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Brain Dysfunction
I heard an amazing case a couple of days ago about a woman who had anterograde amnesia, being unable to form new memories, but retaining memories prior to a certain date. She was woken up during REM sleep and asked about the contents of her dreams: her report would often contain details of events from the day before. However, when quizzed as to the events themselves, the woman had no memory of them or what they were about. Just think the implications of that through...
What do you think of this, and do you have any other similar cases?
Another amazing one I know of (with a plausible explanation) can be read about here: Capgras delusion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sounds like Memento meets Inception
Somebody get Christopher Nolan on the phone right now.
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The unconscious mind is a wonderful thing.
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I think alien hand syndrome is pretty damn fascinating. This is the condition experienced by people who have had their corpus callosum severed, which is the link that connects the two bran hemispheres. It demonstrates the difference in activity between the two halves. Amongst other things, patients experience motor activity in the left half of their body that they don't feel like they are controlling.
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No list of brain dysfunctions is complete without mentioning creationism...
Or at least the cognative dissonance that's necessary to support it.
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The capgras delusion isn't amazing. It's actually quite bothersome.
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Your lover gets off work, at first you think he's possesed by your jerk brother (because he's asking invasive questions or questions you perceive to be invasive, or he makes a strange face when you say something). You treat him as if he were a manipulative spy for the remainder of the trip home, and five minutes later realize you were having a delusion. Then you feel like a hateful and paranoid moron.
You don't want to talk to people on the phone, only in person, because your phone reception is shitty and they sound like three different people (even different genders) over the course of the call, and you feel if you ask them "who they really are," they'll think you're crazy, or they'll "lie to you." So you converse on the phone as you normally would, or as normally as you can. You get off the phone and reflect for a bit, coming to the conclusion that they're probably exactly the person you called, and that you are crazy. And even then, if the person treats you strangely face-to-face (although you don't realize it at the time, it's because of the way you're treating them), the delusion resurfaces.
A lot of folks don't even realize they're having a delusion, when this happens. The person in the examples I gave is a bit luckier than most, probably due to a background in critical thinking. The delusions still happen because their brain chemistry is temporarily fucked, but they catch themself quickly before it weaves into something serious, something impenetrable that could cause lasting damage to relationships. Also, this person has something like bipolar, and hasn't found the right meds yet to cope with psychoses in mania (their psychologist quadrupled their dose of antipsychotics overnight and prescribed a potent one as a night sedative, as a precaution against delusion... The person wasn't psychotic or delusional before, just restless, super intelligent, and full of energy (this statement could be backed by roommates, employers, and family). But after two days of the quadruple dose, the person started experiencing psychotic symptoms, tachycardia, chest pain, dizziness, extreme sedation, constant thirst, shaking, shuddering, paranoia, and delusions. The person wound down their dose over the course of five days, and the psychotic (and physiological) symptoms vanished. Luckily, this person was no longer under legal commitment to take their meds as directed. If they were, they'd probably be in a mental ward for at least a week, complaining of chest pain to nurses who claimed that they were just trying to weasel out of medication. (That's what happened last time, and why they made the person sign a paper requiring med use as directed for a whole six months, with the alternative being involuntary hospitalization (with meds injected if refused))).
So yeah, just, bothersome.
... And that person was me, just a couple weeks ago. Fuck it.
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