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. July 2007 .
01/07/07 05:10 [Sunday] In north Nottinghamshire
I haven’t noticed for a while now that I wake up on the hour - or over a period in the past it frequently seemed to be at a quarter to the hour - which I used to attribute to the agents of the Authorities speaking to us in our sleep starting their shift at those times. However, having got up earlier in the night - around 3 am, but not then on the hour - I have now finally woken up just on 5 am. How anyone can not notice when they have been in a drugged sleep rather than a natural one I don’t know: my sleep this past night was certainly exaggerated - I won’t say enhanced - by sedative drugs. I have made coffee now with water brought with me and coffee granules newly opened and bought randomly recently - possibly at Sainsbury’s in Birmingham in which case the coffee is in question.
Strangely, I am still inclined to trust the water bought at Sainsbury’s Merry Hill yesterday as there is no indication from testing it that it contains drugs: it’s true that assessment yesterday was clouded by the drugs already affecting me but certainly the primary effect of sedation came on before sampling that water.
I do not feel so much under threat today of detention in Bassetlaw Hospital. Rather I would think in terms of members of Dawn’s family having been recruited and paid by the Authorities to play a part in The Experiment and the Authorities not wanting to waste such fees, so that we are brought to this area in order to interact with - and no doubt if possible be drugged by - those members of Dawn’s family.
Today I suppose I should make an effort to get to Doncaster, say to M + S which advertises Drinking Water in the customer toilets. I must be circumspect though bearing in mind that such advertisement is almost a direct invitation, and it is Sunday, and I may well have been ‘hypnotised’ during my drugged sleep. It would probably be best to obtain water if at all from some other toilets than those, possibly for example - without so much effort required - from the public toilets in Harworth. Possibly it being Sunday such collection of water is better avoided at all. One thing I could do to advantage might be to procure water from the River Idle and thereby test out my more recently bought chlorine tablets. My present thinking is that there is no point retaining the Medion computer without its hard drive: even with a new hard drive I would not trust the Medion and to let someone else have it might be encouragement - through failure to waste sufficiently - of the Authorities to repeat their activities causing my doubt in the first place about the Medion (whether or not such doubt is entirely accurate in the particular case of the Medion). What I’m thinking is I might go down to the river before Dawn is awake and jettison the Medion while collecting water.
01/07/07 06:03
Mission accomplished: Medion jettisoned in the River Idle and water - almost a full 5l - collected. The Properties of the ‘voice-activated’ recording made while I was out say Rec Date/Time: 2007/07/01 05:42 and Length: 00:00:58.
01/07/07 06:51
Trying to look in the safe remaining here at the park home I encountered some difficulty at first and even after replacing the batteries - the design of the safe being poor so that the batteries can be got at from outside the safe (and my presumption is I was ‘hypnotised’ in 2004 to buy a safe with such poor design) - there was some difficulty (from which I conclude the replacement batteries are not as good as they should be given the date on them, which I find is often the case with batteries I have and I am inclined with at least a 50% probability to blame the Authorities for contriving this). Eventually though I have got into the safe - or at least my hand has - and I find that amongst other things there are software CDs in there almost all of which were previously faulty whether or not they have since been switched - my presumption, with some suggestive evidence, being that this safe has been accessed by agents of the Authorities - and coins in a money box (and gravy granules suspected of being drugged which when I get a chance I shall chuck).
01/07/07 07:04
The money box contains a £20 note as well as the coins. I was however under a misapprehension about the Leeds building society cheque book. I recall now it will be found in a bag left in the ’van retrieved from detention in Solihull.
01/07/07 07:36
It’s a bit odd. My mind here at the park home is less fertile with ideas of constructive things to do, and surely this can’t always be because of the effect of ASM (say given with more consistency and not avoided so well here somehow) because on occasion I have suffered ASM in Kingswinford and don’t genuinely believe I am significantly under the influence of ASM now here. The reason must be the less familiar environment, on the face of it a paradox as less familiarity should surely raise activation, and hence processing, more? On the parallel with how it was when I went up to university, the solution to the paradox evidently is that because the environment is less familiar, more processing effort has to be used in coping with the external and less is available for daydreaming or any form of inner cogitation. This means (again somewhat paradoxically) that life is more boring - coping with merely the physical environment is not (not for me, anyway) of significant interest (and thinking about it people more schizophrenic than myself must have these effects to a much greater degree: in a tranquil familiar environment they can daydream or do whatever they do within their minds - for example work out the theory of relativity - but put in an unfamiliar environment - such as a mental ward - especially a difficult one - say where they are at risk of assault - their mind is constrained to devote itself to the external). To further debate with myself the paradox: over Christmas here at the park home I felt understimulated in the early mornings. I blamed this on drugs, but now I can see the reason was at least partly the physical context. Even in the dead quiet of dark early morning my mind was not free as it is ‘at home’ to daydream (to abbreviate these internal uses of the mind thus) because the wider context required it to be alert to the environment. In other words because of the less familiarity, I could not feel absolutely sure what might or might not happen, even though nothing appeared to be happening or likely to happen in the understimulating early morning. When I was first in my room at Cambridge I was more explicitly aware of this: anyone might come to the door at any time (I felt), and someone might even let themselves in unannounced as I was not in control of who had a key (it is faintly possible this concern was exaggerated because people did indeed let themselves in to talk to me while I was asleep, and I was subconsciously aware of it perhaps). At the park home in December I had no explicit concerns of this type - for example that someone might come to the door at 4 am (although having said that I was suspicious that I was ‘hypnotised’, especially if I stepped out into the garden for a while and especially if I felt the effect of drugs sedating my consciousness for example in the effect I called blanking) - but underlyingly the necessity for attachment to the external was there. (I mention what may have occurred to some readers anyway, that what I am expounding here basically is the explanation of homesickness such as Emily Brontë suffered from so terribly.)
When I read Silvano Arieti on schizophrenia some decades back he said that the prodromal personality type was almost always either schizoid or stormy (as he called it). I would relate this given my thoughts above to the distinction between the Emily Brontë personality type (corresponding to schizoid) and the Aleister Crowley personality type (corresponding I hypothesise to stormy). What I am asking myself is how is the fact to be explained that Aleister Crowley was seemingly the opposite of subject to homesickness, in that he took himself off to far-flung foreign parts for example choosing by a random process (although pretending he was consulting the gods) to live at Cefalu? In behaving as he did - for example appearing in public places making unusual claims about what he called Magick, and in general behaving in a flamboyant extravert and in fact highly colourful way - he was more schizophrenic than schizoid, yet he maintained a connection with reality entirely sufficient to persist with life in its practical aspects (although he did run into difficulty with money later in life). As an initial observation it must have been the case that his serotonin level had a natural elevation bringing a component of mania to his behaviour, and rather countering the usual schizo tendency to have doubt and to blame oneself, that is to shrink from self-motivated activity and to depend in the main on other people preferably one’s parents. Why do I think of AC as schizo rather than manic? Because in the manic case - for example from what I know of Stephen Fry - the mania is directed towards realistic goals such as fame as an actor. But in the case of AC his manic enthusiasm was directed to unusual goals not connected in any conventional way with practical matters such as obtaining money or achieving fame. He enjoyed - as I do and no doubt everyone I would call schizo does - thinking about and in his case living out fantasies, that is mental structures - which to some extent can be embodied in the real world - divorced from conventional practicality. (This applies, actually, to religious leaders and thinkers such as Moses although not necessarily to functionaries of established churches, and may apply to academics although in the main they have concerns, also, related to the esteem of their peers.)
01/07/07 10:23
I feel definitely under the influence of drugs now, and presume they derive from the Sainsbury’s sunflower spread. I have lost interest really in the goals I had - in any goals in fact - and my eyes being tired and I feeling slightly sleepy I may go back to bed. I am also experiencing some elevation of libido and all in all the syndrome is the same as I suffered the night - a few nights ago in fact - we ended up going to the church in Kingswinford to procure water from the standpipe, later than should have been because when we left the bungalow earlier I had lost track of what I was about and failed to take a water container with me. Similarly to then I am feeling a little angry, presumably because the interruption in my pursuit of my goals is creating something related to frustration. I seem to be thinking at quite high resolution so on the basis that the interference with thinking is substantially confined to pursuit of goals I conjecture the drugs comprise barbiturate with a powerful stimulant capable of elevating the libido - quite possibly amphetamine itself - admixed [this view I later re-thought]. The interest in sex I would put forward as a sort of substitute or equivalent of an interest in pursuing goals for the sake of it: I have pondered before whether ‘achievement emotion’ - which subjectively feels so like sexual orgasm - has developed through evolution out of sexual orgasm, and if so the neurotransmitter basis of what I used to call in fact ‘problem-solver’s orgasm’ may well derive from the hormonal basis of sexual orgasm (which hormonal basis I do not know much about so can conjecture little more than that). The similarities - which I can state - centre round an origin of the activity in an alert interest based in perceptual data, followed by activity mounting in intensity (with a possibility in both the mental case and the sexual case of frustration) terminating (in case of absent frustration or frustration overcome) in a climax followed by a pleasurably calm ‘basking’ interlude, after which interest becomes capable of being aroused once more.
From the fact I feel angry at being diverted from mental interests with a possibility of mental ‘orgasm’ to sexual interests with a possibility of physical orgasm, I would conclude and point out that the pleasure I derive from the former far outweighs (on average) the pleasure available from the latter. I’m sure this will completely confound conventional psychological theorists - or might have had they not read my website thus far which perhaps one or two have - but it is the case and explains without a shadow of doubt my severely negative reaction to having been deprived over the years of these ‘mental orgasms’ through having been given ASM.
01/07/07 18:49
This morning Dawn and I walked into Bircotes to visit her sister. Dawn accepted coffee there but I did not. The sister made comments about diazepam as a relaxant, which I picked up as meaning muscle relaxant (which diazepam is) but of course also it is an anxiolytic and general tranquillising agent. I think the general idea as regards drugs now we are here in north Notts is to get into me - at least, if not Dawn - a mixture of a sedative (more likely a benzo than a barbiturate from the absence of mental confusion I am suffering) and an amphetamine-like stimulant (quite possibly amphetamine itself) [this view I later re-thought]. On the car trip here yesterday Dawn accepted a can of pop from her sister and her response to drugs in it seems to confirm that there was such a mixture, including indeed amphetamine. I did not accept any drink. This morning as I said I suffered an amphetamine-like effect subdued by a sedative effect in combination, and the syndrome became stronger this afternoon. We had visitors in the shape of Dawn’s son and his girlfriend and then (as well) Dawn’s daughter and her family. Dawn’s son brought corned beef with him (which Dawn had phoned to ask him to fetch having suggested - and I agreed - we have corned beef hash for tea) and I feel sure this also contained the drug mixture. The drugs I ingested earlier presumably derived from the Sainsbury’s sunflower spread and although I think we were not ‘hypnotised’ to go to Sainsbury’s yesterday I feel sure wherever we had gone locally, foods - such as bread and spread - would have been made available containing these drugs. The dosage I think is low and affects my sensitivity more than most - for example Dawn’s son and his girlfriend ate the corned beef hash with little noticeable effect (although of course they did not also eat other foods containing more of the same whereas in my case the drugs must have been accumulating in my system since at least yesterday) - and it might not have been necessary and certainly not vital to intercept innocent purchase of the food items in question yesterday eg at Sainsbury’s. As regards ‘hypnotic’ guidance I think probably Dawn was ‘hypnotised’ - or ‘forced’ in the sense a conjuror would use the term - yesterday to get Warburtons Danish from Sainsbury’s (which I have not sampled myself but strongly suspect will contain the same drug mixture) and to suggest corned beef today.
The question remaining of course is why I am being tricked - or have been, although I shall try to take measures of avoidance - to take this drug mixture. It is much the same mixture as in the 1980s produced a psychotomimetic effect and which I have always presumed was given deliberately for such an effect. Then of course (and recently in June) the sedative used was barbiturate and its confusional effect on me considerably enhanced the psychotomimetic result. Also a much higher dosage of amphetamine was used. It is conceivable that the psychosis induced was accidental and misread as genuine psychosis because my extreme sensitivity to these drugs was not appreciated. On the other hand Dawn’s response to these drugs yesterday was unmistakable so one might conclude my sensitivity is no greater than hers. I think probably she does have an exaggerated response to stimulants in the amphetamine family - as probably do all schizo types with their elevated level of dopamine - but it is soon quietened by sedatives and yesterday the ‘unmistakable’ response she exhibited was due to the amphetamine before the sedative had had a chance to kick in. (In the autumn and winter at the end of 2005 she exhibited an exaggerated response to stimulant drugs given then with little or no sedative combined, but possibly with ASM combined but only in a low dosage because of my unfortunate reaction to ASM. The differences yesterday seen in Dawn due to a minor sedative instead of ASM being combined included elevated libido, due to the amphetamine and not countered by the sedative as it would have been countered by ASM [this view I later re-thought].) In other words the conclusion is that most people even if they show an exaggerated response to amphetamine it is countered by sedative drugs either minor or major, or certainly the effect on the mind is countered (depending on relative dosages) although bodily effects such as on the libido may still show through (depending on which types of drugs are used). In my case however there are significant effects even though sedatives be admixed, and this results from the significance in my mental functioning of the frontal brain through its numerous connections (both ways that is to and from) with the middle and lower brain.
Having said all that (and, as this morning, the effects of the drugs, in particular the effect of causing me anger, wearing thin already not so much - what I suspected this morning - because they are ‘cancelling out’ but because at such low dosages the effects are bound to be short-lived) it seems clear the reason for giving these drugs is to obtain my comments on the effects and the explanation of them. I say this mainly because the drugs are ‘risked’ on Dawn too, and the reason there will not be for some effect on her certainly not an effect of engendering psychosis but will be for the sake of my observations (although it may be that my allegation is under test that amphetamine combined with a certain proportion of sedative including some ASM is good for Dawn). It’s a little confusing that amphetamine distorts the mind’s understanding of ‘reasons’ (that is causal chains). For example my presumption or half-presumption an hour ago was that I am being given these drugs because they connect me better with the external and therefore I better observe the behaviour of Dawn’s family (and later theorise about it), this the reason we are here in north Notts. But while now I can imagine that may be part of the reason - in general terms my observations on people are of interest to the Authorities (rather than my computer programs for example) - it seems likely the major part of it is the observations I am naturally drawn to make on the effects of the drugs particularly on Dawn and myself.
To say more about my allegation that amphetamine could be good for Dawn: it is (on this theory) good for her (with other drugs admixed) for exactly the reason that its effect on her is what it is on me, that is it increases connection with the external - it makes more processing resources available for functioning in the real world. In my case I find that effect somewhat distasteful, but not in her case (although I would always refer the question to herself if such drug treatment were offered other than on this test basis). The reason for the difference I have to say is that even with my mind on higher things (daydreaming, if you like) I have sufficient processing power to cope with practical reality; but such is not the case for all schizo types.
02/07/07 03:06 [Monday]
I associate getting up at 3 am when I am not really properly awake - my eyes puffy and my seriatim lagging - and have discomfort in my legs, as I have now to some extent, with risperidone. Yesterday I was imagining that the combination of drugs I was suffering was amphetamine plus an innocuous sedative like Valium, but that would not provide any sort of basis why my internal cogitation - founded in the seriatim - might be reduced in favour of connection to the external (which syndrome I thought I could also detect in Dawn in her case to more advantage than in my case). Also there was the fact that - certainly earlier on yesterday, before my spirit had been subdued I suppose by the ASM - the combination of drugs I was suffering made me angry, and it’s difficult to see why a combination of amphetamine and say Valium should make me angry when the combination of amphetamine and barbiturate although making me confused did not make me angry (except in retrospect when I found my mental confusion was causing me to waste my time and my efforts). For Dawn not to suffer adverse effects from the amphetamine - and possibly I have argued to benefit from it - one would expect some admixture of ASM to be necessary. Yesterday I was vaguely supposing that she was somehow taking in ASM additionally by other means. It’s difficult to say actually why when I am under the influence of ASM without marked physical side-effects I tend to try to argue myself into the belief I am not taking in ASM - or rather I have an initial presumption which I seek corroboration for that I am not - but it is a definite trend which is always to be observed. It’s as if I don’t want to believe the Authorities can be willing to continue to inflict it on me. Every minute I am under the influence of ASM is loss to me, waste of another minute of my life, and I suppose I cannot conceive how official bodies in our supposedly civilised society can so deprive me, just as though - trying to think up a good analogy - I were deliberately imprisoned falsely in the knowledge I am entirely innocent of crime.
The sunflower spread can go and the bread can go.
02/07/07 03:36
Because I believe there is a correlation between the fact that I suffer such drugging and the fact that we come - or are brought - to north Notts (even though I do not in my present condition understand such a correlation, although I would think in terms of myself and Dawn being brought into interaction with members of her family) I would prefer to go home today and avoid coming to north Notts much ever, and avoid moving home to Lincolnshire. I don’t know if trains are running from Doncaster but phoning the National Rail enquiry line yesterday Dawn discovered the Retford/Worksop to Sheffield rail service may be out of action for another six to eight weeks (these problems on the railways a consequence of recent heavy rain and flooding).
02/07/07 03:46
I am now in a condition I have explicitly stated I dislike, that is awake in the night - it is still dark and there is no stimulation from daytime activities - with my mind empty of anything interesting to do. I understand why under the circumstances I find often when we come to north Notts - that is the drugging I suffer - I like to have people to visit (or them visit us). It is because otherwise my mind is deprived of any interesting content, just as in past years under admittedly higher dosages of older antischizophrenic drugs I needed my father to talk to me to put anything of interest into my mind at all; otherwise travelling circuitously by bus or train was a slight help, or watching TV (although the latter was the least successful means of amelioration).
02/07/07 03:54
I suppose I should detect any presence of these drugs in the coffee I am drinking, as the amphetamine content would provide some stimulation to my brain such as in the past possibly has given me the impression that - because of advancing day I thought - my seriatim has started up from its dormancy. It is my hope mainly - I can even hope, exclusively - to rely for food on eggs for the rest of our stay here in north Notts, and drink what thus far appears to be safe water brought with me possibly made less bland with seemingly safe coffee granules.
02/07/07 04:00
Having remembered that when we went to bed last night Dawn was again suffering - although more mildly than heretofore on north Notts - acid reflux and tummy pain, and the thing I blamed these symptoms on - ie believing this might have contained the most recent drugs she took in - was a packet of Ritz biscuits bought at Sainsbury’s in Birmingham city centre (where come to think of it all the recently suspect foods were bought - apart from the Warburtons Danish bread bought at Sainsbury’s Merry Hill, which not having sampled it myself I cannot be sure of either way - ready for our trip here to north Notts: that is when we had chosen to shop at that Sainsbury’s in Birmingham I imagine it was decided to bring us to north Notts) I shall chuck the Ritz biscuits.
The reason we are here at all is undeniably because Dawn seemed happy at the prospect of visiting the place familiar to her from her younger days, and of visiting her family: which is fair enough, familiarity being the reason I myself feel happier in Kingswinford. But there is something of an impasse if when we come here I not only suffer the unfamiliarity (to me) but also drugs which do not suit me. Dawn may benefit both from being in north Notts and from the drug mixture, but I do not and if there is no way I can avoid the unpleasure caused me by these drugs I shall be reluctant to come even to benefit Dawn. The thing for me to do is try to plan out - as I have to some extent in bringing water with me - how I can avoid the drugs. Unfortunately as I said the main motivation for other people - advised and probably employed by the Authorities - to trouble not merely to invite us but actually to fetch us here is not to benefit Dawn but to find out about the effects of these drugs when we have been so misguided as to buy foods containing them.
So I am to console myself with the notion that Dawn has benefited from coming here and has not disbenefited from the drugs, although I have had to chuck the foods most likely containing the drugs to try to save myself further unpleasure. Dawn would doubtless benefit from our having a home in Lincolnshire closer to her family than were we in the West Midlands, but the question is whether living in Lincolnshire I could myself satisfactorily avoid being foisted drugs which do not suit me (the usual argument, that in the West Midlands there are many more easily reached competing sources of supply).
02/07/07 09:24
I have been sleeping off the effects of the drugs - that’s what it amounts to - and I have had a little dream about my Dad. I can’t recall all the details of the dream, but I was talking to him and realised - and told him - that his thinking was very clear, as indeed one might expect of a college lecturer certainly on topics he was thoroughly conversant with. In particular his explanation to me - which he gave some years ago, in life - of the meaning of segregation was very clear. You might think segregation means much the same as separation, eg keeping racial groups separate from each other. But in fact thinking of particles in molten metal (my Dad was a metallurgist), when they segregate what happens is they pull apart in a sense, but form clusters so they pull together in forming the clusters. To appreciate the distinction between segregation and separation one must have fine discrimination (as well as of course knowledge from somewhere what the words do mean in their usage), and this fine discrimination corresponds to high resolution and I have no doubt is associated with large numbers of synapses in the thinking brain. It is not the same as intelligence and I do not know if there are psychological tests for it, although academic examinations certainly test it but not separately from other assets like intelligence and memory.
When some years back I said to Armond that I was unable because of the medication to think clearly enough to do something or other I had used to enjoy - probably related to computing - he stated that antischizophrenic drugs do not interfere with intelligence and I was mistaken in thinking they interfered in the way I said they did. This I suggest revealed probably his own failure of finely discriminatory thinking, but also his presumption that he knew the answer - scientific studies evidently having shown no effect of antischizophrenic drugs on IQ - and his lack of an open mind. In other words he was too confident. And psychiatrists in general suppose the underconfidence of many of their patients is undesirable. A system in which brash individuals like Armond have power over people who do not stand up for themselves is disastrous, and the fault does not lie in the patients’ failure to stand up for themselves (or their relatives’): it lies in the system which gives power to those who have unwarranted confidence and assertiveness. It is ridiculous that people like Armond - even though two signatures are required, the types signing are all from one group having been trained along similar lines in similar establishments - have power to compel people based on their own misunderstanding of matters. As I have said before, even the Tribunal system is useless as a protection because of the overbearing influence of the medical member, trained in the same way in a similar establishment to the detaining psychiatrists. If the medical member advises - as was the case in my own Tribunal - that the reason the detainee appears sensible is because he is taking his medication, how are the other Tribunal members to doubt it?
It is never going to be the case that giving antischizophrenic drugs improves resolution of thinking, any more than taking Valium - or alcohol - is going to improve driving skills. The only way I can see antischizophrenic drugs help people think better is by removing or reducing distraction for example from hallucinations.
The other thing I had in mind to mention was the question what Armond’s confidence in his own understanding - eg of the effects of antischizophrenic drugs - was based on. It was not based on a self critique, an introspective analysis of his understanding of and the soundness of say things he had read or been told at university. It was no doubt founded in the level of serotonin in his brain, but augmented - or directed in this particular regard - by the esteem of his peers. Because Armond was - or felt he was - well-regarded by his fellows, he presumed his understanding was accurate. In other words psychiatrists’ beliefs are like a mass delusion - like the beliefs of medieval theologians or astrologers - maintained in being by unwarranted mutual admiration.
15:59. We are waiting on Doncaster station for a train to York. Because of flooding we have to travel to Birmingham (and Stourbridge) via York. Dawn seems quite happy to return to the bungalow saying - under the influence of some combination of drugs including amphetamine - that we have achieved enough on this visit to the park home (mainly we have seen the children, but also we have - or Dawn has - tidied up a bit, especially the garden; my regard focuses on the fact that we have £300 in our pockets towards the ’van - except £99 of that has been spent this morning in B-- taxing the ’van for six months).
The drugs affecting myself may be the same as those affecting Dawn. In my case I reckon they must derive today from Lurpak I had on my jacket potato at lunch (symptoms such as hot eyes and arguably exaggerated energy started after lunch) but Dawn has had coffee made with tapwater and also has had some of the Benecol.
02/07/07 18:31
Now on a Virgin service we boarded at York (for Birmingham New Street) approaching Derby. About forty minutes ago as we left York station I drank about 100 ml of the Coke with Lime which was suspect the other day, bought from Sainsbury’s Merry Hill. Initially I was stimulated and made some flippant and lively remarks but for the past ten minutes or so I have been in a doze. I also have elevated temperature feeling hot and sweaty despite the air conditioning. My guess has been that after we did some food shopping at Sainsbury’s Birmingham (city centre) buying foods containing the current mix of drugs - stimulant and ASM as usual, but in these particular proportions and at these sorts of overall dosage levels - a pusch was instigated to supply them almost inescapably at places we are known to shop - in particular at both Asda and Sainsbury’s Merry Hill - and when we were observed taking the bait we were fetched to north Notts by Dawn’s sister and brother-in-law going to the trouble of coming all the way to Kingswinford to see us, and as I say invite us back. As I said earlier, I am not entirely clear why it is thought more advantageous for us to be in north Notts when under the influence but it has to do with Dawn’s family being there for us to visit; and I cannot say if more of the same mix of drugs will be supplied in a way intended to be difficult to escape. The ’van now being taxed it would of course be easier to shop randomly using it rather than public transport, but we have not ourselves paid to tax it and I can’t see we could afford to have it serviced and MOT’d and to insure it. Besides which I feel it was most unfair that money was taken from us in handing the ’van back to us. The key to the ’van is currently somewhere in the postal system presumably on its way to the address it was directed to which was Dawn’s sister’s.
A major priority I have at present is to procure a large quantity of safe water. It would be well worth using a banknote to seal such a supply - if obtainable - in a cupboard at the bungalow. (It is remarkable how as the prospect of return to the bungalow gets closer my mind is clarifying in the direction of these objectives I had before we went north - and surely the explanation cannot be solely drug-related, that is that in north Notts I suffer more debilitating drugging: it must be as I said this morning that the familiarity of the West Midlands has in itself an effect of clarifying my mind. It’s as if in north Notts my real life is in abeyance, as it was for example while I was in hospital, and for that matter all the years I was having injections.)
03/07/07 03:56 [Tuesday] In Kingswinford
It must have been shortly after 8 pm last night we were arriving at New Street station in Birmingham [but see below]. We bought cheese at M + S on the station which appears to be undrugged. I think it was not predicted - and we were not ‘hypnotised’ - that we would come back here to Kingswinford by train yesterday. (I think one of the problems with Sainsbury’s in Birmingham city centre was that people do not in the main do major shopping there - probably not for loaves of bread for example - but only occasional shopping or shopping for lunch. The Benecol Dawn tells me was over-priced and hardly anybody would have bought it, but unfortunately my randomiser suggested it. The things ordinary people might well have bought there - the Red Bull in particular - were in fact undrugged. As regards Sainsbury’s Merry Hill, again most people would not buy 500 ml cans of Coke from the shelves I obtained them from: there they would get multi-packs, and individual small bottles they would get from the chill cabinet at the kiosk. On this basis it’s difficult to see that multi-packs of Irn-Bru randomly chosen at Asda Brierley Hill - bought last week, and at least eight of which individual cans we have left - would likely contain drugs, and I can’t be sure they do because when I sampled the one I did I was under the influence from another source, and Dawn’s brother-in-law drank one of the cans without hesitation; Dawn drank one last night and showed no additional effect, say countering sleepiness she was suffering presumably from the Benecol she ate at lunch-time.) There was some sort of police operation around New Street station when we arrived last night presumably related to a security scare, but we were able without hindrance to walk to Moor Street, where a train to Worcester we might have got as far as Stourbridge was said to be cancelled (presumably disrupted by recent flooding). We caught a service to Snow Hill, and the train we did catch to Stourbridge - timetabled for 2030 I think but departing Snow Hill actually at 2055 - was re-platformed which was difficult to understand as it came from the Moor Street direction and one would have thought that had it come from Dorridge or Shirley it would have to have been on the right track from there. Surely it would not have been entirely safe had it come from Moor Street through the tunnel on the wrong track? My suspicion is it was switched on approach to Snow Hill specifically to inconvenience us. Having said that however a Worcester train was enabled to use platform 1 at Snow Hill which our train should have been occupying, before our train departed. The answer then is that our train was re-platformed because - to inconvenience us, or at least to allow time for stooges to come forward - it was delayed almost to the point that the following train overtook it.
I’m a little confused in that I’m sure when we were at Stourbridge Junction the clock there said 8.30 pm. The toilets were locked. Presumably my mistake is that it was 1955 when we left Snow Hill not 2055. We just missed a service to Stourbridge Town, and caught one around 2044. We were at the bus station in Stourbridge - where we both used the public toilets which were open, occasioning me some suspicion although I still procured water and it seems OK - in time to catch the 256 bus timed to leave at 2110 or thereabouts. We got off in Kingswinford at the end of Glynne Avenue and Dawn being tired we waited for the 275 service timed for 2130 but arriving about five minutes late. As we travelled home on this 275 it was just getting dark. When we arrived at the bungalow it was not completely dark but it was dark enough that the security light was triggered to come on.
As I say, I have a conviction the clock I saw at Snow Hill as we were departing for Stourbridge said 2055, but this is a mistake whether ‘hypnotically’ induced or otherwise (or the clock might even have been wrong). The train we were expecting to catch from Moor Street was the 1932 (or thereabouts) but the information screen said it was expected for 1942. (As I said, we actually caught an earlier train for Snow Hill only and proceeded from there.)
On the train timetable front, the man I bought the tickets from at Doncaster station said he would advise travelling to Sheffield by a replacement bus, but what we actually did was follow the National Rail website and National Rail telephone enquiry advice, to travel by GNER to York and catch a southbound Virgin there. We did debate Dawn and I how long the replacement bus might have taken to get from Doncaster to Sheffield, and whether it would have stopped at intermediate points. I think what we did was best not only because we avoided the discomfort of a bus but also it would have been difficult to disrupt major London services to York and major commuter services from York in the Birmingham direction (thinking in terms of the Authorities hoping to disrupt our lives).
The effects I suffered after lunch yesterday might conceivably have been due to drugs in the frozen peas used. That packet of frozen peas bought yesterday morning at the Co-op in B-- was the only such packet available and I bought it in the presumption drugging peas in such a packet would be difficult. Alternatively the Lurpak I have been using for a while may be drugged but if it is it is only mildly drugged.
03/07/07 04:53
On the basis that today we are going to need (mentioning items likely capable of being drugged) to shop for margarine, soup and tinned peas and probably more cheese (or something else for sandwiches perhaps corned beef or canned fish), and Dawn’s sister and brother-in-law may be coming to take away the ’van (depending on whether the key arrives at theirs in the post), I shall list down shops in Kingswinford (and perhaps Wordsley) which we might randomly choose from. Shopping locally we will be at hand should Dawn’s sister arrive.
03/07/07 05:15
This is what I mean by multiple choice:
[1]
Mace at the post office
Distance: 0.8
[2]
Somerfield
Distance: 0.9
[3]
Tesco Express in Moss Grove
Distance: 0.99
[4]
Shops in Granville Drive
Distance: 1.2
[5]
BP garage
Distance: 1.25
[6]
Shops at maisonettes in Bromley Lane
Distance: 1.3
[7]
Shop advertising bags of potatoes in High Street Wordsley
Distance: 1.35
[8]
Shop bearing the name Sukhwindera (or similar) at bottom of Brierley Hill Road/Kinver Street
Distance: 1.4
[9]
Tesco Express opposite bottom of Brettell Lane
Distance: 1.45
[10]
Lidl at bottom of Brettell Lane
Distance: 1.46
[11]
Spar at bottom of Brettell Lane
Distance: 1.47
03/07/07 06:01
I am now losing my focused concentration in a weak effect related to blanking and therefore to sleep. The question I ask myself is, is it due to the coffee I have drunk this morning or is it an effect due to drugs taken yesterday? My fairly certain belief is that it is due to drugs taken yesterday, because even when I first got up (say 3.45 am) I was not properly awake. This failure of full wakefulness (but at the same time inability to continue asleep, this a half-way house between sleep and full wakefulness I have said I find unpleasant), is surely related to most of my brain processes being awake but not the seriatim, or not fully the seriatim. This means that after an hour or two of concentration making use of the seriatim - this morning adapting my random supermarket prog to cater for the list above, the adaptation needed because the file containing the above details does not contain addresses but only three lines for each store: the store number in square brackets, the store name and the supposed distance (as you see above) - the seriatim fails and goes into dormancy as if it were in sleep, which usually would correspond to the whole brain being asleep. Even so, I do not feel that if I went back to bed I would properly fall asleep, and I feel no desire to go back to bed. This as I say is unpleasant, because I am awake but cannot use all my processes and therefore life seems a little empty for an hour or two. (What I sometimes do and may do now is passively read other people’s websites. Even so, any reading requiring more complex understanding is impossible - and I mention was impossible for me over the decades I was medicated in a more conventional way, that is when I was having the injections in earlier years. If the stars give any indication a child will turn out a psychiatrist I recommend drowning.)
03/07/07 06:29
What sort of people are psychiatrists? They start someone on antischizophrenic medication at a dosage said by the drug manufacturer to be reasonable and which may indeed be a help to sufferers far gone in hallucination. The patient improperly treated says how awful the medication is, so the psychiatrists step up the dosage - sometimes far beyond the manufacturer’s recommended maximum - until the patient is in such a state of stupor that words of complaint cease to issue forth.
03/07/07 07:59
Hitcount for colinbrough.co.uk now 1816, which if I remember the last figure accurately is a big jump. For barrass-brough.org.uk it is now 34.
03/07/07 09:25
Trying to download Windows Live Messenger I found accessing it from the MSN home page it wouldn’t download, so I had to visit http://download.microsoft.com and save Install_Messenger.exe (which I shall now run).
03/07/07 12:38
Dawn has had a little more experience of IM’ing this morning. Her sister and brother-in-law are coming to collect the ’van and we are going to Birmingham to meet them. I have again been under the influence of drugs, a stimulant seeming to predominate but the state resulting reminding me of perhaps my early adolescence when I left planning to others - at that age was required to, really - but found it objectionable because I felt I could do it better myself but was not so ‘adult’ as more recently as to let them get on with it and profit by observing what went on (even in cases where what goes on is sub-optimal from my point of view other than the experience of trying to understand their way of doing things and from that the way the human mind works, sub-optimal in the sense that more effort is needed from me than should be) but instead was almost what you might call bloody-minded. A physical symptom I blame on the drugs - in particular on the stimulant in them - is sore throat I have at present.
The conclusion is that the effect of the drugs this morning - and whence they derive I am unsure but suspect mainly the Lurpak again - is that I am deprived of the capacity to plan for myself or at least any planning I do is too easily subject to suasion from others, and this is turned (presumably requiring the stimulant component for this) into not exactly bad-temper but something like ill humour and mild resentment. This subjection to suasion even though I was capable of planning for myself actually (to say more about my adolescence) led me in my younger days to dislike my mother giving me directives. I suppose when a young person is finding their own feet this is not uncommon, but I would add that I distinctly remember when I got my own house and had money of my own the mild anger I had had towards my mother turned as I said above more into interest in her way of going about things and consequential theorising on the human mind.
When I was medicated and ceased to be able to determine my own way in life - being more or less tricked into returning to live with my parents - the ‘mild anger’ turned into bitter hatred, particularly of Armond but initially also of my parents for going along with him. This bitterness - although not against Armond - came to an end presumably when the dosage of the medication was massively increased and I was cowed.
14:16. We are on the train from Stourbridge to Birmingham timed to arrive Snow Hill a minute before Dawn’s sister is expected to arrive at New Street. We were unable to phone her from Stourbridge Junction because the BT payphone there was defective (and took £1.40 from us for no return).
Dawn comments she has a sore throat causing me to realise my soreness in the throat is almost over (for now), from which I conclude my sore throat was caused by something I took earlier and not since - most likely the Lurpak - and certainly not by the coffee or the water used in making the coffee which I have been drinking throughout the morning. The drugs Dawn has ingested most likely derive from the tapwater - and may include only a minute dosage of expensive modern ASM - although she is now drinking a suspect Irn-Bru she has brought with her. (She also shows signs of unnaturally elevated temperature.)
14:36. I find now that I am going through a period of drowsiness, to put it in conventional terms.
We have arrived at Snow Hill but are travelling on to Moor Street to walk across to New Street.
03/07/07 18:23
We met Dawn’s sister and brother-in-law with no difficulty as soon as we arrived at New Street where the exit barrier is from the concourse. They said they had at first wandered to another exit but had then found this one, just as we arrived on foot from Moor Street. We came back with them on the train to Stourbridge and from there by bus. We did shopping at Somerfield in Kingswinford before catching the final bus to the bungalow.
Dawn and her sister completed emptying the ’van while Dawn’s brother-in-law tried the engine (in particular trying to see where oil was being lost) and I filled in the registration transfer and got him to sign it. Now they have driven off - having given us a cheque - and I wonder how long it will take them to get home and indeed if they will lose their way.
Fluctuation - associated with change and edges making distinctions between one thing and another - raises the processing requirement. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the resources available. If there is insufficient fluctuation especially unpredictable fluctuation - that is fluctuation where there is little time to process to cope, as opposed to fluctuation which has been planned for with a lot of pre-processing - in one’s life it is boring and quite possibly - depending on the base level of serotonin - depressing. If there is too much fluctuation there is worry or ‘stress’ of a particular species, and the mind is never at rest but always processing to try to cope this itself defeating fluctuation within the mind/brain. The ideal is where fluctuation in the environment is just the right level to occupy the mind - and the body, the relative significance of mind and body varying between individuals - in such a way that problems are met and perhaps after a bit of time and effort solved this resulting in a satisfactory fluctuation in the level of dopamine and serotonin inversely in the brain. Of course there are mechanisms in normal cases for self-limitation of the level of environmental fluctuation impinging on the brain, and in some cases through introspection in the absence of sufficient environmental fluctuation internal review (in effect pre-processing on far-reaching subjects) can generate satisfactory dopamine/serotonin alternation.
04/07/07 02:09 [Wednesday]
I first got up about two hours ago to go to the toilet to urinate, thinking then it was much later than it was. Seeing the actual time I went back to bed and soon back to sleep. The Update log says we went to bed about twenty to nine, meaning I have had five and a half hours’ sleep or thereabouts. I do not particularly feel the ‘suffusion’ in my head including puffy eyes which sometimes I associate with the early waking due to risperidone, and there are some ideas in my mind for things to do, including a possibility of continuing with character recognition programming where I left off. Somehow yesterday I did take in drugs including an antischizophrenic drug, and in the evening was knocked out from doing much. I did write down a few ideas about the significance in life of fluctuation, in the environment and in brain electrochemistry, but it was slow going and although I had in mind the possibility of noting down something about what you might call the lethargy I was suffering, this did not get written because clear ideas - clear enough to give rise to meaningful output in words - did not arise at a sufficient rate with sufficient vigour to stimulate writing. I’m not sure whether the lethargy could have been a continuation of effects I had had in the morning presumably down to Lurpak I ate at breakfast (but I believe I did eat more Lurpak later on, possibly at tea-time when we had chicken, baked beans and jacket potato). Then again in the past I have had suspicions about baked beans. Dawn got some milk from Somerfield when she went in with her sister on the way from Stourbridge on the bus, and I was drinking that yesterday afternoon and am drinking it now.
Sometime yesterday - and I think it was while Dawn’s sister and brother-in-law were here - I briefly had urinary urgency. I say this because there seems to be a hint it may develop now, and I’m wondering whether to attribute it to the milk. There is a hint too that my activities are getting faster, but at the expense of creatively complex interaction in detail of ideas in favour rather of a passive desire to receive - or perceive - changing data (by looking at other people’s websites in fact, which I am beginning to feel an interest in doing before preparing an update of my own or doing any creative work on programming).
Having said that however the somewhat technical matter of re-uploading to my Easily website images taken off to save webspace - this requiring some calculation or estimation based on webspace available, and possibly requiring some parts of my 2007 diary to be moved from the Easily website - begins to hold interest. (Introspective: instead of going ahead with these calculations and writing them down as I am doing them - see Friday 15 June 2007 - I am here raising the possibility of doing so, reporting n fact mental envisagement which might turn into a plan. In other words goals are not jumping out at me as they ordinarily would and being seized on - and this would be exaggerated even more under the influence of amphetamine - but the possibility of goals is arising in tandem with the feasibility of developing plans to try to achieve the goals. That is, antischizophrenic drugs still affecting me the whole process is slowed down and I am more explicitly aware of needing to assess feasibility of goals before they are seriously taken on and ‘loaded’. To be honest this is a species of unconfidence corresponding to slower and less richly interactive processing: that is interactive in the way the sub-parts of the processing relate to each other and to other stuff in the mind - or from the perceptual fields - at the same time.)
04/07/07 04:54
Whether it is because of the particular antischizophrenic drug affecting me, or the low dosage (having worn off rather overnight in any case), or more likely a combination of the two factors (linked by ‘equivalent dose’ considerations), I am concentrating well on preparing an update for my website this involving shifting text between the old host Easily and the new host 123-reg and some fiddly editing in Notepad of HTML. I am experiencing slight de-focusing of my attention from time to time - this corresponding to blanking - but the effect is very slight.
16:32 [sitting in M + S in the centre of Worcester]. Dawn has had to go to the toilet again, which suggests to me that she has taken in some drugs including a stimulant component - but presumably also an ASM component - in Worcester likely at Poppins even though I think I myself was exempt. I have become tired in what seems a natural way after walking round Worcester for a few hours, and I would put my toilet difficulties - not exaggerated throughput by any means and certainly not involving urgency – (and, more troubling, my headache) down as a hangover from recent drugging. Part of the effect on Dawn of the stimulant in combination with ASM is to make her feel freer to spend money (an effect I know from my own past experience). Whether without the ASM she might use the extra ‘energy’ otherwise - say in a way involving more personal creativity - I do not know.
Let me say sitting in M + S writing this is giving me rest which seems beneficial in an entirely natural way. I shall hope to describe what we have done today in more specific (say, geographic) detail later [unfortunately this task got left until adequate memory had faded].
I became suspicious of the orange juice in the cathedral coffee shop because it was made behind the scenes and took a while to come, but actually I detect no drug effects since.
18:17. On the train now to Stourbridge having recently departed Droitwich. I am tending to close my eyes - to rest them, as I think of it - but without my mind drifting in the way it does when I am affected by ASM [?]. I am losing awareness more but coming-to quicker and more fully. In that, it is more like natural sleep, and indeed I think of it as catch-up of natural sleep, a residual sleep disturbance as an after-effect of recent drugging [?].
I feel glad I am free of drugs recently but I have some trepidation because when I am drugged - and I can’t predict when it might happen again - it is such a disruption.
04/07/07 20:44
Having in the past half-hour developed discomfort in my legs, I alter my earlier judgment that my tiredness after walking round Worcester and my sleepiness on the train home were natural. I’m sure now they were effects due to ASM taken in Worcester, more likely in the cathedral orange juice than in something taken at Poppins [?]. (However given the time when Dawn’s stimulated condition started to be noticeable I would say she took in drugs at Poppins. Given her greater sensitivity to stimulants than I it is possible I also took in the same stimulants at Poppins: however she did have two cups of coffee against my one.)
Thu. 5/7/07 [around 5.40 am].
I can feel the effect of a powerful mental stimulant quite possibly amphetamine itself (but - certainly as yet - there are no physical effects such as on the libido or on the bowels or urinary apparatus). I am feeling sort of ‘high’, or quickened with excitement, in a sense including a self-congratulatory component, as when in the past I have said I have been reflecting on stuff I have written for my website and felt what good stuff it was. The most recent thing I have taken by mouth were the remnants of a packet of Scary Dinosaurs fruit gums retrieved recently from the motor caravan and bought a while back at some M + S probably at a motorway service area. Before that I drank a cup of coffee, the granules from M + S Worcester yesterday and the water from somewhere yesterday most likely the wash-basin tap at Stourbridge bus station (or possibly from there one or two evenings ago when I recall being suspicious that those toilets were open quite late at night: it would have been Monday night on returning from north Notts).
05/07/07 15:40
I am ‘playing backup’ on the Amilo Pro (actually deriving the backups which I am compressing and re-forming to be saved on my new 4 GB memory cards from my auxiliary hard drive) but I am putting more thought into it than when usually I do this under the influence of ASM. Also because of the way I am pursuing the activity and my general condition of mind I am retaining more in memory - a better understanding, if you like, because in a better organised form - concerning the backups and archives I have. This in turn helps along a virtuous circle in which I can think of ways of improving my organisation still further in the future (eg through simply compressing the archives, a thing I have never troubled to do before).
16:39. Once again this afternoon I have had restlessness involving the legs - very slight this time - and have been dozing off. Because of the legs effect I feel sure ASM is affecting me, no doubt taken this morning wherever the stimulant was taken, probably in water from somewhere.
About an hour and a half ago I began for a while to feel free to think and in general to be able to use my mind clearly and without distraction. I believe this happened yesterday too, and would explain it as the stimulant and the ASM perfectly cancelling, for a brief interval. Now the ASM effects have become predominant, and the first notice of this growing predominance I had was in the form of boredom centring on the Christian radio channel we were listening to (we have now switched from the popular Christian music station - a Christian equivalent of any ‘easy-listening’ channel - to the spoken Word). This boredom with a constant fare of ‘easy-listening’ music reminds me of the time in 1979 when I first started listening to pop music radio, and then too the reaction may have been exaggerated by drugs affecting me.
The boredom is not assisted by the time the computer is taking to make the latest backup. It’s true I could go on the other computer, or even hope to use the computer doing the backing-up without disrupting the backing-up. In fact the solution has been to write this on the handheld device. (Incidentally Dawn is IM’ing like an old hand on the other computer.)
18:29. I think drugs - and in particular drugs with stimulant properties - must be substantially absent from my system at present. I recollect that when I was at school and in fact up to the time I went to university I lived a very static and routine life in the worldly sense: I was happy to stop at home and hardly go out except once a week shopping with my Dad (and to school) and if I was led to go out with friends socialising - eg to the Social Club at the place where one of my friends worked, or to a pub - I suffered a mild form of what Charlotte Brontë knew in - let’s say - disruption of one’s head in headaches and hotness associated with ‘over-excitement’, and hence of one’s ability to think - daydream, to abbreviate - calmly, sometimes for days afterwards. I think apart from stimulant drugs - distracting me in a way I think unfair and unreasonable - a life mainly at home thinking, and doing computer stuff, and - who knows - reading once more as well as writing my notes, would suit me perfectly.
06/07/07 04:27 [Friday]
We went to bed at about a quarter to midnight and I have had just under five hours’ sleep.
06/07/07 12:49
Earlier I continued with re-forming my archive documents, and have completed it to a satisfactory but not perfect standard (not perfect because more compressing could be done thereby reducing the number of memory cards needed, and avoiding the use of smaller capacity memory cards as ‘fill-ins’). These archives as I imply are of my own documents - that is either created by myself (such as diary entries and VB progs) or consisting of information (plus a small amount of software) downloaded from the internet (such as stuff I have downloaded relating to the proposed changes in mental health laws in Britain) - besides which I have a fair number of image files and movie clips shot by myself or scanned from my parents’ and Dawn’s family’s photographs from the past, plus some music ‘ripped’ from CD. And of course I have copies on hard disc - and backup media - of software CDs.
I’m sure I am not at present under the influence of drugs. I note my heart rate becomes higher than I have noticed for a long time (except for unnatural tachycardia) but it settles back - that is the rate rises and falls - in what seems to me an entirely natural way. But I am about to drink a mug of coffee made with water from Sainsbury’s bought a week ago or so, which has been slightly suspect and which I have a feeling I have added more water to even more suspect. From what I can observe of Dawn - and trying to note what she takes by mouth - it seems the tapwater here at the bungalow still contains drugs including stimulants.
06/07/07 16:25
We have been out shopping at Somerfield (Kingswinford). The Sainsbury’s water (as amended) did contain drugs, the component showing itself thus far being a minor stimulant. The effect I noted on myself - clearer now at analysing the effects as they are not so powerful as to confound me, and do not affect me constantly - was basically a hastening effect, with ‘niggles’ from exaggerated bodily sensations such as itching due to sweating of the scalp. What I would say about the ‘hastening’ effect was that because I was not aware in advance that I had definitely taken drugs and that these would be the effects, the extra energy - if you like to call it that - was wasted. If the stimulant had been one as powerful as amphetamine, it would in itself have stimulated the generation and ‘loading’ of goals. It’s true this would be wasteful in the sense that I - or ‘the subject’ - would be diverted from his true goals - this of course presuming he had any and that his life without amphetamine was not desolate - but nonetheless the generation of goals in such a way that they would easily be satisfied - in the absence of other drug effects, or effects from too high a dosage of the amphetamine itself - would almost inescapably give rise to pleasure, that is achievement-emotion pleasure. (Of course if for whatever reason the goal could not be satisfied the reaction would be worse with amphetamine than the natural reaction, that is frustration would be considerably worsened.)
However the stimulant being minor and I not expecting to have extra energy to use, the bodily ‘niggles’ were the significant thing I noticed and the stimulant as I say was ‘wasted’. (Another thing with amphetamine would be the stimulation of the frontal brain would inhibit niggly sensations from the body and lower processes so in that respect too it would be subjectively more of a pleasure, although again this way amphetamine works would be countered by admixing ASM. It is somewhat paradoxical that amphetamine - one would think - will benefit those whose lower-process dopamine is too active, but also ASM - apparently - benefits them too. I think the answer lies in the relative significance of signals from the frontal brain, the reason indeed - the large number of links from the frontal brain, by my understanding - that I myself considerably disbenefit from ASM.)
07/07/07 04:01 [Saturday]
I initially got up at 1.35 am with the idea in my mind that I had taken in some ASM probably in 150 ml or so of Somerfield milk I drank yesterday late afternoon - or, otherwise, deriving from the same source as yesterday morning’s stimulant I took in likely the water from the Sainsbury’s 5l bottle I said at the time was suspect - and that this ASM - which I suspected might be risperidone and was sure was not one of the old-style drugs - had the effect of ‘stimulating questions but not answers’ that is it stimulated the middle brain - as risperidone used to stimulate my production of language for example - but not the frontal brain which would be of use in constructing hypotheses and unravelling sequences of causation to try to resolve the questions raised. This would be a puzzling way for an antischizophrenic agent to work, as it would seem to me that it is a replication of the basic difficulty in schizophrenia: that perceptual processes and ‘pre-processing’ by the lower and middle brain ‘raise questions’ - that is throw up a lot of detail of information - inviting resolution by some higher process which in schizophrenia is not available for the task. What basically I was on about was that my early waking might result from some stimulant effect of an antischizophrenic drug such as risperidone which last year did have that effect on me and is known to have the side-effect of insomnia. So I suppose the fundamental puzzle - which I feel almost tempted to suppose voices in my sleep might have expressed interest in, although presumably this is just me reading into the statement of the puzzle interest I would expect the Authorities to have in such a puzzle - is what difference is there between the stimulant effect I believe risperidone has and the stimulant effect of say amphetamine, or even caffeine or the type of lesser stimulant I ingested yesterday morning?
To give a specific example of the ‘detail of information’ thrown up by my lower processes and ‘inviting resolution’ when I woke at 1.35 am: the orange ‘sleep’ light was showing on the computer, and I asked myself if someone could have got at the computer while I was asleep. Likewise two empty 500 ml Coke bottles had fallen over, and I asked myself if someone had entered the bungalow and brushed them over. And even my suspicion of voices in my sleep is along these lines, that some external agency has ‘got at’ me while I have been unconscious. It is clear that what I was suffering was a very mild form of the suspicions I had writ much larger in past years - for example in 2006, when I suspected very strongly but in an unrealistic way that our foods were drugged (at the house in Worksop) and that we were eavesdropped or bugged, and indeed that voices spoke to us in our sleep - and I would guess is blameable on the same sort of combination of drugs although yesterday in a very very low dosage. No one has entered the bungalow this past night, I’m sure, as the internal bolts are intact (although in the past I did conceive we ourselves - either Dawn or I, or indeed the grandsons staying with us in the past - might have been ‘hypnotised’ to open the doors, and I can’t say such a scenario is utterly impossible although it was more believable when we were under the influence of barbiturate) and furthermore my judgment at the present time tells me such a procedure would be unlikely to be authorised as so improper (but again on the other side of the coin someone was undoubtedly authorised to enter the house in Worksop in August 2005 and steal the hard drive out of the E-machines laptop I then had).
So I have noticed details raising queries - like the ‘sleep’ light on the laptop and like a few months back the roadsign on the A42 directing one to join the M1 via the A511 instead of via the usual route at Junction 23A of the M1 (see Friday 8 September 2006) - and have been rather less competent than usually I am in resolving the queries. The answer to the ‘sleep’ light is that I left the computer on when I went to bed because Norton Antivirus was performing a system scan. Allow me to point out that had my memory been interfered with - say by barbiturate - this answer to the query would have been difficult or impossible to retrieve. Sedative drugs as a general principle do me no favours because they reduce the awareness I use to resolve puzzles and paradoxes thrown up by my extraordinarily detailed perceptual and pre-processing apparatus. Whether in a general case giving say anxiolytics to schizophrenics is a help or a hindrance I’m not sure. My view is that anxiety - in particular anxiety in social situations - is a deterrer to the schizophrenic from placing himself in a situation which would over-tax his processing capacity and might if not avoided lead to positive schizophrenic symptoms. I would certainly not give advice such as psychiatrists seem intent on - or at least in the past were, as Armond was - that the sufferer should strive to be - or pretend to be - a sociable person.
It seems on reflection that the ‘stimulant’ properties of risperidone - which in my own case in 2006 I seemed to note in my increased production of language output, feeding itself once it got going - do not include increasing the strength with which perceptual data arise. They seem confined to promotion of output activity. I know if one moves about more then one is going to have more input to process, but it is not the same as directly enhancing perceptual detail or strength. From what I read from people taking risperidone it reduces low-level data arising for example anomalous perceptual data the origin of hallucinations (by blocking D2 receptors lower down in the brain where perceptual data comes in). This contrasts with the effect on me of the stimulant I ingested yesterday morning, which exaggerated signals from my body - that is ‘niggling’ sensations such as itching of the scalp. So the essential difference is that antischizophrenic drugs if they have stimulant properties they will stimulate output only otherwise the antischizophrenic effect is not there and the drug is not an antischizophrenic drug.
The explanation I would proffer for my slight ‘paranoia’ this morning at 1.35 am is that the details of perception available to me were great, either from my natural self or more likely that slightly exacerbated by a residual effect from yesterday morning’s stimulant, and the ASM I had taken probably later on yesterday (because the ‘paranoia’ did not show itself earlier) - probably in the Somerfield milk, which in the recent past has seemed to contain these drugs as a matter of course and the dosage must be so low it is risked without concern on innocent purchasers - had the effect especially in the nighttime when I was not fully awake (and my seriatim in particular not fully alert) of defeating the advanced processes - that is most likely frontal-brain processes - with which ordinarily I would resolve the queries raised by the detail thrown up by lower processes with hardly a second thought. Happily the dosages have been so low that I have been able to resolve the queries on giving second thought.
Because it is virtually impossible to believe the concatenation of events yesterday was pre-planned - although once I would have presumed they were - that is my ingestion of the stimulant drug in the morning and the ASM later on, I must conclude these drugs are supplied - as I said, as a matter of routine in such things as Somerfield milk - because fortuitous concatenations such as that yesterday lead me to write stuff like this. That’s fair enough, and in this particular instance because the dosages have been so low I can’t say I have suffered any unpleasure at all, and have been interested to unravel the above theory. But more generally I feel I should get danger money for the risk of taking in higher dosages (and as reparation for past suffering) or to look at it another way payment for the burden of needing to be so circumspect in drinking milk (as I said, luckily yesterday I restricted myself to about 150 ml made wary by what has happened in the past).
07/07/07 19:53
I did prepare an update for my website this morning but then I got sidetracked into thinking about re-uploading text taken down recently to save webspace (before I acquired extra space through the medium of the new site barrass-brough.org.uk) and this in turn led me to wish to add an additional page, and re-form the existing pages, for 2006. As a result of this I have rewritten the prog to fix smart quotes to now do other things as well, and I have started on the task of re-moulding the website diary pages for 2006. I have had some symptoms which might conceivably be from drugs ingested today, but on the whole I think no psychotropic drugs are affecting me (and the only thing I can think might have contained drugs was a packet of crisps bought at Somerfield when we went shopping there this afternoon). The most evidential - or rather suggestive - symptom was sleepiness, and in fact I dozed off for a few minutes earlier this evening. Also I seem to have had a lot of digestive throughput, going to the toilet three times so far today to evacuate my bowels.
07/07/07 20:10
We have the Wembley LiveEarth concert on (on TV), and it gives me a lot of pleasure to see the crowd - or rather individuals in the crowd, even though there are many such individuals (I mean rather than ‘the crowd’ in the aggregate) - themselves experiencing pleasure in identifying with the music and swaying with the rhythm and mouthing words they are clearly familiar with. When I say it gives me pleasure I mean it makes me happy, to see their happiness. This makes me realise - getting here into intellectual analysis which I about to rather demote - that besides gaining understanding with the mind and - somewhat related - developing plans and bringing them to successful implementation, there are other sources of pleasure, and these probably most people are much more familiar with than they are with Thatcherite efficiency and achievement. That is, such matters as identifying with other people and sharing their pleasure, and also seeing sights which are directly pleasing to the eye apart from the balance and symmetry (although always containing balance and symmetry I suspect) which I suppose (although this was not what I had in mind) includes views of the sky which I believe immediately affect the serotonin level. I am asking myself if this devolvement from concentration on pleasure from achievement is a result of my present avoidance of stimulant drugs, and perhaps in tandem the greater availability of simple means of raising my serotonin level is a result of avoidance of ASM [I have since reconsidered this - note added 08/07/07 08:25].
07/07/07 21:14
I have been having a bath and thinking about the human - or more generally any advanced animal - visual processing system. Having done a lot of ‘work’ in the past - mixing detail with overview - I am now able to summarise my understanding of the subject.
Brightness is certainly ‘fixed’ by the physical apparatus of the eye - that is the aperture mechanism that is the pupil. This is not only because a high intensity of light would damage the retina, but on the general principle of arranging things - ideally, but that there are flaws in mechanisms in the physical universe - so that the maximum information is obtained from the visual scene apparent to the eyes (and I mention for the sake of completeness that different information is significant to different species, for example some years ago I read about research findings that the retinal processing structures of chameleons have detectors specific to objects whizzing about in the types of motion a fly exhibits). The next type of ‘fixing’ which mechanisms developed by man does is for contrast, this development I suspect out of processing for TV but possibly before that it was done in the case of cameras recording on chemical film. I do not believe visual processing in animals takes this course, for the reason that I cannot think of easy methods implementable using neurons to fix for contrast. But it is very easy to see how output from neurons could be thresholded, and then averaged across an area of the retina or retina equivalent, using principles of neural refraction and of propagation delay along dendrites [axons, rather, I think]. To extract maximum information from the visual scene something very like contrast adjustment must be used, in practice I think by setting a threshold (thinking here in terms of greyscale) which varies - smoothly but still it varies - across the retina equivalent so as in each neighbourhood to maximally distinguish details of the dark among the light (the background in general for humans being light on the basis that in daytime the sky is light).
In a computer model it seems processing for neighbourhoods across the visual field would be very costly in time (or equipment if parallel processing were envisaged). Therefore with my particular interest in visual perception of printed text the way to go seems to be initially to separate out lineages of text from top to bottom of the page (for a language which writes horizontally across the page). This precludes cleverer analysis of blocks of text - and perhaps graphics - spread around the page as for example in a newspaper or magazine, although quick and dirty methods might be tried which could be expected to work in standard cases. The lineages resulting - in fact arrays of greyscale - are then more amenable to processing, even perhaps processing neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
However the way I propose to advance is again firstly to treat the rows of pixels (within each lineage) one by one, and in fact fix them for contrast. This is because I don’t think thresholding would work treating the horizontal separately from the vertical, and as I say for now I am avoiding the neighbourhood by neighbourhood approach most closely mimicking - I believe - the animal retina. After fixing for the contrast of rows to be more or less the same - which I anticipate (based on past findings in my attempts) will clear up flaws due to camera apparatus developed for use with computers - I then propose to use the ‘proper’ method of fixing the threshold column by column along the lineage and smoothing by using a moving average.
In fact this is really a clarification and summarisation of the method I had just got round to using when I was writing a prog to count fragments in columns along a lineage.
07/07/07 22:17
Looking for the latest visual field analysis progs I wrote I can only find since February Visual field analysis (2007-05-27A) and Visual field analysis (2007-05-28).
07/07/07 22:33
Reading through my website diary for May just gone I find I became interested again in character recognition programming on Tuesday 8 May 2007, when I reminded myself where I had got to in the ‘work’. Over the next week or so I wrote additions and amendments to my progs, up to Thursday 17 May 2007 when it seems as though growing drug effects began to interfere with my clarity of thinking. A week later in having another go at character recognition I took up a way of proceeding which was actually a backward step given that I had already developed the fragmentation idea. Of course pursuing other lines of enquiry is a good thing to a certain extent, to check them out, but in that instance I feel I thought up too varied a range of possible ways of proceeding and spent too much effort testing them by actually coding procedures rather than modelling in my mind what the results would be. As I say, it seems clear to me now that fragmentation - and a more thorough exposition is given above - is the best way forward. In any case, I seem to have mislaid my backup copies of most of the progs I wrote in May (but the main procedures of interest are contained in what I do still have).
08/07/07 05:08 [Sunday]
I got up twice in the night to pass water. The elevated digestive throughput yesterday and then this increased throughput of urine, plus seeming activity of my mind when I was more or less asleep (which however I would not describe as restlessness, and I seem to have had a fair amount of sleep) puts me in mind of the effects of stimulant drugs. My sleepiness at bed-time last night - getting on for 11 pm - causes me to suppose a sedative drug was acting to promote sleep even though a stimulant was acting, ie to counter possible sleep deprivation. This idea of a sedative seems somewhat corroborated by my dozing off yesterday evening in front of the TV, and as I said - especially given the timing when these effects started - the only thing I can think to blame would be a packet of crisps bought at Somerfield yesterday afternoon. (Otherwise they might be due to water obtained from the wash-basin tap in the public toilet in Kingswinford, obtained on the same trip out as when we went to Somerfield, yesterday afternoon.)
08/07/07 05:20
I am drinking coffee now made with that same water. Goodness knows what the idea might be of giving a minor stimulant in combination with a minor sedative - I can’t believe that ASM is involved, for example, or that something like amphetamine is countering it - unless it is simply to obtain my comments. On reflection, I suppose it is conceivable the drugs are major drugs rather than minor, but with more weight in the stimulant - as I say, possibly one as powerful as amphetamine rather than in 2006 seemingly a somewhat lesser stimulant and included then at a lower proportion compared to the ASM - and the ASM a drug without marked physical side-effects such as on the legs. My seemingly elevated serotonin level yesterday evening one might attribute to drugs, possibly - theorising without real evidence - an antidepressant given to counter the ASM which might have been one - without noticeable physical side-effects as I say - which tends to depress the mood.
The most noticeable effect quite probably due to drugs yesterday - starting after we had been down to Kingswinford as I say - was the increasing fullness of the bowels, an effect I used to have eg when we were living in Worksop but this time now associated with greater frequency of emptying the bowels which although it did not involve looseness might well have been caused by amphetamine, and as - I believe - in those Worksop days combined with ASM but this time the amphetamine at a higher relative dosage. The effect on my urinary apparatus - unusual sensations yesterday evening, now I think, as well as the need to get up more than once from sleep in the nighttime - might well have had the same cause. After in watching LiveEarth on TV - or part of it - I experienced what seemed to be elevated serotonin, and commented then that there was something to be said for simple elevation of serotonin without thinking or doing - that is (the latter two) the fluctuation in brain electrochemistry which as a general principle I applaud and say leads to an improvement in learning for the individual and therefore in his flexibility to cope with changing circumstances, as well as ‘learning’ of the race through evolution and the same thing although over a longer timescale, flexibility of the species to adapt in the face of changing circumstances - I did then start to do the intellectual analysis which is the real reason for being alive as far as I am concerned, and furthermore turned my mind in the direction of programming for character recognition a thing I myself believe could have significance over a longer term into the future than say working as an accountant. What I seem to be suggesting is that amphetamine yesterday was improving - in a way I myself would regard as improvement - my mental functioning, presumably being combined with ASM which I am almost willing to believe somehow relieved what usually would be the case with amphetamine that is diversion into short-term easily satisfied goals giving rise to easy achievement-emotion pleasure (or euphoria).
As a general principle I must say I find it very difficult to accept that drugs could improve mental functioning. Yet it does appear that antischizophrenic drugs do do some good to some schizophrenics, by - according to my understanding - removing the distraction of for example hallucinations. I suppose I must accept that some drugs - speaking more generally - do do some good, even though I have doubts based on the species becoming dependent on artificial means of say pain avoidance or alleviation of depression which it might perhaps be better to leave evolutionary selection to sort out. In other words by relying on drugs we are to some extent interfering with the flexibility which evolutionary selection is a mechanism for, so that by - perhaps - prolonging the lives of individuals in the present we are ‘weakening’ the human species for the future. On a shorter timescale the readiness of some doctors to prescribe antidepressants - as some did in former times Valium - I do not think is a good thing, and for this very reason, that reliance on drugs - and of course one can see this unarguably in cases of conventional addiction to street drugs like heroin - deprives the ones so relying of the flexibility they might obtain by more natural methods of ‘coping’. What if the supply of drugs is removed - again a more easily accepted argument in cases of addiction to illegally obtained heroin?
But humankind - or some of humankind - relies on ‘unnatural’ structures other than drugs. A lot of people in the West - speaking from our personal life here, Dawn and I - rely on a motor vehicle. This is widely felt to be reasonable, yet a consequence of it is that oil resources are being used faster than they can be replenished from the sun’s energy, and that means that we are living for today and not for tomorrow. Well, so what? Past generations have accumulated capital and we the children are spending it although we know our children’s children cannot go on as we do. The Earth and the solar system will not continue for a literally infinite time - the human race must come to an end - so what does it matter?
Well, if it comes to that what does anything matter? I do not say this out of depression, but as a rational question devoid of personal emotional engagement - as an intellectual exercise if you like. The fact is there are mechanisms in the world which cause things to happen one after the other (ignoring the possibility that relativistic ideas about simultaneity have any relevance) including the behaviour of people and animals. As I say, being the person I am I can as an intellectual exercise abstract myself from emotional engagement (and rely on the seriatim to model stuff setting aside more ‘animal’ motivations at least for a while) and in doing it I see that without some basis for deciding what is best to do - what is good and what is bad - well then there is no basis for deciding. That is except for ideas of beauty, that is balance and symmetry which can be appreciated and used as a basis by the seriatim process itself, and what I am talking about simply is informational beauty or you might even call it efficiency. In the past I used to enjoy planning my TV viewing using the Radio Times irrespective of the merits of or the pleasure I might derive from watching the programmes themselves. This is an idea or a behaviour cognate with what I have just said. Some people enjoy calculating or planning how stuff is to be done without overly concerning themselves how the ends to be achieved are decided on, and use of the seriatim - in creative processes related perhaps to efficient planning - can be an end in itself or perhaps not an end but a basis for activity - mental activity in the main - in the real world or almost in the real world. There is a fine line between the regard Other People have for such activity: between their regard being high for artistic creations such as the novel Wuthering Heights and their regard being low for wasteful daydreamers such as perhaps those religious who spend their lives on top of a pole. And of course Other People’s regard fluctuates with the individual and with fashion and the culture. Again, without some ‘sub-reflective’ basis to decide all one can do is describe and produce explanatory theories (I mean in this case of Other People’s regard).
To come back to human behaviour and set aside for now the behaviour of Newtonian billiard balls or quantum mechanical quarks, what I suppose is that individual behaviour is determined by pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of unpleasure. Pleasure is the mechanism by which motivation arises, by which the individual ‘decides’ what to do (and I put decides in quotes because I mean to include behaviours more immediate than those planned by the seriatim). It is true that some notion of advance preparation of a goal and reaching it by some process involving negative feedback is implicit and that for example an immediate reflex such as the knee-jerk does not require the hypothesis of pleasure as a motivator. Indeed to use a term like motivation implies advance preparation of goals.
The simplest behaviours are reflex and are to be observed in neonates - eg clinging to mum through reflex action including gripping - and in simple life forms such as the amoeba (whom I remember studying well at school). As animals with nervous systems progress in life they learn new ‘reflexes’ or reflex-equivalents, and in cases of animals with cerebella routines - that is programmed sequences which you might call macros - of reflex-equivalents such as those used in riding a bike are stored in the cerebellum. The essence of a macro is that it does not have conditionals in it, that is contingent subparts of the sequence switchable according to what eventuates. Even in riding a bike clearly feedback is obtained and motor output varied accordingly, so if my understanding is right that the entire process of riding a bike is left to the cerebellum, then it is not strictly correct to call cerebellar routines macros. However one must remember that even the most routine routine in life is capable of throwing up something unexpected which has to be referred to higher processes than cerebellar processes. I do not know enough about the cerebellum to say whether its routines contain conditionals allowing switching according to what feedback is received, but more generally if too much which is unexpected occurs higher processes will be alerted by lower. Whatever brain process is controlling behaviour at any time - bearing in mind furthermore that many ‘behaviours’ may be going on at the same time in an intertwined manner - it must always be capable of reporting to higher processes that it cannot cope.
Apart from reflexes and macros of reflex-equivalents what more advanced animals do is guided by emotions. I did once try to list emotions relevant to humankind - in fact see Annexe 4 at my diary entry for Sunday 7 December 2003 (which was about the last time I was as free of mind-bending drugs as I am now I should think) - but for now let me say that there will be comparisons and contrasts between the emotions relevant to different species, common denominators being found - as I said in December 2003 - in sex and hunger and for a wide range of animals fight-or-flight anxiety.
Humans have frontal brains and correspondingly seriatim processes, and apes may have a rudimentary seriatim also. I must say the seriatim process is the mental process I feel most familiar with, because it is so significant in my own mental functioning which is the mental functioning I have had longest notice of, through introspection. The frontal brain as far as I can assess copes with complexity - it quintessentialises complexity in a methodology related to the task of précis in language processing - and with contingent causal sequences. Contingent causal sequences derived from the real world inevitably involve a high level of complexity - for example think of the slightly less than real-world example of the game of chess and how many variations there are in the sequences of moves which can eventuate - more so (as I have previously mentioned) than is the case for scenes deriving through the visual process: because visual scenes from the real world can be analysed into constituent parts which are highly repetitive: for example trees are more or less the same, except for a connoisseur of trees who might distinguish the oak from the beech but then oak trees are more or less the same except for a connoisseur of oak trees, etc (and I am reminded that Eskimos have twenty or so words for distinguishable forms of snow). Contingent causal sequences in the real world are extraordinarily complex and you have to be a genius of Newtonian proportions to unravel even the movements of the planets - of course it becomes easier if Newton has already done it and left a written record for teachers to teach from - let alone the movements of human persons. (The movements of human persons with intact frontal brains has as its ultimate basis interference from their frontal brain which - the very thing I am saying here - has such a capacity for extraordinary complexity - even greater complexity than is used by the planets in deciding how to move or according to former theorists by God in directing them how to move - that we fall back on the get-out Sartre was enamoured of, that human behaviour is ‘freely determined’ which is like saying quarks decide freely for themselves what they are going to do.)
Honestly I should be a writer.
08/07/07 07:35
A symptom I had yesterday and have again now - since drinking the coffee, and I have now made myself another coffee the same - was slight soreness of the throat. I have also just evacuated my bowels in a motion seemingly quite normal, except one would have to remark on the timing.
08/07/07 07:39
Also, now you mention it, I have slight aching or tension in the muscles of my thighs, again something which has started up since I drank the coffee and which I had last night, but again both last night and now very mild.
08/07/07 07:57
It strikes me - but of course I can only guess at the drugs put in our drinks - that in giving me a mixture of amphetamine and ASM, by varying the proportions the use I make of my mind varies. If the amphetamine is stepped up I indulge in more internal - selfish, if you like - cogitation, and am more inclined selfishly to pursue goals sometimes (depending on dosage levels) goals in the real world. If the ASM component is more - but not so great as to cause me to lose interest in thinking and in the real world: in fact in life - I become more outward-looking and while still using my mind - as I say provided the dosage of ASM is low - I use it for acquiring information, in the main from other people - in fact a simple example in cases where my mind is fairly debilitated by too high a dosage of ASM is that I look at other people’s websites - and in the main pursuing my interest in unravelling the theoretical basis for people’s behaviour by trying to understand their minds (or even their brains).
08/07/07 08:09
As I continue with preparing an updated proposed update for my website, I will just say what I am thinking: that my doubts about drugs and other ‘artificial aids’ are founded in my basic presumption that you cannot by developing synthetic structures hope to do better than evolution allowed freely to work itself out, any more than by de