No one’s gonna call the police on God

Many of us feel that we know what epilepsy is, it comes up a lot on TV and in movies: someone falls down, shakes a lot, their eyes roll back, and they may foam at the mouth. But not all epilepsies are like that. Yes, generally, an epilepsy is marked by recurring seizures. But it can be caused by many things and can arise at different times. In essence, it’s your brain cells firing uncontrollably. And this abnormal activity can start at one small point and spread out to the rest of your brain or not. It all depends on the type of epilepsy you might have.

I want to focus on temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).

Why TLE? Well, some patients with TLE report having altered versions of reality during and after the time of seizures. They might describe being one with the universe, or that God visited them. For me, it’s by far one of the most amazing stories I have heard of. An experience of God, arising from abnormal brain activity. What in our biology would make us come to that conclusion? Is it socially driven? Would a person with TLE in an isolated, atheist, scientifically minded town report “God”, having never encountered the term? Or would they revert to saying that they felt “one with the universe”. Undoubtedly, each person’s experience during a TLE seizure will be different, some will not report any such feelings of “finally understanding it all” and some will just say they felt a presence.

What’s even more interesting is that scientists have jumped on this. One scientist has created a device he dubs the “God Helmet”. It magnetically stimulates your temporal lobes, causing abnormal firing, and some of the people who use it report similar stories to the TLE patients. Although, I think their stories are less profound, and many of them don’t feel a thing. Apparently, Richard Dawkins reported feeling nothing. Read into that as you may.

For now, watch this video on TLE and God and learn a little more about it. Highly recommended.

Temporal lobe epilepsy and the Capgras delusion are, to me, by far the most interesting neurological disorders I have heard of. Together they have significantly altered how I view the world and they have made me appreciate how important the biology of the brain is. In the next blog entry, I will use these as the spark to say something about what reality means and how our perception and experience shape it.

NOT Lazy

I’ve been accused of many things in my life and lazy has always been one of them. This time, it has been with regards to my previous post. A single photograph of three Chinese children. No information was provided. Just a photograph. And because it has been brought to my attention that some of the readers felt shortchanged, I will explain myself.

A week or two ago, I complained that writing three entries a week is too much for me. I’ve been having less and less exciting weeks here in SF, as I find myself settling in at my new home city. Instead, I’ve been piling on more and more graduate related work. This is why I wanted to give up on the Wednesday post, sticking only to Mondays and Fridays.

But then I had an epiphany. “A picture says a thousand words”, or something like that. So I dug through my library of my favorite photographs that I’ve taken over the years. And the first one I uploaded, the three Chinese children, has always been close to my heart. I will never forget these kids that I met back in 2006. They really made an impression on me and I wanted to share that with you folks.

So right under the photograph, I started writing about it. I wrote about the kids, where I met them, what we did. I even thought of uploading the rest of the photographs. But instead, I deleted all of that. Instead choosing to showcase nothing but the photograph. Through it, I hope that you and I can travel back in time, to that captured instant where I stood once before. And maybe together we can appreciate what I saw at that second, on that day. We can reflect, think, and feel about what it means to be in the moment. And to honor this commitment to nostalgia and meditation, I will do my best to upload photographs that really do mean a lot to me. Whether I took them or not is meaningless, what matters is the essence of the photograph. The subject. The action. The feeling.

Photograph of the Every Other Week

The Capgras Delusion

The scenario:

A woman walks into her house. She’s had a long day at work and wants nothing more but rest. She takes off her coat, puts her keys back into her pocket, and removes the fedora hat she’s started wearing to hide her recently gotten and still healing scratch marks. She walks into the living room and calls out to her husband, “honey, I’m home”. She hears his reply from the kitchen, just around the corner, “take a rest love, I’ll bring you some tea”. She collapses on the couch and hears him shuffling around, probably looking for clean tea cups. From the kitchen, he asks about her day. This brings a smile to her face and she begins at the beginning. A few minutes later, as she was just beginning to explain how she solved a major departmental problem, he walks in and places the tea kettle on the table. He needs to go back for the cups and sugar but decides to stand in the living room and listen to her story. She looks up at him and there, standing in front of her, is a man that looks just like her husband. He has the same frizzy hair, the same dark eyes, and he’s wearing her husband’s clothes. He’s even missing that same tooth on the left side. But the man standing in front of her, smiling and waiting to hear more, is not her husband. She jumps back and nearly falls out of the couch.

“Who are you!? What are you doing in my house!? Where is my husband!?”, she frantically asks as she backs away quickly. The smile on the man’s face quickly disappears, instead being replaced by a look of worry and sorrow. “I am your husband” he says to her in a calm voice. And although he’s telling the truth, she doesn’t believe him.

She has The Capgras Delusion.

This is one of the most interesting neurological phenomenons I’ve yet to hear about. The story is similar. A person, after some trauma or in conjunction with another disorder, like schizophrenia, believes that his or her closest family members have been replaced by duplicates. Clones. Impostors. They might say to the doctor, this woman looks, dresses and acts like my mother, but she is not my mother.

The question is: why does this happen?

I think there are a few ideas circulating about why, but the one that I am apt to believe is simple, and elegant (from V.S. Ramachandran). In a nutshell, the brain is made up of wires and connections. The wires from your visual center feed into an area that help you recognize faces and objects in the world. I should take a side step to point out that there is a difference between “seeing” something and “recognizing” it. There are people alive today who see their loved ones and don’t recognize them at all. This is different from The Capgras Delusion, in which a person sees and recognizes their loved ones, but doesn’t believe they are who they say they are. So back to the brain: the “visual center” connects to the “face recognition center” and that feeds into the “emotional center” of our brain. Well it turns out that the wires connecting the recognition center with the emotional center have been severed in Capgras patients. So that when the woman in my story sees her husband, the emotions that should come with that visual information are absent. She sees a man that looks like her husband but she feels nothing for him. Her mind then creates a fiction that allows this to happen: “This person must be an impostor, he is not my husband even though he looks exactly like him. This explains why I don’t feel anything for him”.

This is interesting. It suggests that our basic gut instincts play a major role in our thought processes. Instead of saying the obvious, “hey, this is my mother, even though for some reason I don’t have any feelings towards her”, the brain chooses to create a story that, although highly improbable, makes sense of the situation. A fictional story that overrides our intellectual thought processes. Although The Capgras Delusion is an extreme case, the brain actually does this all the time. It’s constantly trying to make sense of the world and it will manipulate facts into a cohesive story, while we tag along for the ride. How much of the world is actually what you think is true then? And how much of it is a story that your mind created? Chew on that for a second.

So while you’re chewing, I have three questions for you.

(1) Recall in my story above about the woman and her husband, that they actually had a full conversation before the woman freaked out. Why did she not suspect her husband of being an impostor then?

(2) Do you think that knowledge of your condition alters your perception enough so that you may switch from the fictional “impostor” story to a more believable story?

(3) How “rational” are our decisions?

I can theorize about (1). I know nothing about (2). And I’ll wait for your responses on (3) before I say anything.

Let this day also be marked in history, as the day after the Health Care Reform Bill was passed.

The End of the World

I don’t usually just put up videos that I find. Choosing instead to write a few thoughtful and thought out paragraphs on my current state. But I think a video will do for tonight, for a few reasons. I have been feeling utterly overwhelmed. I’m not say I am overwhelmed, only that I have been feeling like I am. There is a slight difference. Because of this, I have pretty much taken the week off from blogging (even though I’ve continued to contribute, albeit weakly).

I’d like to open up a discussion about this video. But I doubt any readers keeping up with this blog will have much to disagree about. We’re probably all saying “choose column A”.

Alcohol addiction: Dr. Patricia Janak

Memory of a relapse: Patricia Janak, UCSF/Gallo

Carry the One Radio

I had a really good chat with Patricia Janak about her research on addiction. In an effort to not anthropomorphize too much, she puts rats in a bar and let’s them order as much alcohol as they want while she records from their brains. She uses this model to understand what goes on in the brain that causes a relapse. Really cool work.

ohh Nelsa

I learned how to paint Nelsa

Nelsa looking at a cockatoo

just 20 minutes from my house

The bridge

Further proof that Bobby Won the World Cup

This entry is, as the idiom goes, straight from the horse’s mouth. Only in this case, the man known as Bobby has, almost literally, become a horse. The words you will read below have been copied exactly from an email that he sent me.

—-

As you remember, I gave myself a March 14th deadline to complete phase two of my transformation, which was getting down to 270 lbs. As of this morning, pre-workout, after breakfast, and wearing my underclothes, I weighed 269.5 lbs. Post workout, after a shower, I weighed 268 lbs. These are, to all intents and purposes, spectacular results. In 5 weeks, I’ve gone from 287 to 270. I must say, it was one of the most challenging things I have ever done. My weight fluctuated so much, I was pretty sure I was gonna fail up until monday. My joints are a bit battered right now, and at the same time, I can use them much better, as to date, I have lost 38 lbs from what I was mid January. Running is easier, jumping is easier, hell just walking to and from campus is easier. I quite literally feel like a faster person. And I feel amazing. I sleep better, I breathe better. Additionally, I have once again won the world cup. Attached is a video, taken today, where I am benching 325 lbs! That is a new record for me, and the guy spotting me is my friend, Shawn. He has a dedication to lifting I can only hope to achieve. Additionally, one of the old timers named Jim, who actually has the best bench numbers in the gym, congratulated me.

The transformation has both been inward and outward. I feel the strength to do anything, to truly do anything built up inside me. Though, you all were my inspiration to do this. Everytime I wanted to give up a rep, I thought of Sama saying “I thought you said nothing was impossible? Are you admitting there is something you can’t do?” Everytime I thought it was enough, that I should quit and cut my losses, I thought about the disappoint of having to tell you all my failures. And everytime something didn’t go my way, I thought about how each and everyone of us has to persevere through something, and all those past experiences that we have had together where we had to overcome or perish. Yes, you all are mythical in my eyes, for the purposes of completing this project.

Outwardly, Just about everyone I know has made some comment about my strength and transformation. Some people have asked me to train them (summer is coming up, I suppose), some people think I am wasting away. Ironically, some people try to give me advice which is usually terrible, but I smile and nod, and get back to focusing on what works. I still get called names, half heartedly, because somehow, eating spinach and meatballs during a pizza lunch is weird. Also, apparently, thats an eating disorder. But there have been alot of positives. I am currently helping a bigger guy out in the gym. My friend shawn is training him, and he is frustrated with his progress (he is about 6′ 5″ 340 lbs, but not much strength). I’ve been helping him to lift with more passion and proper technique, and also been telling him about where I came from and what I did to get here.

This email is pretty long-winded, so I’ll cut it off here. Will outline Phase 3 in a later email (the goal will thankfully be physical therapy, lol), and continue to keep you all posted on my progress. Oh and one more thing. I shopped at Old Navy for the first time the other day… weird to have things fit you, shopping at regular stores isnt all that common for me.

Peace and Love,

Bobby

Proof that Bobby Won the World Cup

For those of you who did not believe my words: I give you the blair gym project.

Whoever captured the footage should have used a normal camera instead of one of those “make all your footage look like you’re hunting for Big Foot” novelty cams.

How Bobby Won the World Cup

So we’re 94 days away from witnessing the 2010 World Cup games in South Africa. Currently, Nigeria is one of the African qualifying teams. Sudan, of course, came in last place in it’s group and, not being a country to surprise us, will once again not qualify for the world cup. All in all I think African has an ok chance of making it far this time around and let it be known that I’m officially endorsing Nigeria.

All of this has nothing to do with how Bobby won the world cup.

For some background: I have known Bobby for a long time. He is a beast of a man. And at the risk of inflating his ego, he has always been so. He’s one of those guys that you expect to have helped Ma out around the house by lifting the couch over his head so she might run the vacuum underneath more easily. Of course, at the age of three. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was doing pushups in the womb.

That’s Bobby.

Now, he recently sent me a video that was 23 seconds long. It looked like it was taken on a 1980′s video camera as the quality was low res and shaky. I could barely recognize the man facing the camera. (Whoever said the camera puts on 20 pounds was a liar and a thief.) Bobby looked like two arms acting as massive parenthesis to the rest of his body. In the first half of the video, Bobby trots around for a few seconds but then finally centers himself in the camera’s frame. In front of him is a bar. He bends down at the hip, reaches down, and grabs hold of it.

At this point, my eyes widened and (the first time I saw the video) I audibly said: “Holy Fu**in Sh**. No way”. And in the video, Bobby pauses for a few seconds with his hands steadying on the bar, and he has this smug look on his face like “yeah Sama, this ain’t photoshop”.

He strains for a second and then deadlifts five hundred and fifty-five freaking pounds.

Needless to say, I felt my own abdominal lining rip open as my intestines dropped into my testicular sack. Doctors would call it a hernia. I would just say it felt like one.

Bobby then dropped the 555 pound weight (this shook the gym slightly because I saw some people trip up in the background). A second later, he steps triumphantly over the bar and straight for the cameraman. Presumably to lift him up and toss him aside like a rag doll. On that day, Bobby was only 5 pounds away from deadlifting double his own body weight.

And that my friends, is how Bobby won the world cup.

In my book at least.