell you is that since you keep these cells, there are ways to keep your brain running well.

The fact is that in middle age, entire areas of cognitive functioning are improving.

  1. Inductive reasoning is better than it was in your twenties.
  2. You are better at recognizing categories.
  3. You are better at sizing up situations.
  4. You are better at getting the gist of a matter.
  5. Your social expertise has never been better.

A sense of well-being peaks in middle age, across occupations and ethnic groups. Your brain is actually becoming less responsive to negative stimuli.

In all these areas, your brain is functioning at its best.

Over the years various “brain boosters” have been touted, but a couple of things have proven to be effective. One thing that’s good for your brain is being open to new ideas. Don’t shy away from confronting ideas that are different from your own. Talk with people you disagree with. These kinds of challenges sharpen brain functioning.

But the best thing you can do for your brain, by far, is exercise. According to researchers, anything that impacts your body impacts your brain. Your brain is like your heart; everything you do for your heart is just as beneficial to your brain.

Vigorous exercise increases brain volume and actually produces new brain cells. Cognitive functioning goes up.

All of this brings to mind more words from the Beatles:

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, A little better all the time…

References

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967. Getting Better [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone.

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967.  When I’m Sixty-Four [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone.

Strauch, Barbara. 2010. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. New York: Viking Press.

"Older Really Is Better," by Alpha Unit

When I was a kid, my idea of what it might feel like to be old had been captured in this Beatles song:

When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I’d been out till quarter to three Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?

Sixty-four was ages away in my mind. It was something my grandparents might have been. Whatever it was, it was old. You’d practically had it by then. Sixty-four isn’t old. If you’re between 40 and 68, you’re doing better than you were twenty years ago. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain lays it all out. Barbara Strauch, the author, explains that middle age is practically brand new in our species, a product of our increasing lifespan in the West. Scientists have only recently begun studying it. Surely by the time you’re pushing fifty, it’s pretty much downhill from there, people might have once thought. It’s only a matter of time before parts of you are all used up, broken down, and ready to be replaced or given up on. Maybe not today or tomorrow – but the decline has set in, and there’s no turning back the clock. Completely baseless, according to research cited in the book. In middle age, your brain is actually still developing. In no way is it static or inevitably turning to mush. Myelin is the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers. It increases the speed at which signals move around your neural network. Myelin levels actually increase the older you get. Its growth takes off in middle age. Your brain is improving in other ways as well. First, though, the big difference between your brain at 20 and your brain at, say, forty-five is processing speed. It’s slower, so you’re more easily distracted when your start to focus on something. According to Strauch, processing speed mainly affects the beginning of your concentration on something. That’s why researchers recommend that you consciously focus at the very beginning when you set out to complete a task. This slower processing speed, allowing for distraction, is how you end up in a room with no idea why you walked in. Strauch says scientists used to think processing speed underpinned every aspect of brain functioning. But they now know it doesn’t. So the decline in processing speed doesn’t really matter that much in middle age. There’s also no disputing the struggle with memory as you get older, particularly episodic memory and names. What the author points out is that in spite of the fact that you’ve drawn a blank, those memories haven’t vanished. It’s just that your brain struggles now with requests for names and facts that it can’t associate with anything else. It’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library, says Strauch. It’s not a storage problem; it’s a retrieval problem. Sound and meaning are stored in different parts of the brain, and over time, the link can decline. But these memories can pop up if someone gives you a hint. To help yourself remember names as you get older, she says try to attach the name to something else. For example, when meeting Joe, who happens to have bushy eyebrows, giving him the name “Joe Bushy-Eyebrows” (in your mind, of course!) will help you remember his name. The simple word “Joe” might be too arbitrary for your brain to retrieve easily. And to help yourself remember a task you need to do, she suggests imagining yourself doing it. This will create a neural footprint that will actually help trigger your memory. Distraction and memory loss are common concerns the older you get, but what’s good is that they in no way signal any major loss of brain cells. Strauch says brains shrink about What researchers will tell you is that since you keep these cells, there are ways to keep your brain running well. The fact is that in middle age, entire areas of cognitive functioning are improving.

  1. Inductive reasoning is better than it was in your twenties.
  2. You are better at recognizing categories.
  3. You are better at sizing up situations.
  4. You are better at getting the gist of a matter.
  5. Your social expertise has never been better.

A sense of well-being peaks in middle age, across occupations and ethnic groups. Your brain is actually becoming less responsive to negative stimuli. In all these areas, your brain is functioning at its best. Over the years various “brain boosters” have been touted, but a couple of things have proven to be effective. One thing that’s good for your brain is being open to new ideas. Don’t shy away from confronting ideas that are different from your own. Talk with people you disagree with. These kinds of challenges sharpen brain functioning. But the best thing you can do for your brain, by far, is exercise. According to researchers, anything that impacts your body impacts your brain. Your brain is like your heart; everything you do for your heart is just as beneficial to your brain. Vigorous exercise increases brain volume and actually produces new brain cells. Cognitive functioning goes up. All of this brings to mind more words from the Beatles:

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, A little better all the time…

References

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967. Getting Better [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone. Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967.  When I’m Sixty-Four [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone. Strauch, Barbara. 2010. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. New York: Viking Press.
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