substitute

Like most people I think there are versions of me. This is a pretty accurate snapshot of one version at least.

( quiz cut )

It has come to my attention that I need a vacation. Alone. In the desert or up the Central Coast. I usually do this twice a year and it's one of the things that keeps me from completing my transformation into Howard Beale.

It doesn't have to be long or cost a lot of money. A long weekend, two overnights in a cheap motel, and a digestible series of patty melts will do if the scenery is okay. That's great news, because I'm completely broke, too.

The Fix My Damn Brain project ate everything for a year, starting with my time. Neurofeedback, which ends at least temporarily on Tuesday, will have lasted almost 11 months straight with no breaks, twice a week with some extra days. Forty-seven weeks! No leaving town or taking time off. Plus shrink lady once a week and doctor once a month. Plus doing enough of my job that I didn't get fired. I'm a little surprised thisl happened at all.

And it ate all my money too. In theory I'm getting reimbursed for some of this stuff at least, but out of pocket for the period since NFB start includes

Neurofeedback: $8930 <- !!!!!
Shrink: $6815 <- !!!
Drugs: $2200 (est) <- !

Oh hey look, it's almost $18,000. No wonder I'm in the hole. Must defeat ADD and get that paperwork done. If I can get even half of that back...

Most of what I write about my head is private, but sometimes there are things worth sharing with the larger world.

Monday will be my last neurofeedback session.

I have been doing NFB twice a week without a missed appointment for any reason since last October 12, almost a year. There have been no vacations, and no exceptions of any kind.

When I say "last session" the meaning is both conditional and hopeful. The strategy my practitioner uses is to continue until the client either gets significant symptom relief or can no longer tolerate the treatment. I'm in that second category.

In that case, the treatment is stopped for two months or so to let the side effects, which have been the dominant experience, fade out. At this point the benefits — whatever they may be — can be assessed. There's a range of results from "Thanks, I feel better, bye!" through "Some things have improved and I would like to improve other things that are still bugging me" to "I feel somewhat better but we need to keep going with this."

I'm apprehensive about this for obvious reasons. What's going to be there when the bandages are removed? However there's not a damned thing I can do about it other than try to relax and maintain a hopeful attitude. In any case I'll be delighted to be done with the stress and side effects, which are very debilitating.

Apparently many NFB practitioners deny that there are painful effects. Based on my own experience that's a huge mistake, and I would urge anyone going into serious therapeutic neurofeedback to carefully consider how bad a long period of aggravated and newly induced mental illness might be. I've not enjoyed the last year at all, and my career and some relationships have been permanently affected.

It's entirely worth it to me if the result is good enough, since my alternatives were not looking very good. If you're dealing with the neuropsychiatric results of a head injury, if you have disabling ADD-like symptoms that do not budge with other approaches, or if you have emotional problems that are life-threateningly severe and inexplicably resistant to conventional medical and psychotherapeutic treatment, then neurofeedback may be worth investigating. If your life is worth living despite your issues, this may not be for you.

I hope to report some good result by the end of the year.

Car accident: dumb. Car accident in parking lot at 3 mph: super dumb. Car accident at 3 mph in psychotherapist's parking lot, partlally due to side effects of therapy: dumb enough to be funny. Said accident being with therapist's own parked car: COMEDY GOLD.

Price to fix just her car: $1200. And then I get to fix mine. Hey, this shit ain't funny now.

Going from a half dose of two antidepressants to no dose of any antidepressant is a ride. And by "ride" I mean "rusty Tilt-A-Swing-A-Clank-A-Whirl operated by carnies at the County Fair."

I woke up at 3:30 pm today feeling hung over. The day went slowly for three hours while caffeine and my last remaining head pill (Adderall) took effect and I got some minor stuff done and dorked. I showered, felt better, and needed to go for groceries; my brother was arriving for a visit for a few days and a full larder was a necessity.

Then I went to Trader Joes to get food. As I was checking out my stuff I got the sweats, blurry vision, stomach upset, headache, and total exhaustion. It was like a sugar low plus jet lag plus the flu, all at once.

I made it home, stuffed the freezer and fridge things in their place, and told my brother and mom that there was easy food there for them to eat. I then drank a liter of Orangina and ate some yogurt and collapsed.

There's a Dead Man's Party in my hippocampus and you're all invited!

For some of us it's the most we can do.

hotelsamurai pointed me to this Wired News story which has interesting implications.

These researchers have invented a scheme for finding interesting images. Computers aren't so great at it yet, but humans are. In fact, we're so good at it that we recognize important images before we consciously know it, and this recognition can be measured by EEG. In their setup, a human watches images go by, and the ones that register on the EEG as "of interest" are set aside to be looked at more carefully. In short, it's brain-aided image triage.

Given the current sources of funding for research, the examples given are surveillance camera shots, and the T-word has to be mentioned. This makes the whole project stink of 21st century panopticon. But that's not the important part.

Using a human as a coprocessor, literally as a brain rather than as a person, is new. I imagine it doesn't matter too much which brain you use, aside from some that are very good or very bad at recognizing images. It's also likely that this isn't fun "work." Just looking at rapidly changing images for a long time is tiring, and if you aren't able to do anything else but sit in the chair and let your unconscious processes do something, the boredom would be awful. From my own experience doing EEG biofeedback, the side effects of directly EEG-linked activity can be very unpleasant and unpredictable. I doubt anyone knows yet what the effect would be of long-term work as a rent-a-brain.

A Philip K. Dick dystopia looms, in which "braining" is something the poor do, like plasma donation or prostitution. Maybe it fucks you up pretty bad, but the Wal-Mart hasn't been hiring in a while and you need cash. Too bad about the week-long psychoses a person gets after doing the hookups for a couple of weeks of 12-hour days...

THE DOPAMINE MECHANISM IN MY BRAIN IS BEING REALLY FUCKING ENTERTAINING TODAY

SORRY FOR THE WIDE DISTRIBUTION

Today in a psychotherapy session I was discussing my problems with relationships, and more specifically my lack of intimate relationships. The working theory is that my own emotional life is too intense to communicate to others and that I shut them out in ways I'm not consciously able to control, mostly nonverbal.

This is particularly true if I have an attraction to someone, because my feeling of attraction is tightly coupled with unacceptably strong fear, shame, and self-hatred so that I become exceptionally false and not "present".

Okay, interesting theory. But what's the mechanism here? One theory is that the problem lies in the 10th cranial nerve. This is the vagus nerve, which goes to both the gut and the lungs from the brain. The "polyvagal theory" holds that separate branches of the vagus nerve, when stimulated, produce strong and opposed feelings: either you feel very safe, or not at all safe.

This has implications for a number of problems, including some autistic spectrum disorders, PTSD, panic attacks, and social adjustment problems. If the two systems become, as my therapist puts it, "overcoupled", then it can be impossible to make a serious connection with someone without being overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions. The result is a kind of neural shutdown, which makes people like me seem distant or standoffish when we're feeling exactly the opposite.

Stephen Polger, the originator of the polyvagal theory, has had some promising results at the University of Illinois treating autism with sound. There are also some suggestions and tips for dealing with these problems in this interview with Polger, which is intended for a lay audience. The other information I've found about this so far has been much more technical.

In my own case, since I am not autistic, PTSD, or suffering from panic attacks, the goal is to get the neural function more normal through a combination of neurofeedback, EMDR, somatic therapy, and medication. It's kind of a science project though, since some of these ideas are very new and raw and will undoubtedly be further refined later.

Brain Lady seems to have figured out a regimen for the neurofeedback that does not cause me to veer between flailing depressive self-hatred and near-paranoiac rage. This is a good thing.

I'm also experiencing a more even temperament generally. The same problems are there, but the amplitude is reduced, as are the swings. In simpler terms: I'm still upset about a lot of things and have some pessimistic opinions, but I'm no longer staring at the wall thinking about them for 9 hours straight.

I'm also sleeping between 12 and 14 hours a night, which is both therapeutically deemed to be "good" and pleasurable.

So far my rating for neurofeedback as a therapy is a conditional positive. I've got improvements that are good and important, but getting there was disagreeable in the extreme.