'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense'

Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn't be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point - after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat - that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows.

The findings, published on 27 March in Nature, are "extremely exciting," says Li-Huei Tsai, a neurobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. They contribute to the picture that forming memories is a "risky business," she says. Normally, breaks in both strands of the double helix DNA molecule are associated with diseases including cancer. But in this case, the DNA damage-and-repair cycle offers one explanation for how memories might form and last.

It also suggests a tantalizing possibility: this cycle might be faulty in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, causing a build-up of errors in a neuron's DNA, says study co-author Jelena Radulovic, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

Recently at Psychology Today, psychotherapist Mark Shelvock asked some questions of philosopher Monika Mandoki, who has written a dissertation on near-death experiences (NDEs). Both are based at the University of Western Ontario. Here are two of the exchanges:

Shelvock: Do you think that near-death experiences are real?

Mandoki: I believe that a consciousness-only or mind-only reality works out better than any other types of philosophically-advanced theories because the uniformity of reality solves many difficult philosophical questions, such as the relationship of mind and body and the relationship of this world and the next. Therefore, its conclusion that consciousness or mind survives death and continues in an afterlife is the most convincing philosophical option.

Shelvock: How was your work received?

Mandoki: So far, it has been received very well. Firstly, I defended my dissertation successfully without having had to do any revision. Secondly, my dissertation in the past two years has been downloaded by close to 4,000 individuals.

"A philosopher on the possiility of Near Death Experiences and the afterlife," Psychology Today, February 11, 2024

A new psychological assessment has been developed to measure the endorsement of attitudes related to critical social justice. Findings from its application in a Finnish study reveal that stronger alignment with these so-called "woke" beliefs correlates with heightened instances of anxiety and depression, as detailed in a publication in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

The rise of critical social justice, which focuses on identifying and addressing systemic inequalities across various identity groups, has prompted discussions on its influence in academia, politics, and everyday life. This particular orientation towards social justice — often associated with concepts like intersectionality, antiracism, and, colloquially, "wokeness" — has been both lauded for its recognition of systemic barriers faced by marginalized groups and critiqued for its approach to identity and free speech.

Yet, despite the debate surrounding critical social justice, there has been a noticeable gap in empirical data regarding the extent and impact of it. Recognizing this, the author of the new study aimed to create a reliable tool for assessing critical social justice and to explore its prevalence and effects.

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr's childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr's shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. "I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing," Kerr told me.

As he moved to touch his father, Kerr felt a hand on his shoulder. A priest had followed him into the hospital room and was now leading him away, telling him his father was delusional. Kerr's father died early the next morning. Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn't delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada. And the priest, he feels, made a mistake, one that many other caregivers make, of dismissing the moment as a break with reality, as something from which the boy required protection.

There's currently lots of hoopla about some crybabies who want daddy to keep Substack clean and safe.

They talk about "Nazis" on the platform, conveniently forgetting to define what they even mean, which, of course, is a feature, not a bug. Seriously, I doubt those who scream "Nazi" the loudest have ever read a serious book about the Third Reich or about Mustache Man. Not that this matters.

But what drives these people? Beyond being crybullies, I mean? I think there is a deeper point to make here about discomfort and wishing death upon those with different opinions.

David Abramowitz joins us once again, this time to discuss Michael Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian's Taxonomy of Woke Psychopathology. With Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology as inspiration, the taxonomy summarizes how certain Woke topics and causes express Cluster B personality disorder dynamics. While the topics themselves may not be pathological, the manner in which they're presented is, expressing such features as attention-seeking, grandiosity, emotional dysregulation, excess and lack of empathy, victimhood ideology, impaired reality testing, and splitting.

Join us as we take a broader look at political causes, the pathocratic function of ideology, and its role in creating a worldview that makes sense to the Cluster B personality. Pathocratic personalities then attempt to force everyone else to conform to the world they have created.



Running Time: 01:27:00

Download: MP3 — 119 MB

- The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically augmenting them with cybernetic components. The Borg's ultimate goal is "achieving perfection"...

- SOURCE

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

- The Borg

In an article last month, I mentioned virus expert Geert Vanden Bossche and his prediction of mass deaths soon going "exponential" in highly Covid-vaccinated countries.

Since posting that article, I've learned through one of my part-time jobs that two younger-aged people died within a day of each other. One was age 37 and the other was in their low forties. The younger of the two died of a heart attack and the 40ish person's death was, supposedly, according to the doctor, the result of a previously unknown congenital heart defect.

Although a positive mindset is often associated with success, a new study suggests that excessive optimism often leads to poor decision-making, especially when it comes to finances.

The study, conducted by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sought to determine whether people with an optimistic mindset had worse decision-making cognition than people who were more realistic. The researchers found that people with lower cognitive function tended to be more optimistic, which led them to make poor financial decisions.

Study Findings Explained

The study examined more than 36,000 individuals and found that people with realistic expectations and planning processes tend to make wiser decisions than people with a more optimistic mindset.

Researchers discovered that people with the highest cognitive ability were 22 percent more likely to be realists (or pessimists) when it came to financial planning. They also had a 34.8 percent decrease in optimistic tendencies compared with people with lower cognitive ability. Cognitive ability was measured based on various cognitive skills, including verbal fluency, numerical reasoning, and memory. The results suggest that optimism bias causes people to expect unrealistically positive outcomes in life decisions, especially regarding their finances.

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik's Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime. There's no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted - but that's an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we're in deep denial.

- Straus and Howe (1997): "The Fourth Turning", FIRST EDITION page 2

The books "Generations" (1992) and "The Fourth Turning" (1997) by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified and categorized recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras. Both books analyzed the timelines of historical events and correlated them to specific life cycles identified as generational "types". Strauss and Howe addressed the concept of time in the context of both circular and linear perspectives. In so doing, they described the "saeculum" as a "long human life" measuring approximately 80 to 90 years and comprised of four turnings, each lasting around 20 to 22 years.

Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life experienced in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and elderhood.