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. February 2008 .
01/02/08 03:17 [Friday]
There are things one is used to doing in modern British society - learnt in my own case mainly in childhood and adolescence - which because of flaws in procedures used to decide how forces greater than myself shall be used to make imposition on me it is unnaturally dangerous for me to do. A major example is food shopping. I am still acquiring experience how to minimise the risk to myself (the risk consists of buying foods and drinks which contain drugs which cause me hurt and which furthermore distort my decision-making with the possible result that I continue to shop - or otherwise obtain food and drink: say tapwater - in a way exposing me to increased risk). A necessity for life is water, and the only certain way to obtain undrugged water is to use water from a flowing river (or spring or similar) as it is inconceivable that such a quantity of drugs would be wasted (in being necessarily washed downstream) in getting me to take a smallish dosage. On the other hand costly procedures have been used to trick me into taking unsound drink - for example selling drugged drinks throughout New Street station in Birmingham (from what I can make out) one recent Saturday. It is difficult for me to estimate the cost of these procedures, and even if I could it would be more difficult to estimate the budget available: one’s first presumption would have been that perverting all drinks on sale at New Street station on one Saturday would not have been worthwhile for the perpetrators.
Still, I feel sure that water from a flowing river will not contain drugs in any hurtful dosage, and my experience so far bears this out. As regards foods: there are some foods which - based on experience and on estimating the costs involved in getting drugs into food - have a greater likelihood of containing drugs. Eggs which I de-shell myself will not contain drugs. Bottled drinks - going back to drinks - are quite easily drugged, as also is bread and similar bakery items (such as cakes and pies). Even potatoes - for example - can be individually drugged but the cost of individually treating each potato (almost certainly) is such that it will not frequently be done (it is more likely if there is a stock of few potatoes or similar at home which can be got at by persons willing to introduce drugs; this applies also to bottled drinks).
To make onerous the drugging of drinks in our home (and I have incontrovertible evidence illicit entry has in the past been gained) it is good to have many separate containers (bottles say) and to secure them within many separate secure holders (such as safes) and to put in place means of detecting with certainty if access has been gained. Actually preventing access is difficult: in fact literally speaking it is impossible as forces greater than myself cannot be prevented from (say) breaking down the doors. Improprieties of that type (but not so extreme) have in the past been perpetrated, and I have learnt that to expect useful help even from sources one would initially have presumed were independent (such as the police or my MP Ian Pearson (Dudley South)) is a mistaken expectation.
The drugs which are most fearful - because debilitating me most from successfully countering future drugging - are those with sedative or quietening effects, notably antischizophrenic agents. Antischizophrenic drugs furthermore I find subjectively the most hurtful. But in recent months I have discovered that if I can evade continuously taking in such drugs, then in the recovery period after being under their influence I have increased vigour - often including anger - which can be helpful in thinking out and then implementing firm measures of avoidance for the future. Indeed, I believe the thinking out and writing of these remarks (and the decision what to do with them) follow in the aftermath of relatively mild drugging I suffered yesterday.
01/02/08 11:10 [starting a proposed Diary of stuff taken by mouth]
Within the past hour: three rashers of bacon done in Fry Lite; cup of coffee using river water and Asda granules.
Effects: tired eyes and a tendency to hasten with slight tetchiness (the hurry unlikely to be caused by hypnosis on the basis of seemingly no particular time - eg often it has been 9 am - or other trigger such as working in the passage to the side of the bungalow where our bedroom and its air brick are, working that is to defeat hypnosis). Most likely the coffee - the water and the granules both - are not the cause of these undoubted drug effects, because when I drank coffee the same earlier - 2.30 am, approximately - there were no such effects. However after I ate bacon around 6 am there were soon afterwards opium effects (as I think of them); and so there are now, including this wordiness. The difference of its being daytime now may alter the appearance of the effects by causing me - more or less wilfully - to try to be awake and get things done, now in the daytime, this creating tetchiness associated with having to push myself unnaturally (the seeming ‘stimulant’ effect of hastening) due to difficulty obtruded into ordinary daytime activities by the opium. (The pushing myself - more or less unnaturally - can be induced by hypnosis, or encouraged by hypnosis, but in the absence of drugs does not have the same confusional effect, because - to get technical - if things get out of hand in the direction of dangerous lack of effectiveness, my own overview control process - the seriatim - can step in and set aside the hypnotic advice.) It strikes me more likely the Fry Lite contains the drugs than the bacon, on the basis that the bacon Dawn cooked using I’m sure less Fry Lite had less effect than when I used more this recent time within the past hour.
[Note made 07/02/08 02:17: I have a note of the reg of a car behaving suspiciously in Oak Street Kingswinford this Friday evening: PM 04 HDU.]
Sat. 2/2/08.
About 11.45 am on 256 bus to Stourbridge. Within the past hour I have been through a phase of resentment whose commencement coincided with a letter from Homeserve GB suggesting we pay to indemnify South Staffs Water against leaks on our property!
I presume this resentment was a reaction to yesterday’s ASM (almost certainly in chips [bought in the evening from the Kings chippy in Kingswinford just before Dawn spoke on the phone to members of her family from the BT payphone outside Kingswinford library]) although I’m surprised it’s so strong after a period of seeming zero effects (in other words I had thought the ASM [taken yesterday evening had by now] entirely worn off). (But [I have the evidence of] tiredness especially of the eyes after the processing effort of computer programming this morning.)
Resentment [is] now followed by a multitude of stuff to say - eg via my website - much of it relating to my latest understanding of the history of The Experiment.
03/02/08 06:37 [Sunday]
The Amilo Pro computer now being usable - in fact for several days now - I have got round to continuing to try out the USB experiment board I bought from Maplins. It works excellently (and I can recommend Velleman kits to everyone). It is drawn to my attention how much easier things become - that is to do things with information becomes easier, and this in turn allows grosser things to be done quicker and more efficiently (such as burning the house down should it be required, or in commoner parlance destroying enemy cities by bombing) - if well designed information-processing devices are available, such as a computer or the human brain. Instead of struggling against the entropy in the physical universe which causes for example soldering irons to go wrong, it is possible simply to plug in a USB connector and type some stuff at a keyboard, and hey presto I can detect ‘at a stroke’ hundreds of different combinations of things going on at more or less the same time (specifically, doors opening). And I can record such detections in my memory together with timestamp information: just as the human brain does (but even simpler of course). Of course there is still entropy if we have anything at all to do with the real world, but if there are many distinct components (such as retinal cells) in some optimal combination of mutual substitutability and (on the other hand) specialisation, they aren’t all going to go wrong at once (despite my joke on the train yesterday about absolutely every letter between myself and Solihull Magistrates possibly being lost in the post) and they can monitor each other - that is be inter-compared making use of redundancies, under the auspices of an overall controlling principle (eg the seriatim process) again with some ideal balance between top-down control and committee-level decision-taking by vote lower down (and I mention in passing that the degree of top-down control in the USSR was not ideal) - which leads to even less being subject to entropy and to even more efficiency (and I’m sorry if Socialists don’t like the idea of efficiency, but think of it as the State saving money so it can be spent better on helping people - not only State employees deserve to be helped - or in the case of efficient goings-on by the human brain it helps preserve the person in life longer).
I have just been trying to write a data DVD, and I was reflecting that instead of (in the past under the influence of ASM) sitting more or less bored in front of the computer as it did its stuff (and then when it failed because life was empty otherwise, becoming frustrated and/or despondent) I was getting other stuff done the while. I am not under the influence of a stimulant drug, but stimulant drugs of the activating kind do not simply lead one to get a sequence of things done one after the other in a quicker time (seemingly the view in the past of my hypnotic ‘advisers’): rather they encourage a lot of stuff to go on at once (or more or less at once in a multiplexed manner). As I have made clear (I hope) an advantage of this is that disparate activities at more or less the same time will encourage the actor to observe parallels between the seemingly disparate items (such as apples falling to earth and the moon falling towards Earth) and this may well lead to very richly creative insights.
When I am under the influence of ASM I tend to think in terms of ‘brain death’, because after all I can only think then in elementary terms. Reduction of dopamine activity is to a degree - and with large reduction it is a large degree - brain death. The obvious question (to psychiatrists, seemingly) is, ‘What is wrong with brain death: we don’t observe the brain-dead person striving not to be brain-dead, so it must be all right for him.’ The thing is, although brain death is not itself at the time aversive (because there is no aversion response) if one succeeds in being resurrected from it, afterwards one has (certainly I have) very great motivation to evade a recurrence.
’Nuff said (until I get round to saying more about dopamine-serotonin fluctuation).
05/02/08 00:58 [Tuesday]
The first thing is that I note one or two windows flash up on the screen of this Amilo Pro just after the desktop appears on start-up, so I conclude - also from the fact that problems remain with the touchpad sensitivity - the operating system is still not as it should be. I put it in those terms because from the fact that I am awake and Dawn can’t sleep - she says she has had very little sleep since we went to bed at twenty to ten - my first inclination is to suppose They have stopped drugging us (certainly with sedative drugs which make it easy to speak hypnotising words in the night) and that The Experiment is at an end. This however is a wish-fulfilment fantasy I develop very frequently but which is just a fantasy. Myself I am affected by stimulant drugs, first noticeable (in the past twenty-four hours) in Birmingham yesterday and causing then and now problems in my legs amounting to an increased risk of muscle cramping. The reason we went to bed when we did was that I was suffering discomfort in my legs. The fact that I cannot clearly recall what time we went to bed (I looked it up in the Windows Update log) and what preceded our going to bed - and for example in my inattentive condition of mind I left the convector heater on when we went to bed - tells me some sedative agent was in fact present in my metabolism then. I now have sore eyes and a hard dryness in my mouth, which I find to be unpleasant physical facts. Because I am suffering these effects much more markedly than Dawn I conclude probably the unwanted drugs getting into me derived - substantially, anyway, although there is no doubt we were given drugs in Birmingham, probably at Druckers in the Pavilions (in the tea-cake most likely, again most of which I ate and Dawn only say a quarter) - from M + S butter I ate in some quantity on Sainsbury’s crackers before retiring to bed.
My ill-temper itself now tells me stimulant drugs are affecting me, but in combination with sedatives most likely ASM. On the bus back from Birmingham yesterday around 6.30 pm I experienced unpleasant effects seemingly of ASM involving boredom and consequential sleepiness. I find now I am in an unpleasant condition between wakefulness and sleep (but nearer to wakefulness this indicating the stimulant component of the drug mixture predominates). I can’t for the life of me understand why I should have to suffer these drugs now. In Birmingham yesterday when I noticed initially the stimulant effect I recalled that in January I had concluded the reason we were given stimulants there on the 10th of the month was to keep us away from home longer so that incursion into our home could be perpetrated allowing (for example) water left unattended to be drugged, but I find it impossible to believe anyone has entered illicitly yesterday. I cannot see that there is any noticeable benefit to me in retaining diary notes I have recently written. To the extent that they relate to things I myself am interested in - the computer programs I have been writing or altering, basically - I shall remember the essence of them, and apart from that the pleasure I have (perhaps) taken in them consists simply of thinking what I clever fellow I am. Therefore on the basis that the result may well be a decreased likelihood of my being drugged in future, I shall delete them.
05/02/08 08:21
We went back to bed at 3.30 am and this time Dawn slept better than I. I woke up about 5 am (as best I can recollect) while Dawn woke up and got up about half an hour ago but has now gone back to bed. I think most likely her sleepiness since 3.30 am has resulted from her use of M + S butter different from the M + S butter referred to above when she made an omelette for herself. I had an omelette a bit after her, but presumably I am less affected firstly because I require less sleep in the nature of things, secondly I had already had a few hours whereas Dawn had not and thirdly more of the butter got into her portion of the omelette which was the first portion cooked, that is cooked at the time the butter was put in the pan.
I’m not sure if the annoyance I felt when I woke up soon after midnight implies that I had in fact been given ASM in Birmingham yesterday. It was certainly some sedative which affected me on the bus back, but when I am out and about my introspection is not so clear and I can’t always be so sure what class of drug it is affecting me. From the fact that I felt annoyance rather than bitter resentment directed against The Experiment and those (such as Armond) involved in the past - the annoyance more to do with having my sleep disturbed than anything, and the physical problems associated with the stimulant (such as muscle cramps) - I conclude probably what I suffered was not ASM. I said likely the sedative was supplied in Druckers but an alternative would be McDonalds we visited about half an hour before getting the bus home. In the past I do not doubt drugs in the tapwater (eg when I was living on my own in Retford) varied through the course of the day - because it would not be appropriate for me to be sent to sleep early in the day - and it may be that drugs we are given when we are out and about in places we are known to frequent vary likewise through the course of the day (whatever order we visit places in to drink or eat). Thus I feel pretty certain we were given a stimulant in Druckers, but it may be the sedative was supplied separately and later, ie at McDonalds. This would tie in nicely as an explanation for the difference in effect on Dawn and myself. Dawn would be more affected by the stimulant from Druckers - taken about 2 pm and I took about three times the quantity she did if it was in the tea-cake - but the onset of that stimulant would have been later in Dawn. She would have been less susceptible to a sedative given in McDonalds (about 6 pm) because of the stronger stimulant effect still on her. At home she took very much less of the M + S butter than I prior to going to bed about 9.40 pm, so the sedative in that would have affected her less. Later on - 3.30 am, the stimulant taken in about 2 pm yesterday having worn off - when she took much more M + S butter (even though of a different brand, most likely containing the same drugs) she has been affected - and is now - greatly by the sedative whereas I am less so for reasons given above.
If we can be guided by hypnosis to shop at certain places - Dawn noticeably keeps mentioning stores we have had store cards (since cut up) that is M + S and BhS - we can with more certainty be induced to procure drugged foods like the M + S butter. This in turn makes easier the perpetration of further hypnosis. I have in the past asked myself what the point is of drugging us in order to better hypnotise us in order to more easily drug us. No one could say it is other than an interference in our freedom of choice. It’s true I have been ‘allowed’ to develop counter-measures - presumably part of which was to assess my true desire, if under hypnosis I go along with ridiculous schemes as seemingly I do and the perpetrators (or a branch of their number) present this as meaning I must ‘want’ to go along with them - but to counter drugging entirely, when the State funding is such that all bottles of water on sale - possibly all drinks on sale - on New Street station in Birmingham one Saturday recently were perverse, is very onerous (and would mean if carried to the logical conclusion that we must entirely eschew eating out in cafés and restaurants).
Recently I said (to paraphrase what I may in fact have deleted) I would not strive over-much against hypnosis because I concluded it would no longer be used to hurt me or us. However, I have been hurt the past twenty-four hours, by muscle problems, interference with my sleep and the consequent distraction from severe annoyance I felt, so I shall continue to strive against hypnosis when I have energy and wakefulness sufficient. If we can no longer be hypnotised to prefer to shop for food at certain stores, then even if we shop on a whim and do not pre-prepare by onerous calculation of randomised procedures, we are safer.
06/02/08 00:20 [Wednesday]
From my waking so early - after something like three hours of sleep - and the mild tendency to muscle cramps in my legs (and, now I reflect, the feeling of hot dryness in my throat), I conclude I am affected mainly by stimulant drugs, probably in tapwater I collected yesterday morning and was using a lot of the day yesterday. I do not find this too terrible a scenario, and conclude the anger (or ‘severe annoyance’) I woke up with around the same time twenty-four hours ago depended on ASM which had been affecting me in combination with the stimulant then (probably ASM in the mild or intermediate form of Sparine, but ASM all the same leading to the ill-temper).
When I call Sparine (the only such mild antischizophrenic drug I know, although there may be others similar: I repeat what I have said before, that when Armond tried me on many different oral forms of antischizophrenic drug in 1980 when he first had official hold of me Sparine was the only one anything near tolerable) ‘intermediate’ what I have in mind is that it is nearly as innocuous as non-ASM sedative drugs like (say) Temazepam. Yet it is different from them and is more troublesome to me.
The essence of an antischizophrenic drug (and here I am giving my druggists what they are after, but the reason for not giving it to them has been to try to deter them from persisting with foisting ASM on me and I am hopeful now writing this will not encourage them on the other hand to do so but rather will wind the matter up: if not, the policy I must pursue is not to eat or drink ‘out’ later in the day, to be wary of effects from food and drink taken at home and to meet any future drugging with ASM with more furniture over the fence) is that it blocks dopamine transmission. The effect of dopamine blocking in my own case is - at what for me are high dosages (perpetrated by Armond in the past) - to create something like the ‘brain death’ I have mentioned in recent notes. Trains of ideas peter out almost before they get started, and this is very easy to understand for anyone taking a sensible brain-science view, instead of the psychological track of mumbo-jumbo, in terms of ‘ideas’ corresponding to activity of neurons - that is, firing of neurons - which generate other ideas and create a train of ideas by stimulating other neurons - I should say neural structures - by transmitting to them across synapses - the ‘ideas’ I am referring to, which comprise patterns or structures built up of sub-parts into which they could be analysed just as a pattern in the visual field can be analysed, as we pattern-recognition computerists know, into sub-patterns commonly called features, evidently implemented in the dopaminergic systems of the brain so that the synaptic transmissions in question are dopamine transmissions - which in turn stimulate others. This notion of trains of ideas corresponding to chains of neural structures setting each other off by transmitting across dopaminergic synapses carries certain implications for mechanisms I have referred to previously. The concept cloud is to be envisaged as a region of stimulated neural structures - measurable if one could measure neurons firing within the cortex, although the ‘regions’ might not in fact be conveniently localised in the 3D layout of the brain as most likely there is a distribution across the brain of neural structures connected to each other by pattern-recognition similarity or by relatedness of the species I am referring to for reasons of robustness in case of physical damage - which have set each other off through dopaminergic synapses up to a certain boundary where no further ‘related’ ideas are set off but rather the cloud settles into a self-perpetuating or rather self-maintaining stasis which corresponds to the sort of gelling or firming-up - involving recapitulation, a thing I remember noting in myself in my first years of introspection at the age of about 16 - by which theories get checked out for internal consistency and get put into a form perhaps whereby they become expressed in language which can be used for communication, or simply to record the structure (that is the theory or the high-level pattern of whatever description: for example possibly a scene in a work of fiction which needs to fit in consistently with other scenes to make a tolerable entity to be presented as a tale; or indeed something similar in the poetry line, poems also having to hang together by various measures to be any good; or - I could go on - a piece of music which again needs to have internal consistency) for oneself at a later date or - now we have the internet - for others’ perusal should they happen upon the record with interest, but without any necessary aim or formal intention of communicating the recorded structure.
Another corollary notion of a mechanism within the cortex depending on dopamine transmission is that of a ‘neural loop’ by means of which ideas are ‘held in mind’ for an interval until they can be dealt with. This is a species of short-term memory making one think of repeating a telephone number to oneself until it has been made use of after which it can be let go. It is a mechanism for short-term memory different from that which ‘holds in mind’ the start of a word heard through the auditory channel up to the end of the word so that the word can be ‘recognised’ which recognition depends on the presence of all the sub-parts. The ‘neural loop’ mechanism depends on top-down maintenance of order by some more frontally located part of the brain (ultimately that is under the organising control of the seriatim process implemented in the pre-frontal cortex). Such frontal overview mechanisms can be used in language processing (despite what I say about this short-term memory not being the same as the more automatic less conscious short-term memory needed to maintain a single word in mind) for example if the language being processed involves long sentences or equivalent structures perhaps containing within them nested sub-structures. Needless to say given dopamine-blockers my own capacity to use mechanisms like the neural loop to organise - either for input or for output, or for the combination which is verification of output I may just have produced that is for more-or-less introspective checking-over - goes to pieces. (For readers with less capacity for internal envisagement, the neural loop is considered as a sort of linear concept cloud in which output at one end of a chain of neural structures linked by dopaminergic synapses gets fed back to the starting end - edge would perhaps be a less paradoxical word - so that constant re-stimulation maintains the structure ‘held in mind’, in a way similar really to the way I envisage concept clouds other than this linear type turning back into themselves on reaching their natural boundary for consolidation through - as I said - recapitulation and the like.)
Where I came in was trying to explain to myself and others why I find dopamine-blocking drugs detestable. Reduction of dopaminergic transmissions is going to reduce the extent of concept clouds and the capacity to use mechanisms like the neural loop to organise one’s thinking. In such a case my own thinking becomes more like that of an ordinary person, but then again ‘ordinary people’ are not distressed by their inability to (say) produce long complex sentences, so why should I be distressed by it especially given that since my young adulthood most of the time I have not been able to think in the way - the complex way - natural to me (so that I should have got used to the more ‘ordinary’ way, is what I mean). It isn’t that I think I ‘deserve’ to be recognised by other people as the genius I am if I am not given drugs, because it matters nothing to me whether I am recognised or not (as some readers may be aware with frustration, believing perhaps that I should make some ‘useful’ application of my clever way of thinking - useful according to their view, that is). It is something to do with the pleasure I myself obtain from thinking complex thoughts, and this pleasure is something to do with elevated levels of serotonin. That’s why when a mixture of drugs was hit on to torment me but keep me quiet (that is, uncomplaining) at the same time - optimally under Kurian in the first years of the new Millennium - I was at my most accepting of the abuse (that is, because my serotonin level was kept up with antidepressants).
There’s more to be said than that, related to the significance of fluctuation in serotonin as against a constant although high level, but Dawn has got up and we are going to have breakfast (at 06/02/08 01:51).
06/02/08 03:19
Looking over my website diary for January 2008 in trying to conclude what is going on in The Experiment as things have changed a lot since I relinquished Nottinghamshire - so that it may be Nottinghamshire Authorities have given way to those with more sense - the first observation is that there are many gaps, and the reason is I deleted a lot to make objection to being given ASM. Broadly speaking I may conclude that where there are several days missing I had then been suffering ASM, and in particular in the week commencing Monday 21 January 2008, when I did not have the use of my computer having changed the password and got it wrong - undoubtedly confused at the time as an effect of ASM - and not being well organised enough to retrieve the situation until the following Sunday when I had this to say: I am slightly confused in my estimation of time relating to the past week (say). The reason presumably lies in the drugs I have been suffering ... and later this: I seem to be recovering now from much of the day - so it seems to me now, although I could check up by looking back at whatever I may have written (my memory is incomplete due to lowered resolution) - under the influence of ASM. And the following day: I feel the best theory is that ASM is being withdrawn from Dawn and myself and: On the other hand (able as things are - that is the dosage of ASM very low - to hold in mind and inter-compare several possibilities) surely the degree of effort put in by mainly State-run or State-dependent organisations (such as the BBC) cannot be simply to assist Dawn and myself to safely come off drugs. It must be that things are hoped to be learnt as we go, that is as we suffer. I must say I am heartily glad that the official view now surely must be that exceptional care is to be taken when prescribing any dopamine-blocking agents.
At the time, that Sunday and Monday - and this has been the case in past years when I have been given ASM and then ceased to be given it (or have escaped it somehow) - I thought in terms of suffering a rebound after administration of ASM for months or years. However the evidence from my January diary is that the rebound - genuinely a rebound - was from ASM administered over just a week. (The strange state of mind in the rebound period - the basis of rebound psychosis, I suppose - causes distortion, certainly in myself, of estimates of time past.)
Presumably the reason I - and Dawn - were given ASM last month was the reason I thought applied in September of last year and indeed over the months and years, that is to find out about the effects of ASM and how such drugs work. It seems likely I am mistaken in regard to past years and in those years the reason I was given ASM was that medical people - like Stewart the GP in Bawtry - genuinely believed it did good to someone diagnosed as schizophrenic and would do little hurt even if the diagnosis was somewhat inaccurate (I have known mental patients suffering depression prescribed antischizophrenic drugs for their condition, doctors seemingly trying anything and hoping to find something which in some sense ‘works’). The explanation for what I have suffered over January might be that ordinary doctors giving advice what I - and Dawn - should be foisted (based possibly on what I have been prescribed in the past) seriously underestimated the hurt I would suffer and my consequent reaction, given that I was not constantly subdued by the drugs but managed to obtain the relief of evasion intermittently.
Since the start of February I seem to have been given much milder dosages of much milder drugs (possibly Sparine, as I said) and although yesterday morning my ‘severe annoyance’ led to deletion of some diary material I have now been able to retrieve that for Friday 1 February and Sunday 3 February. This tells me - tells us - that the drugs I suffered Monday evening and overnight Monday night were not so powerful in their aversive effect that I remain so bitter now as to fail to make effort to continue my website diary (possibly otherwise my bitterness continuing now might lead to further deletions, and certainly of the retrieved diary entries which yesterday my intention and effort it was to delete).
06/02/08 09:00
What I had it in mind to put forward when I initially got up this morning was not only an attempted exposition of the way dopamine-blocking drugs affect me and debilitate me in fact, but also the way different drugs - such as reserpine and opium, and perhaps lesser sedatives - have their effect. I am reminded of this by the fact that I have just been having quite a pleasant doze seemingly caused by drugs of a minor sedative variety in lemon curd I ate on toast perhaps three hours ago. Dawn is similarly resting/dozing although she has not had any of the lemon curd. My exposition - or attempted exposition - must wait for now however.
When in the early part of last year attempts were made to interest us in living in London and (it seems this was the notion) it was thought I might work with the deaf, either as some sort of educator (eg of children) or as some sort of assistant in researching and/or ‘treating’ deafness (we went to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital with Dawn’s daughter) - and reflecting on the matter the way my desire to do so (or absence of desire) was assessed (because it was never put to me consciously) must have been in some sort of trance state, and goodness knows what impression I gave (because I must surely in such states under-mention my contempt for being questioned in them, and for being put into such states at all, for them to continue - or to have continued - to be thrust on me) - the perpetrators must have (as I mentioned above) felt that I ought to make use of my gift - whatever it is they think it is, that is some sort of cleverness - to be what they think of or thought of as ‘useful’ (ie to Society, that band of ordinary people who in concert have failed to save me from the drug treatment I have been subjected to and in fact who have collectively authorised my hypnotising and general being-taken-advantage-of) and I may conclude they consisted of medically if not psychiatrically trained people (to have thought of such matters as helping the deaf). Later on I was led to a meeting with a research student in neuroscience and said to him - while in my conscious mind - that I might well consider joining him in some such research but that I had Dawn to consider. Since then the argument has been forcefully put forward that Dawn and I might not be best suited to each other (for example, I think - but with monetary inducements too, I’m sure - to her family, or some of her family) but no-one in my life except Dawn has been of any assistance to me in coping with psychiatric treatment and indeed seeking to combat covert psychiatric treatment which uses drugs surreptitiously administered. (Caroline showed the right spirit in the period prior to Easter 2004, but then I conjecture she was got at by conventional psychiatric treaters with the consequence that she assaulted me in the May. And I can assure readers I have a very clear understanding of the reasons - that is what was going on in her interpretation of the sequence of events - to have led her to assault me; but unfortunately at the time my own understanding was debilitated by drugs. Most certainly I do not blame her for the assault, but the faulty advice - to state it mildly - she received.)
The people running the show - in the past certainly - must have very flawed understanding indeed - but it is possible that they take my smiling compliance (as I guess it to be) when under the influence and in a trance state at face value, and it is faintly imaginable they genuinely believe that it is not possible through hypnosis to induce anyone to do what they ‘do not want’ to do; - flawed understanding to suppose that continuing to take advantage of me with drugs sometimes antischizophrenic drugs, and with hypnotising which distracted me and gave a wrong impression what my true inclinations are, did not more and even more turn me against any sort of approval of the Society of ordinary people and lead me to believe more strongly in and with better thought-out understanding of my attribution to the Ordinary Man of Original Sin.
God knows what I’m on about here, but it seems to be related to my contempt for the ways of Society which seek to normalise its component parts and to the note I take that in schizo cases - not only my own, but schizophrenics under ordinary treatment (all of them, I should think) - it is wholly counter-productive which doesn’t matter in not being a help to Society but does matter in creating suffering (or unpleasure, to use a less emotive word) for schizo types who get caught up.
Undrugged now (this morning, anyway) there’s all sorts of stuff I can think of to write about: for example activation (as I used to call it) which grows (sometimes to the point of total disintegration of useful thought) by amplificatory feedback in the schizophrenic case but which peters out in the absence of outside stimulation - usually from other people - in the non-schizo case. Without antischizophrenic drugs I have enthusiasm based on anticipation of serotonin boosts in view of multiply forward-branching possibilities (all positive, or capable of being turned positive when I am my capable self) from any given starting success. This encourages me to do stuff, although possibly not the sort of ordinary stuff ordinary psychiatrists might think with approval of (I read a comment attributed to one such that he could have helped the Brontë sisters no end with their depressed unsociety).
Things are looking up as I have been empowered (by someone sensible, or some sensible committee) to defend myself against drugging and hypnosis - although it may cost me, for example in wasted water rates because I am not getting the contracted service of pure water - and my former fear that the drugs might creep up on me unawares and I be taken over or become addicted (a fear ever since I was foisted heroin in the 1980s) is somewhat lessened.
06/02/08 09:50
PS. I have finally finished off my website diary for last November.
06/02/08 12:01
Dawn has written a letter to her son and I am wondering if the logical organisation of it (including care over ‘presentation’) and lack of unrealistic emotion-laden expectation is natural to her or is enhanced by just the right combination of amphetamine and ASM in our tapwater today. I think the latter, because of the effect on me of the small quantity of the tapwater I myself have risked (rather too much ASM for me, leading to failure to get achieved what might have been achieved but this not too difficult to put up with - given also the small dosage I have taken - because masked by sleepiness). Another physical effect on me has been nasal congestion. I have a suspicion the ASM might be Sparine again, or something similarly low-powered.
06/02/08 12:09
In checking over the augmented website diary for November I have got as far as 08/11/07 14:20.
09/02/08 13:28 [Saturday]
[…]
I am getting on relatively like a house on fire - relative to how I used to progress when suffering greater intrusion from ASM, that is - with the character-recognition programming (actually Visual Field Analysis at present). I show below an image I have quite easily persuaded the prog to print out, showing Picture3 on entry to initialanalysis.
The resolution is restricted owing to the fact that it is based on my screen resolution in pixels, and the entire source document is initially converted for display on the screen. I suppose this could quite easily be altered so as to preserve the resolution of the original scan (or close to that) but then possibly when it came to individual pixels if the characters were more than (at present) a height corresponding to a tramlinesize of 8 (although even that implies better resolution than shown above) the processing cost (to the computer on this occasion, not to us humans) might be extremely taxing.
The way I’ve got things now, the original image is stored in Form1.Picture1A.
10/02/08 06:22 [Sunday]
I have done as I planned and retrieved for each lineage something of the resolution of the original scan of the document (in my Visual Field Analysis prog). In doing this I have found confirmation of my suspicion that PaintPicture does some peculiar rounding in re-scaling images: in general it causes some blurring. I show below two output images from my routine to fetch the current lineage of text, the first using direct access to the original scan and the second making an initial copy using PaintPicture.
10/02/08 07:57
As I have been doing my programming ideas have come to me concerning the way the perpetrators who drug our tapwater and try otherwise by various forms of deceit to get drugs into me may regard matters. As far as they see, because people (including myself) do not kick up a great fuss when given ASM (I was going to say, when subdued by ASM) it can’t be that unpleasant or unwanted. They must, I presume, believe there is some benefit in giving ASM, other that is than to their own pay-packets, but what benefit they think they observe - certainly in my own case - I have not yet fathomed. The best approach I have come to finding what might be thought of as benefit was in supposing these drugs were given to me to find out what made them so horrible (perhaps to learn also for cases of other people treated to them).
Unfortunately I have encrypted recent diary entries in such a way that decrypting them even knowing the method used by the prog and the password is onerously time-consuming, but I shall try to make the point here that two or three evenings ago I suffered a dosing of ASM probably in M+M’s bought at the wine shop on the corner of Manor Park in Kingswinford. A rebound effect from that, consisting as usual of anger, got exacerbated yesterday morning - I got up about 2 am Saturday morning I think, suffering the effects of hypnosis and the sedative drugs used to enable the hypnosis - and I had in mind to vigorously pursue my complaints, via my MP Ian Pearson again (who seems to be no help at all thus far) and in preparing for my appearance before Solihull Magistrates. The anger has now worn off, but as I say created motivation to apart from anything else make my encrypting prog even more onerous to circumvent (as I said). Clarity returning pretty fully now, I am able to hypothesise (as I said) on how the perpetrators may think.
I can’t think of much else to say except I did in the notes now encrypted make the point that ASM makes me less forthcoming with information, and the reason I still believe is that lowered processing capacity makes it more difficult to be confident in predicting the consequences should one reveal information. It may be the case that some schizophrenics treated with ASM have an enhancement to their processing capacity and become less secretive but in my case it works the other way, and as in so many ways ASM makes me more not less schizo.
10/02/08 12:11
Having suffered tired eyes and nasal congestion this morning (and frequent visits to the toilet to empty my bowels) and wondering whether to blame the coffee granules or the Utterly Butterly (or the bread) I have since eaten a few Melba toasts (from Sainsbury’s, the one in Birmingham city centre I think) with more Utterly Butterly. Since lunch (jacket potato with some older Asda cheapo butter) I seem to feel unnaturally easily annoyed. This could be down to the presumption which seized me that the Utterly Butterly was drugged and I had been continuing to use it all innocent, but more likely it strikes me it is down to some different drug more recently ingested - top suspects are the Asda butter and the Melba toasts - including a component of a stimulant not present in the earlier drugged food (the Utterly Butterly, the bread or the coffee granules).
Reflecting, although I was made sleepy again yesterday evening I did not suffer nasal congestion. This even though I took quite a bit of Utterly Butterly with my jacket potato. I conclude most likely the sedative drug which causes nasal congestion is in the bread, bought yesterday at Somerfield Stourbridge, and it made me sleepy last night because it was getting on bedtime but did not at the dosage taken cause noticeable nasal congestion. [My view now is that likely the unnaturally easy annoyance was a mild rebound effect of ASM in bread eaten in the morning this Sunday in some quantity, a rebound effect I know well as anger and resentment - note added 11/02/08 01:45.]
I could theorise that foods which we less usually buy - specifically in this instance the Melba toasts - might more likely contain the combination of stimulant and ASM which creates anger in me, because they are not foods I will constantly take and if I notice unpleasant effects I am perhaps more likely to single out such foods for chucking.
10/02/08 12:29
I think my inclination (under the influence) is too much towards guessing at hypotheses and presuming after devoting considerable fantasy time (you might say) to them that they are correct, with insufficient checking against facts in the real world. I say this because facts now presented to me in the form of agitated behaviour from Dawn give me now to suppose (again, with almost instant conviction I am now right) that the stimulant drug (plus perhaps ASM) is in the potatoes. Dawn’s greater sensitivity to stimulants would explain her more vehement reaction than my own.
I have now the well-known fear of losing information, recalling the time Dawn trashed my computer on the eve of our wedding. (I also have the well-known emission of large amounts of ‘information’ or at least of words [but only to a mild degree].)
11/02/08 00:23 [Monday]
This weekend the main source of drugs for us - that is ASM - seems to have been bread bought on Friday at Somerfield Stourbridge. I cottoned on to this later on yesterday with the result that although yesterday morning I ate quite a lot of the bread toasted - most likely encouraged to do so by hypnotising words spoken early Sunday morning (that is overnight the night preceding this night, in the small hours yesterday morning) - later on yesterday I ate hardly any, and the last I ate was a single round at tea-time say 4 pm. My supposition must be that the sleep disturbance I am suffering now - although we went to bed soon after 8 pm I am not as well slept as I could be, and my eyes are sore - is a consequence of those drugs yesterday (and the day before). Under the influence yesterday evening - although I felt a definite clarification in my thinking around late afternoon yesterday (before the tea-time round of the bread) nonetheless there must have been a residue in my metabolism causing an accumulation effect when that tea-time round was taken, so that its effect was strong compared against single rounds equivalently taken earlier - my introspective capacity was still such that I was able to observe the absence of clarity caused by the final round of the bread, and the accompanying tendency to paranoia. The absence of clarity was what I call - and am right to call - lowered resolution, meaning in the number of synapses capable of being brought to bear on any sort of mental processing or problem-solving (that is, dopaminergic synapses). Subjectively what this meant was that details accompanying any thinking I was doing - dopaminergic thinking which involves structures capable of being analysed into sub-structures or in more conventional parlance patterns as treated of in pattern-recognition consisting of component parts (features) in relationship with each other (various sorts of relationship, including spatial, temporal and set-inclusion) - were reduced. Both the details of sub-structures were blighted - so for example resolution of visual perception (but especially of internal envisagement involving structures deriving from the visual field, ie making use of memories of things seen with the eyes) was downgraded and this would almost certainly be measurable experimentally in terms of fine discrimination say between similar characters of the alphabet (thinking of my own particular obsession in ‘character recognition’) perhaps characters not so familiar (eg Hebrew characters to one not so familiar with Hebrew) - and the details of connoted structures (by which I mean ‘associated’ structures in the terminology I effected in my younger days, that is obiter dicta type structures which come to mind when one is thinking on one subject and ‘related’ subjects or structures arise by connotation). The latter one could surely measure experimentally (as I believe I have mentioned before) by asking a subject treated to dopamine-blockade to speak out or write down all the words he could find related to a given word, either in a limited time (the speed at which connoted ideas arise would be seen to be slowed) or given indefinite time (the overall extent of the ‘concept cloud’ of associated ideas would be seen to be reduced).
The ‘paranoia’ I mentioned consisted in my failure to understand the likelihood that we are foisted these drugs lately for quite sensible purposes, even though previously they were given more under the auspices of psychiatric prescribers for purposes such prescribers might conventionally think of (such as, in the vague terms they do think in as I have seen from Eid making a diagnosis of Dawn in the summer of 2006 and from Kurian in continuing Dawn’s prescription of risperidone on a recent occasion, to rectify tendency - in Dawn or myself - to schizophrenia). The extent and cost of The Experiment latterly - for example in numbers of vehicles put on the roads when we are about (certainly when our being about has been anticipated, although saying that even though we were expected in Birmingham Saturday and not Stourbridge which was as far as we got, still on the bus home from Stourbridge an impressive number of motor-cyclists were supplied) - surely gives strong indication that sensible results are sought for sensible reasons, instead of these costs being incurred simply for the sake of our health Dawn and I or to demonstrate (conceivably expected by the psychiatric fraternity but regarded as a joke by anyone else with close knowledge of the facts) the correctness of concepts employed in psychiatry. The nature of paranoia (as again I have hinted before) lies in bringing forward expectations - and the use of the term paranoia implies they are inappropriately brought forward - founded in significant unpleasure one has suffered in the past. In my case this means treatment by psychiatrists. If a person has never suffered significant unpleasure, they will be less likely to exhibit paranoia, which explains (at least partially) the contribution of preceding life experience (and childhood experience) in ‘mental illness’. No doubt the degree of the preceding suffering makes a contribution not only to the severity of any mental illness but to its occurrence at all, and almost anyone stressed sufficiently will exhibit post-traumatic disorder (eg returnee soldiers from the Great War, and Army horses also exhibited distorted behaviour I believe).
The question how the fact of having insufficient processing capacity for one’s needs (at a given time) leads to paranoia specifically is answered by reflecting that mental processing only needs to be done really for negative experiences, to compute methods of avoidance. If things are going well, the only thinking one feels invited to do is based either on opportunities available for pursuit - eg a man planning his next sexual conquest - or simple playing-about as part of accruing experience useful for the future (which youngsters do a lot - my favourite example is the gambolling of fox cubs - and which scientific researchers do a lot - even those in ‘private practice’ and not employed say by the State in trying to perfect armaments). So if there is a threat - based on preceding life experience but exaggerated by excessive dopamine-propagation, or rather by influences similar to frustration effects whereby if one’s processing power is insufficient there is greater and greater striving after adequate processing (a species indeed of amplificatory feedback often rearing its head in schizophrenia) - then the quantity of processing being done is raised and focuses on the threat as perceived in terms of expectations learnt in the past. This is my view of how either a naturally raised level of dopamine turnover or stress raising a processing requirement with which the individual’s powers are not commensurate (or the two in combination) can lead to effects observable as paranoia.
11/02/08 04:40
I have been continuing my programming, and while I have a certain tiredness of the eyes (that’s the best word, I think: they aren’t sore any more, or itching or anything along those lines) I believe this is more or less natural from having been concentrating at this time of the morning having had not quite sufficient sleep. In other words I regard it as a working-out of sleep disturbance associated with yesterday’s drugging, and it is not severely unpleasant or inconvenient. I have drunk two cups of coffee and eaten some Sugar Puffs (without milk) and a small quantity of corned beef. It is a virtual certainty these things do not contain drugs. I have had no effect like boredom or inattentiveness to the work I have been doing (what I call yawnative) which confirms to me that the mild tiredness is natural and I have taken in no additional drugs this morning.
11/02/08 07:57
I now have the unclarity of mind - manifesting as slight stuffiness in the head as well as stuffy nose - which indicates to me I have ingested ASM (and also the quickness with which I am resolving bugs in the prog I am continuing with is less: I am tending to fall into repeating much the same sequence of alterations in trying to get the bug to disappear, this not helped by losing the clarity of the memory which tells me whether I have attempted the same steps in the sequence already; my internal envisagement of what the prog should be doing - to compare against what it actually is doing, - that is the model in my mind, is less clear and difficult to avail myself of, also). This ASM has presumably come from either the coffee or the Utterly Butterly, and - although I do not feel entirely confident to trust my previous assessment, as my memory of the details of it are unclear - I would think more likely it is the Utterly Butterly as the coffee gave no sign earlier - hour after hour - of containing drugs, whereas soon after eating crackers spread with Utterly Butterly I feel these effects.
15:52. It is surprising to me how much encouragement it is possible to derive from other people’s expressions of interest and even approval and assistance. It is more surprising to me as I am not accustomed to it, and this time again it is Dawn who concurs with my methodology when most people would not. That is we are going to Wombourne to fetch more river water and the justification in Dawn’s mind is that it will give us a walk in the country when otherwise we would have nothing much to do. Part of the reason for her relative enthusiasm is that ordinary ‘values’ - as reasons for doing things - are of less significance to her and ‘variety of experience’ - including doing something quirky if there is a justifiable rationale - is of greater significance. Although hypnotising advisers may have sought to persuade her of ordinary values - I’m still working on the basis underlying her vehemence today in wanting to be in Nottinghamshire (I suspect Authoritarian influences) - at heart she thinks much as I do (which is why we are so closely tied now after three years of wedded bliss).
12/02/08 02:53 [Tuesday]
I have made a start on the rather lengthy job of converting my old website colinbrough.co.uk into a suitable macro form (that is into .mach.txt files for use with the macro compiler I wrote in VB) and bringing it in as a subsidiary part of the present barrass-brough.org.uk. I note certain inconsistencies which will need to be thought about more thoroughly when I have time (and patience) to spend on such an activity: bulleted lists appear sometimes differently (with differently sized bullets, that is); the paragraph spacing within numbered lists needs to be made consistent; the use of Top links is not consistent in that some time back I did not put them in after every day’s diary; not apparent in the rendered version but still an inconsistency is that when I was using MS Word without so much experience the HTML I output was not filtered, and in particular references in tags to EN-US language remain in parts.
12/02/08 04:47
Since eating some Sugar Puffs without milk - these Sugar Puffs retained for some months past and conceivably for more than a year - I have been suffering the effects of a sedative drug, in inattentiveness and tired/sore eyes. I think they will have to go over the fence.
12/02/08 08:06
My presumption now is that the sedative mentioned derived not from the Sugar Puffs - which had no similar effects on me yesterday - but from beer which I bought at Wombourne Co-op yesterday evening and the second bottle of which I drank - most of it, chucking the remainder when my suspicion was roused - after getting up this morning around 1 am. My presumption further - based on more severe (and unpleasant) effects now in trapped wind and sore eyes (much more sore than earlier when they felt tired rather than sore) - is that the drugs contained (as well as probably the sedative I initially suspected, making me sleepy as such) a component of ASM. My inclination is to feel bitter and indignant - the drugs (more I now believe than merely being made sleepy could account for) took me off the programming I had been planning to do, and even away from the website preparation I got into doing instead - but considering the mildness of recent dosing and the fact that the ASM almost certainly is in a one-off form (most likely in the beer, as I said) and will wear off within a matter of hours (if indeed it is ASM, but I think the evidence is there as I have explained) I shall resign myself and hope to be compensated sometime (although I have been anticipating such compensation since the early 1980s) with money. The reason I was taken away from the computer work was of course lack of clarity in my thinking, a different symptom as I say from mere sleepiness which by an effort of Will can be set aside certainly until several 24-hour periods have passed. (As obiter dicta I explain again my view that severe sleep deprivation - after several 24-hour periods sleepless - gives a similar style of reduction in processing capacity to that giving rise - or at least too low a processing capacity, compared against the requirement, gives rise - to symptoms in schizophrenia based on confusion in a mind over-full - in the sleep deprivation case over-full because not cleared by dreaming sleep, helped simply by reduction close to zero in incoming stimuli - between ideas which are very similar - the more full of ideas the mind is the more similarity of this kind there is likely to be - but should be maintained distinct.)
I comment introspectively that without ASM (and I have little doubt now that a very low dosing is influencing me) I should trouble myself to rectify the preceding sentence which although I know I do tend to include nested parenthetic insertions is in this instance particularly cumbersome and confusing. It’s true I still could ‘by an effort of will’ do so, but my judgment of the expected benefit set against the onerousness of the task - significantly more onerous under the influence as I am: and this is evidenced indeed by the production of clumsy sentences in the first place - is that it isn’t worthwhile. Reflecting on that, it is true for many people that their view of the profit from polishing their language isn’t worth the effort, unless for some special purpose such as a report for work or a piece to be published if they are (say) journalists, but then again the average writer of language is not going to produce sentences complex enough to be clumsy in that way in the first place. The essence of schizophrenia, I would suggest, can be represented in terms of a tendency to produce complex output - whether sentences (think hebephrenia) or structures within the mind (hypotheses, say) - but an insufficient capacity to sort them out, for oneself internally (or in one’s diary) let alone for presentation comprehensibly to other people. ASM puts me in the latter camp of producers of complex structures with insufficient ability to sort and clarify them. As I say, ASM makes me more not less schizo.
12/02/08 08:46
I should think something is unnaturally elevating my serotonin level of optimism, because I am regarding this dosing with ASM not so much from a negative viewpoint but (thinking of the downward trend in the dosages, for one thing) from a positive viewpoint. It seems evident that until recently most of my expositions about drug effects fell on deaf ears, and the druggists persisted with dosages they thought reasonable or low, and dealt with my negative reactions as symptomatic of illness and to be cured by persuasion from nighttime voicers (in the tradition of trying to persuade schizophrenics out of their schizophrenia using talking therapies). Latterly the correct track has been followed - if I must suffer ASM at all - of giving dosages very low (by the manufacturers’ recommended standards, I daresay) with the useful results (I expect it is agreed) which have followed.
12/02/08 11:05
With this drug (or these drugs) at this mild dosage I am able now to abstract myself from the programming I was doing, feeling confident I have sorted out in my mind adequately (in such a way as to not forget) the basis of the problem currently showing in the prog. Given certain combinations of drugs in the past I should have ploughed on, annoying Dawn by giving her too little of my time (and disrupting our plans to get to Birmingham at a reasonable time today for the shops): presumably these drugs in the past would have combined stimulant (driving me on) with ASM (making me lose track and generally causing me confusion, including confusion of memory).
One reason for abstracting myself now (not strictly necessary yet in order to prepare to go out with Dawn) is that I have an interesting comment to make on the confusion in my mind which has led to or at least exacerbated the problem arising in the prog, and delayed its tracking down. In my website diary I have been on about confounding one thing with another which is similar but in truth distinct, this confusion arising (in my view) in schizophrenia and other conditions (including my own condition when given ASM). In this prog the ‘similar’ things which are in truth distinct are locations on the scanned document (the basic image which is supposedly being analysed for contents which are lineages of printed characters) in co-ordinate systems at different scales. Different scaling is needed (1) to display the document fitted to the screen, and (2) to get the resolution right (in cells equivalent to pixels) for satisfactory recognition processing (good enough to make distinction between similar characters (!) but low enough not to be of overwhelming cost in processing). Where the prog is going wrong is in using one scale of co-ordinates in place of another, due to confusion in my mind - or rather failure to make distinction - between the different co-ordinate systems in use for different purposes.
I will just mention again the example of debits and credits. These also are ‘similar but in truth distinct’: they are two sides of the same coin and easily confounded by people learning accountancy till the structures in the learners’ heads modelling the accounts have firmed up with practice and experience, this ‘congealing’ of neural structures enabling higher resolution in distinguishing one thing from another. (One could no doubt look at this as initially versatile neurons - switchable between tasks - coming to be usable only for the limited subject in which they have ‘congealed’ - this congealing related plainly to synapses becoming less alterable as memory accrues with experience - but thereby becoming more efficiently usable for that subject: this indeed a metaphor for what use memory is at all as a brain function helping the organism with the brain persist longer.)
13/02/08 01:36 [Wednesday]
I shall relate some of the symptoms - symptoms caused by drugs, that is - which Dawn has suffered lately, whether because she still does not entirely eschew the tapwater or whether because the dosages are tailored more to me than to her I can’t tell. A major problem in giving drugs surreptitiously in the way we are given them, of course, is unpredictability of dosages and timings.
Three or four days ago now - that would be Sunday or Saturday - Dawn went through several hours (almost a day, one could think of it) of depressed mood. From memory which is incomplete (this itself suggesting ASM was acting) augmented by looking back at notes I made but did not encrypt (because decryption the way the prog is now would take an effort) I can tell that most likely over the weekend - I hypothesised at the time that the origin was bread bought from Somerfield Kingswinford on Friday, but most likely to ensure we could not evade a certain minimum dosage of the drugs the perpetrators led us to acquire several different foodstuffs containing the drugs - we both took in ASM with a serotonin-lowering effect, quite possibly in fact reserpine as I seem to remember myself being made less self-assured this a mild form of the ‘paradoxical anxiety’ associated more with reserpine than with the more modern drugs. Because Dawn’s base serotonin level is such that she is more susceptible to factors causing depression than I, this would probably provide the explanation. The ‘depression’ manifested partly as boredom, as I myself reported in the 1980s to Armond this leading to his comment when I first told him of my suicide attempt, ‘People don’t suicide from boredom.’ Such feelings of boredom I suppose derive from the lowering of serotonin and dopamine together which creates even more underactivity - of the mind, which is the primary concern for the sufferer - than clinically observed naturally occurring depression leading to life seeming empty and devoid of anything worthwhile to do, leading indeed more than in naturally occurring depression to lack of the will to fight the depression. The first effect on Dawn I now recall - one evening, which would have been Friday evening or Saturday evening - was to bring back to her the feelings of loss she experienced when her mother died in 2004, a few months before she was hospitalised on the occasion I met her in fact. (The fluctuation in her expressions of regret about her mother’s death - that is the degree to which they include angrily blaming Bassetlaw Hospital - is very indicative of the variation in contribution from different neurotransmitters in her brain, and mostly I suspect depends on the drugs she is subjected to stimulant drugs leading to greater expressions - and internal feelings - of anger. Such anger being related to frustration is greatest in manifestation when lowered serotonin concurrently with the stimulant effect on dopamine leads to the realisation there is nothing to be done about the negative experience, or when some other factor - inability to compute any plan, caused by dopamine lowered in another presumably more frontal part of the brain, if a minor stimulant is combined with ASM say - intervenes to frustrate any possible way of expressing the anger or solving the problem of the negative experience.) The next day or two - Sunday and Monday, probably - Dawn was in such a condition of anger, and moreover part of the condition - a condition created I would think (as I have just been discussing) by admixture of stimulant drugs - was that the focus of her feeling of emptiness became more recent and dwelt on her present separation from her teenage son and her daughters’ young children which she blamed me for in my unwillingness to visit Nottinghamshire (and this itself represented a focus on the more negative, pessimistic aspects - due to the lowering of serotonin - in that three of her grandchildren are to the south of Birmingham and not in Nottinghamshire and I would be very happy to go to see them). Yesterday morning Dawn had recovered her good spirits and was creating lists of things to get done and after achieving them counting the achievements. From my own feelings yesterday it seems evident the reason for this scenario was that we were given somehow in our foods antidepressants (and possibly before that, around Monday afternoon or even - based on my diary of early Monday as paraphrased below - starting a build-up from later on Sunday, an amphetamine-level stimulant improving the contribution from the frontal brain this leading to Dawn’s enhanced activity level earlier on yesterday, including as I say an enhancement to her ability to plan exhibited by her creation of to-do lists).
In the early hours on Monday I said this: I felt a definite clarification in my thinking around late afternoon [Sunday] ... nonetheless there must have been a residue [of the drug presumed to be reserpine] ... so that its effect was strong ... my introspective capacity was still such that I was able to observe the absence of clarity caused by the [presumed reserpine], and the accompanying tendency to paranoia.
The effect of reserpine seems to me - based mainly on reflecting on my experience of it from the past - to quell the downward transmissions from the frontal brain by which the organising power of the seriatim should be put into effect, but not significantly to suppress the upward transmissions to the frontal brain corresponding to introspective self-observation. This means for one thing that one is aware of decisions needing to be taken (ordinarily taken by the ‘executive’ in the frontal brain) but one fails to take the decisions, because of absence of the means of effectivising them making use for example of output from the frontal brain with feedback to it for honing; the upshot is that one feels disempowered and anxious or at least ill-at-ease and unconfident as a result. This ties in well with my comments early Monday about having introspective capacity (enhanced by the presumed amphetamine from around Sunday afternoon time) but (the implication is) being disempowered that is, too subject to the influence of events outside of myself. When my ability to plan for activity returns after a dosing with ASM the first activity usually I spend a lot of time on is computer programming, as it excepts the problem - requiring extra processing power - of entropy in the real world. Also, if my capacity to effectivise plans is still diminished - in the case of reserpine as explained above - doing computer programming is a way of doing something giving rise to the pleasure of achievement without having to produce a lot of effective output: similar really to outputting words instead of actions, another thing I am given to even without any drugs at all but in my natural self. Dawn - although she does sometimes get lost in thought - is more than myself given to taking action in the real world, and therefore corresponding to my computer programming from Sunday onwards she - starting later than my recovery, in her case on Monday I suppose, after a phase of frustrated declamation of words on Sunday lasting into Monday (I recall her attitude as we were coming away from the park in Stourbridge early afternoon Monday) - formed plans in written-down to-do lists which she took action to implement starting (in the real world) yesterday - Tuesday - morning. (The degree to which the availability of funds to us is controlled by the Authorities I do not know, but in December our funds were caused to fail and also very little money was available to us over the weekend just gone, until yesterday in fact, so putting plans into effect was not really possible until yesterday anyway. It strikes me as significant the way the availability of funds and the effects of the drugs link together as regards timing, as if planned indeed by the Authorities. On the other hand it could have been simply chance, because in a state of depression - for us over the weekend just gone - one is not so likely to waste money as when given stimulant drugs, and in fact having money to spend can provide a means of partial relief of the depression.)
When I mention Dawn’s frustrated declamation of words the implication is that for Dawn (and for most people) using words alone to get things done is unsatisfactory, because of insufficient resolution that is inability (if you like) to say - or even to write - just the right words. This goes hand-in-hand (for a very great proportion of people) with their preferring action not words (even in the films and TV they like to watch, for example). I would suggest that in schizo cases - cases of unusually high dopamine turnover in the brain especially on the side of perception, this giving rise to over-notice of discrepancies requiring rectification - this can lead to problems involving amplificatory feedback. I have puzzled a lot over Dawn’s relative sociability compared to my own - her desire for the company of other people - and my conclusion is that while there may well be a contribution from her having grown up with siblings and sociable parents whereas I was an only child whose parents hardly went out and hardly ever together, the main factor is her greater level of activity in the real world this tied together with the absence of satisfaction she obtains from language as words (or other symbol structures such as computer code or those used in mathematical manipulations) alone. But as I say for a schizo person to go into society too much (as in the case of Charlotte Brontë) can lead to difficulties either more or less psychiatric in their nature (in the Brontë case the problems were more ‘psychosomatic’ involving sick headaches and the like). Likewise for a schizo person to have real-world ambitions - say to make a lot of money, this necessarily entailing planning for oneself for activity in the real world rather than either working for someone else or acting within the world of academia - is very likely to lead to frustration and/or stress-related dysfunction.
Writing language such as I am writing this morning requires more finesse - more processing power - (if it is not mere empty language) than writing computer programs, and I am doing it now (but hoping nonetheless to get some more programming done) by virtue of the fact that the weekend drugs have worn off. I should mention that Dawn overnight has been suffering physical problems - including diarrhoea and vomiting - which I take to be withdrawal effects of the recent drugs and for which I think additionally she deserves to be compensated.
14/02/08 01:41 [Thursday]
Yesterday after uploading my website update - around 4 am, I think - I got into doing more work on security of our premises. I used to find as a teenager that when I got into some activity a species of momentum took over and I would persist with it in a concentrated way (usually that was over a number of weeks though, for example in my interest in constructing my own computer - the first was based on electromagnetic relays and was the only one completed and then only in a simplified form compared against the original plans). This faddish way of taking up interests is a known feature in Aspergers Syndrome, a condition related to schizophrenia. What I have theorised when considering the shorter-term bursts of localisation of my interest under the influence of ASM - in the Spring of 2006, I think, when I noted in writing bits for my website which I believed were replies to invitations from nighttime voicers to deal with certain topics (such as what freedom and responsibility are and how they are affected by ASM) - was that the reason for ‘following my nose’ leading to persistence in some topic with what I then used the term momentum to cover was an insufficient overview of how what I was doing fitted into the overall picture - of my life, ultimately - this implying no executive interruption arose to take me away from the topic of the moment when other things which needed doing became more pressing. In my teenage years not only was my seriatim immature to be able to perform this function of interrupting but further I had no need really to interrupt myself to get other things done because I had no responsibilities as my parents still looked after the affairs of life (the two things go hand in hand of course: youngsters do not have a powerful seriatim but nor do they need it as their parents act in loco parentis instead of the youngsters’ own ‘incorporated parent’ performing the function.)
14/02/08 04:18
I have been trying to get a VB prog corrected which I wrote some years ago and which worked but which I was trying to ‘improve’, because it used techniques I used before I had had so much experience with VB. There’s a lot of truth in the saying, ‘If it ain’t bust don’t fix it,’ because now of course I’ve got into a mess and the prog does not work in its improved version. However, the point I am making here is that a few minutes ago I was getting nowhere and losing my concentration, and I asked myself why I was persisting with the attempted programming if I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. The answer is that there is still a residue of ASM in my metabolism, evidenced also by physical symptoms such as internal wind and unnaturally tiring eyes (and contributing to the failure of concentration). (I’m pretty sure I have taken in no more ASM since getting up over two hours ago.) The ASM effects however are very mild - although made more apparent by the time of ‘day’ and the fact that I suffered preceding sleep disturbance so that even leaving aside drug effects I am more liable to tire - and one result of this is that my seriatim is in sufficiently good shape to interrupt myself now, giving me a break from programming which had become tiresome, to write this.
Organisms without a seriatim process take action based on what is in the past. They react to stimuli. When my seriatim is debilitated (by ASM) this is what I do: I continue with activities based on what has been happening in the preceding period. Because I do not go anywhere much which provides ‘stimuli’ - and I ‘stay at home’ even more under the influence of ASM - this encourages me to persist with much the same activity hour after hour (and when my parents were alive, day after day, week after week and year after year). Non-schizo people are more inclined to react to stimuli rather than base their activities on seriatim forward-planning but they feel motivated to go out and about and expose themselves to ‘stimuli’, so their activity becomes varied by responding to events around them while out and about. But what makes humans essentially different from non-human animals is the seriatim process (and readers may guess that what I am going to say involves as a corollary that non-human animals do not develop schizophrenia) leading humans to have the capacity - which some are more inclined to use than others - to look to the future, and interrupt themselves in activities based on what has gone before in favour of activities based on estimates of what is to come. What I claim is that without ASM almost all of my own activity is based on projections into the future - indeed into a remote posterity as I have little interest in whether my ideas and theories are attended to in the present - but it sounds as though I am saying people suffering schizophrenia - or more conventional schizophrenia - also do this, that is live for the future and not in the present. In that case are they all geniuses who will eventually receive acclaim such as Emily Brontë has posthumously achieved?
The basis on which people live for the future - that is base their activities on computations about what can be expected to come to pass - is use of the frontal brain (the seriatim process). The reason it is more active in some people than others is that their lower processes tax them with puzzles which need the frontal brain to try to resolve. If you like to look at it this way, some people are puzzled (and even worried) by philosophical questions such as the nature of existence, whereas other people (most people in fact) simply live their lives (I won’t say simply exist). Schizophrenia arises when the puzzles (turning to worrisome problems) are so difficult that the frontal brain, even, cannot cope (depending of course not on the worrisome questions themselves being always ultimate philosophical questions, but on the relationship between the degree of questioning thrown up by the lower processes - maybe not on anything very deep or elaborate - and the capacity of the frontal brain to answer satisfactorily). This then (I suggest) explains the frequent parallels between schizophrenia and questions of deep philosophy, and living ‘for the future’ - that is in a world of abstraction from the real here-and-now - rather than for the present.
14/02/08 13:00
This morning we went to Stourbridge to pay a cheque into our new-ish Abbey account, and ended up (rather against my preference, as I would rather do most food shopping in a busy place on a Saturday) buying a fair quantity of food at Wilkinsons and at The Big Apple (where I must say their eggs are very reasonably priced and eggs as sure as eggs is eggs are undrugged). At Somerfield I bought bread as risklessly as possible - that is a popular label not chosen by randomisation which fails to take account of the fact more shelf space may be occupied by esoteric brands which no one in their right mind will buy - and Evian mainly to get some 75cl bottles. But I am now trying out this water, in a cup of coffee.
As the ASM wears off I find - having before leaving home (say 8 am in fact) been through a phase of feeling vulnerable and angry at the same time - I am feeling motivated in an intense way which in the past I suspect I have confused with effects of stimulant drugs of the amphetamine style. This motivation though - this natural motivatedness, if you like - is not so intense and slanted to the lower-level of too hasty activity in the real world as to be a distraction: I am able to plan adequately - better indeed than in a less motivated state, this arguing ‘activation’ of the frontal brain instead of merely ‘stimulation’ of the lower reaches - before and (depending on the overview allocation of resources) as I go, in the manner of rolling plan which I find so useful and pleasurable and which I used to have the benefit of in part of my Bristol period (around May 2004 I should think, in the immediate aftermath of the assault and before the presumably Nottinghamshire-based Authorities caught up with me in Bristol). Mentioning Nottinghamshire I have been asking myself if it can be of any relevance that the Mental Health Act Commission hangs out in Nottingham.
14/02/08 13:35
In my teenage years (and I keep going on about my teenage years because prior to the present time, except for brief interludes since 2003, that was the only time I have had anything close to the adult abilities of the seriatim I should naturally exercise) when I was building furniture (of a fashion) and was assisted by my best friend, I used to lay out a plan of activities for each Sunday (when he visited) setting targets which we both got pleasure from achieving, and they were not overly difficult targets. This was all unconscious of any theory of goal-directed activity such as I later read about in relation to AI, and I believe comes naturally to a certain type of person - the natural Thatcherite, you might say - except some such people (many, you might say) are more interested than I am in getting the job done and getting it done with great stress on efficient use of time, this often manifesting as concern to make profit in the monetary sense. As I say, the goals I decided on were not at all troublesome to achieve, and the benefit I found in understressing was that it gave plenty of time for learning by acquiring experience in all sorts of obiter ways.
14/02/08 16:54
This afternoon I have been continuing with security work, and have had success - and mostly been focusing on - security lights. The mains supply to the one I fixed under the eaves yesterday is now led through an air brick in the master bedroom to a three-pin mains socket adjacent to the air brick. This yields the ‘profit’ that over half the 10m of mains cable I bought from Maplins is freed up for use otherwise (probably for a supply to the other bracket-mounted security light when I shall have mounted it, saving purchase of a further 5m which I had pencilled in). The TV signal cable from the camera nearby the security light under the eaves also passes with the mains cable through the air brick.
[I leave this paragraph with its mistaken ‘utter conviction’ - it seems mistaken to me now at 15/02/08 07:08 (although at 15/02/08 07:59 I have again changed my mind, back to the utter conviction but now not so utter, this reversion seemingly coming about by virtue of clearer memories returning of actual physical data in the colour coding at the male-connector ends of the cable ‘not supplied with the camera kit’ whether as a drug effect or because I am now more awake for natural reasons that is the advance of daylight) - because I think the cause of the mistaken confidence may show up a rather subtle effect of drugs - either antidepressant I was affected by unawares or simply the wearing-off effect of preceding ASM. Naturally I - even I - am subject to error, but the nature of the error here in overconfidence seems untypical of me. As I say, it may well be that some combination involving an antidepressant effect making me overly sanguine while not to my usual degree checking things out in self-doubt led to the error.] The point I wish to make