eambash's blog

Computing The Creative Mind: How Margaret Boden Sails, then Scales, the Psyche

If you're up all night before a big exam, or if you sleep all day before getting up to go to a big event, can your doctor tell? Sometimes the brain makes mistakes, be it because of it sleep deprivation, lack of interest, or bad concentration. Sometimes we space out, daydream, fall into a zone other than the hard-at-work zone. These space-outs cause visible effects -- just look at the papers we forgot to file, the typo we could have avoided, the kid we should've picked up after school. Aside from the visible, though, how else can we tell when the brain is doing something wrong or something outside of the ordinary?

Dizziness. Mania. Insomnia. Fatigue. These could all present, without great surprise, as symptoms a psychiatric disorder such as major depression or bipolar disorder. A common cause for concern about health care providers and patients alike, however, is the association of these symptoms not with depressive illnesses but with withdrawal from antidepressants. Sometimes called SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome or Antidepressant Withdrawal Syndrome, many users of pharmacological drugs have experienced a disorder characterized by the prevalence of a wide variety of symptoms at the time when a short-half-life

This feels like my ordinary nighttime routine: yellow light, static screen, wooden chair, pins and needles. Needles and pins? My foot has fallen asleep again – and yet, as that thought comes to me, I immediately question it: has my foot itself really turned off, or is it just that my mind has stopped registering the foot? Is my foot ignoring stimuli from the outside world, or is it simply unable to deliver the stimuli it does receive to my brain? I wonder what the relationship is between numbness and neurology. If I don’t feel a body part, does that automatically mean the part isn’t working? What if no “part” even exists outside of my