Depression: Not So Depressing Anymore?

Nice long piece in the NYT about the long history of diagnosis, theory and treatment. I missed some key elements going from pg. 1 to pg. 7 and rushing this to you, because I don't have time to read it all right now. Something about cell death in the hippocampus.
You're welcome.

My Confirmation Bias

is to find as much evidence as I can that Freud was a fraud.
I never expect to learn otherwise. It's hard, baby, life is struggle.
Oh, wait...

...although Freud’s work is still a big part of pop culture and everyday language – Freudian slips, repression, anal retentiveness, etc. – it’s mostly bunk, and you know this because psychology became a proper science over the last century with rigorous lab work published in peer reviewed journals. Today, scientists are still slicing away at the problem of consciousness and the ego, or what we now call the self, and that brings us back to Roy F. Baumeister and his bowl of cookies.

I love this stuff, I really do. Especially when it tells me that my cigarette craving is not only normal, but mostly because I am ego depleted.

More Brain Stuff

When you look at the structure of the brain it's made up of neurons. Of course, everybody knows that these days. There are 100 billion of these nerve cells. Each of these cells makes about 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons. From this information people have calculated that the number of possible brain states, of permutations and combinations of brain activity, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

Mindblowing, as they say. If you click the link, you will be at The Edge, which is a pretty cool place to be on a rainy day.

Just As I Suspected All Along

Who am I?
We don't often perceive how we've changed, or think about it much when we do. And it's hard to remember what we used to be like, how we thought, what we thought. And even what we do remember, we know from experience, is inaccurate from an objective point of view. In fact, it's inaccurate from the moment it's recorded. God! Living is chaos. Consciousness is precarious. Best forget about it.
But wait.

There is indeed a self, says Damasio, “but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious.”

Just the other day, I found someone who argued that consciousness wasn't much good for anything from an evolutionary standpoint and that there's no reason to believe that something like human intelligence is evolutionary progress rather than just a dead-end side road. (Although I must say his reasoning that dung beetles or whatever would have consciousness if it was such a good thing didn't really resonate. Maybe the dung beetle is just waiting to see how it turns out for us.)
Anyway, now this:

the reason why conscious minds prevailed in evolution was the fact that consciousness optimized life regulation.” 

'I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes'

And I'm okay with that. Who said it had to be unified, found in a central location. Aren't I central enough?
I love this stuff.

They Call It Ego Depletion

and here all along I just thought I was being stupid. Huh.

But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily

In my new quest to find out about happiness, Nobelist Daniel Kahneman's book is now at the top of the list.

Cucumbers v. grapes

Some monkeys began throwing cucumbers at the scientists because they know a bad deal when they see it.

Your Incredible Shrinking Brain

Made me laugh out loud, disturbing the three dogs, who are sleeping as I try to put myself back to sleep by visiting the internet at 3:30 a.m.

Digression, cast adrift on the buoyant Dead Sea of your own narrations, is a sign of old age, and remarked by ancient moralists and proven by modern neurology and brain science to be a symptom of natural decay of the aging brain, so let me conclude with one, which now that I consider it, is not really a digression at all, though this present clause surely is:

January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.

Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the usual suspects were not innocent but the known criminals of whatever the city was, Tangiers, Marrakesh, I forget which.

Colleague: Casablanca.

Me: I am going to go shoot myself.

The Teenage Brain On ... Life

You've probably heard that the brain continues to mature into the early 20s, but haven't read much about it.
This month's National Geographic devotes a cover to the topic, and here's an exchange between a neuroscientist, the author and others.
I'm bookmarking this and I've just reserved Barbara Strauch's book about us fogies.
As if I didn't have a big enough pile on the counter.

I'm Switching Majors

From Brain Stuff to Gut Stuff, because it suddenly seems our second brain research is yielding a helluva lot of new, confusing, disturbing results.
Enough to qualify for the first-ever Contrarienne Two Quotes O' Teh Day.

Next, we'll find that we're nothing more than giant virtual bodies for a strain of bacteria that wanted to rule the world.
posted by mantecol at 4:02 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]

(I originally meant it as a joke, but I think that was the most profound thought I've ever had.)
posted by mantecol at 4:16 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]

Here, Have A Death Cookie

Possibly the most engaging thing I have read in months. And I read a lot.

“The risk you take has a feedback effect on the unconscious,” he says. “The unconscious will give you ideas and it wants you to act on them. The more courage you have when you act, the more ideas it will give you.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_goodyear#ixzz1IMDNIfZd

The reason it is so engaging is that I recognize my own experience.

I'll Be Bouba, You Be Kiki

Tried to read all this review of the hot new brain book but, I'll be honest, it was long. So I skimmed. Basically I wanted more summary, less discursive analysis. But, as always, a lot to ponder.

Human 3.0

To go where no man has gone before. But it must look familiar. Hmm.
Just recycle a few billion neurons and, voila!, you have speech, writing, music.

After all, the change from Human 1.0 to 2.0 is nothing short of universe-rattling: It transformed a clever ape into a world-ruling technological philosopher.

What will we make of ourselves in the future? Logically, it must be argued, it is already happening because it comes from culture. Or something like that.

Probably The Most Impressive Part Of A Sentence

I can remember reading, written expressly for me. Thank you DFW.

believed in the interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totality—in the universe as an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at its highest point, an organism that could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe’s way of being aware of and thus “accessible [to]” itself

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/03/07/110307fi_fiction_wallace#ixzz1FZ9k0VII

It's part of a short story of his that is inexplicably published in this month's New Yorker, and I am tempted to conclude his widow is releasing unpublished manuscripts at intervals. It's actually the first thing of his that I've managed to read, although I began the big novel with no hope of finishing it before it was due back at the library.
I resolved to buy it at the used book store. Today, I re-resolve.
I now realize that throughout my life, I have expected things to be solved at some point, to have myself achieved enough knowledge to conclude certain things beyond the platitude "uncertainty is the only certainty."
Seems fruitless, I know.

And that's what the story is about, it turns out. I should mark this date on my calendar.

He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/03/07/110307fi_fiction_wallace#ixzz1FZDt6DR2

Stephen Pinker Explains Egypt

at about 8:40. Also, why things went the way they did at that meeting with my bosses. Although I guess I kinda knew it, it's nice to have it explained to me.
Hint: You can't take it back, it's out there.

Quote O' Teh Day

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." - Voltaire

From this, which came from this, which came from this.
It started here.

It's all in the oneness, right? Is the internet God?

Brain Stuff, Brain Stuff, Brain Stuff

My favorite stuff.

In other words: one night someone else went to sleep and woke up as me. I do a lot of the same things as him but I know that I'm not the one who came up with them. I like a lot of the same things as him but I know I didn't discover them. Otherwise I act in ways that he wouldn't have thought of and found new stuff to like that he wouldn't have recognized. I've taken that poor bastard's place and he barely even realized it was happening. It's awesome.

Watch Out!

For that skull-lurking monster, no telling what it's up to. Sorry, I kinda love this stuff.

As you read these words, your brain is taking in all kinds of sights and sounds, and zeroing in on a few. It is recalling what you have learned about the forms of letters, the meanings of words, and what information you hope to find on this website. Your brain is making decisions and forming new memories. All the while, it is helping you stay alert and steadily breathe.

It's An Electrical Problem

Discalculia, the problem I didn't know had a name, means being not only indifferent to but wildly unhappy about math.
And there's a therapy, if not a cure.
Just a little gentle electrical stimulation.
Still too new to know how it will help my algebra.
Calculus? Don't get me started!

Henry's Brain...And You

I haven't read the whole thing yet because I found the cool quote below, but Andrew Sullivan says it's worth it and I'm going right back.

Henry's life never really progressed beyond the day in 1953 when Dr. Scoville, my grandfather, removed some small but important pieces of Henry's brain.