Tag: stereotaxis

Revulsion of the said

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended.

I mean, if even Wittgenstein might feel such a way. Then off to the movies, which he equates to dreams, incoming Freud.

In the anecdote, we feel a fierce anxiety that moves him relentlessly to flee the scene, where the words he has just uttered linger in the air (the space of his interlocutors gaze). They are, but he is becoming; they’ve been said, but his thought is restless, in flight, no longer there.

The movie, as the dream space on demand, becomes the realm of self-analysis, of overwhelming emotions, actions, and judgments, and overwhelming in the good sense, crowding out.

onthearts.com/p/how-wittgenstein-watched-movies

Dreaming of animals and other warning signs of neurodegeneration

The research shows that people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and several other neurodegenerative conditions often experience sleep disturbances many decades before any symptoms appear, and that these disturbances are somehow linked to disruptions of the circadian rhythm. They include common sleeping difficulties such as insomnia, sleep apnoea, and daytime drowsiness, and some slightly more unusual ones. According to one small study published in 2011, for example, the early stages of Parkinson’s disease are characterised by alterations in the content of dreams, particularly the presence of animals and increased aggressiveness.

‘Ware the dreams of animals and aggressiveness …

Dreaming of animals and other warning signs of neurodegeneration

Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

Our system uses c-fos-tTA transgenic mice, in which the promoter of the c-fos gene drives the expression of the tetracycline transactivator (tTA) to induce expression of a gene of interest downstream of the tetracycline-responsive element (TRE) (8–12). We injected an adeno-associated virus (AAV) encoding TRE-ChR2-mCherry into the DG or CA1 of c-fos-tTA animals (Fig. 1A). Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2)–mCherry expression was completely absent in the DG of animals that had been raised with doxycycline (Dox) in the diet (on Dox) (Fig. 1B). Exploration of a novel context under the condition of Dox withdrawal (off Dox) elicited an increase in ChR2-mCherry expression (Fig. 1C). We confirmed the functionality of the expressed ChR2-mCherry by recording light-induced spikes in cells expressing ChR2-mCherry from both acute hippocampal slices and in anaesthetized animals (Fig. 1, D to F). Furthermore, optical stimulation of ChR2-mCherry–expressing DG cells induced cFos expression throughout the anterior-posterior axis of the DG (fig. S1, A to I).

And that, my friends, is all you need to know if your looking to engage in an inception or any other non-nefarious memory-creation activities you might desire. 

Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

The body itself can smell

In other words, we use our noses to smell food after it’s inside us, as well as before. But, in a fascinating snippet of news based on a presentation given yesterday at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting by German food chemist Dr. Peter Schieberle, it seems that our noses may not be not alone in that ability, and that other cells in our bodies are able to “smell” food too. (##)

Cells themselves will move toward volatile organic compounds that even the nose cannot smell in a process called chemotaxis.

The first part, about smelling through the mouth, is an important part of why you should disregard all those articles, usually about wine, that say “you can only taste five tastes, so any complex favor profiles are mumbo jumbo.” I mean, one should discount those based on experience alone, because, like, well, can you taste the difference between broccoli, cauliflower, kale, romaine lettuce, arugula, and sorrel? Yes. Of course. That’s six.

The second part is even more interesting, as if the body itself, beyond any sensory input, craves certain foods and aromas. Or rather, again, we need to redefine and broaden what we mean by the senses.

Kevin Curtis’ Ripoff Report

Similar to the other piece of stereotaxis I published a few days ago, another scrap of speech:

About 4 hour into the job after I laid down the first coat of sealer, I became very thirsty. I was unable to exit the morgue due to floor finish not drying as fast as I had anticipated with the humidity level, so I opened the dor to a small refrigerator located to the right of the autopsy table. I assumed I might find some water or anything to drink as I was dehydrated.

What I discovered, changed my life forever! There were dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic. A leg, an arm, a hand, a foot, hearts, lungs, tissue, eyes and even a severed human head! I guess I was in a state of shock when I rushed out of the morgue because a physician asked me “What’s wrong”?

I told him exactly what I had seen & asked him what they did with so many body parts? He looked very strange & did not answer me. Instead, wrote something down on a piece of paper. I suddenly became a prime “person of interest” where my every move was watched & video-taped.

I escorted a young radiology technician to the morgue as she did not believe me. When she saw the body parts and severed head, she could not believe it either. We told every single person in Radiology what was in the old upright refrigerator.

I immediately noticed a change in the atmosphere. Security guards were all of a sudden around me…walking behind me and I could hear video camera’s zooming in on me as I walked down the hallways that night. Security followed me to the time card machine that night for the first time in 14 months.

Here, the individual is confronted with a “fantasmatic anatomical fragmentation,” something shocking to him, the fragility and dissocited body, a moment where he “all of a sudden, mysteriously, God only knows why, becomes decompensated,” decomposed into a world that no longer makes sense (#, #).

And it cannot be just the body parts: we are in a morgue, after all, where the job  is to dismember the occasional body. There is an immediate change, a paranoia that bears on everyone and everything, where the imperceptible (the noise of cameras zooming, security guards) begins to impinge upon and dissociate reality. 

Though, unlike a law suit against a basketball player, one with a political direction, a man who sends ricin, a biological weapon, to senators and the president, with notes bearing witness to this fundamental experience: “No one wanted to listen to me before. There are still ‘Missing Pieces’" (#).

EDIT: Or, potentially, a sociopath mimicking such an enunciation (#), which only makes the circulation of these signifiers more intriguing, not less …

Kevin Curtis’ Ripoff Report