Saturday was meant to be a day for travelling up to London, being political in the street, then discussing more politics in a big hall, then somehow getting home and dissecting the day's politics in a pub.
Instead, it was a day for sleeping through two alarm clocks and missing the coach.
There was a choice of evening entertainment. Either spend an hour in the cold outside receiving enthusiastic but inexpert oral sex...or two hours in a warm pub. With a different kind of oral pleasure.
Guess which I had? Yes. I must be getting old.
Working on my Song Theory - and after the latest revision, I've calculated there are eighteen different ways to phrase "I Love You", in 4/4 time.
Not counting those that have the same pattern but half (double, quarter etc.) the speed, those which differ only in note lengths but not note start position, and those which are theoretically possible but leave absurdly long gaps between words.
And I'm just talking about phrasing and rhythm - not melody. Details if/when I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change my mind the next day.
Speaking of minds, have you ever thought about how misleading the term "mental illness" is?
It's a metaphor, obviously. Measles is an illness, so mental illness is...like measles of the mind. Scrofula of the soul. A cold in the nose of the unconscious.
No, it doesn't make any sense at all, when you think about it. Whatever "Mental
But then, it's not really like a demon using you as a sock puppet either. The right metaphor doesn't seem to exist yet.
I once had an argument with a gaggle of trainee nuns...over whether a mind could be produced "within" a brain with no body attached. They insisted that there would be thoughts, even though there would be nothing to have thoughts about.
Back in the land of sanity...Mother is knitting me some shoes.
Well, slippers actually. And jackets for everyone. And hats. So I know exactly what I'm getting for christmas.
The more PC term is now 'mental health issues', but then the suggestion of a mental health is exactly the same kind of metaphor you refer to.
ReplyDeleteThere is 'evidence' to show that some parts of the brain do become damaged from injury and infection which cause a mental illness. Siphilis is the best example.
As I am sure you will be aware the jury is still out on Schizophrenia, Depression etc but again, there is some evidence to suggest biological factors in mental illness so apparently your brain can get ill.
Conversely, there are many theories to suggest environment or wanting to suck your mothers tits as a kid as contriuting factors... the list is bloody endless and with the platicity of the brain there is the age old problem of cause or effect? So we just don't know.
Any of these theories can and probably will be beaten with your hard stick.
P.S.
Can I suck your Hallux yet?
Yes indeed. The brain is a bodily organ, so can become infected.
ReplyDeleteAnd I imagine we both take it as axiomatic that the brain is the physical substrate in which occur processes which we call "the mind" - without falling into the reductionist trap of saying the mind therefore isn't "really there".
I recall reading a study (don't recall the details, can't find the reference) a few years ago which claimed 90% of schizophrenia patients had swollen axons in their hippocampus - from which it concluded that schizophrenia is nothing but an infection, by a bacterium or virus as yet undiscovered.
Just two small problems:
1) Schizophrenia is the name given to a ragbag of behavioral symptoms. Sometimes there's delusional or paranoid beliefs, sometimes a loss of intellect, sometimes mood swings, violence, inappropriate emotions (whatever that might mean), or a difficulty in separating fantasy from reality.
One thing schizophrenia is not is a single identified cause of any or all of these symptoms. As far as I'm concerned, in many (perhaps most) cases, it's a way for the psychiatrist to say "there's something deeply wrong here, but I don't know what".
2) It implicitly assumes that causation can only proceed from the actual to the virtual, the hardware to the software, the physical to the mental. But if the mind is constituted by processes in the brain, then a change in the mind must also be a change in the brain.
The swollen axons therefore are evidence neither of schizophrenia being the result of an infectious agent nor of it being caused by the life experiences of the patient.
I've no doubt all this is quite obvious to you, but it helps me think to lay it out. I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV.
I think it boils down to this: If you see someone behaving in a way you consider bizarre, what's your first thought? Is it:
(1) This person is behaving normally, according to the standards of their social group. They're just different.
(2) There's something wrong in their life and history. They're fucked up.
(3) There's something wrong with their body/brain/soul/spirit/essence. They're ill.
(4) There's something wrong with them morally. They're evil.
The evidence - such as it is - can be interpreted to support any of these views. Most laypeople (and probably a lot of professionals) will have an incoherent mishmash of all four in their heads.
My default position is (2), or sometimes (1). (3) still seems to prevail in medical orthodoxy, and a disguised version of (4) dominates on the street.
PS. It's still a bit tender. And I'd really like to lose a few lbs before presenting anything for your delectation.
ReplyDelete