You tried to pretend it would never happen again. But deep down, you knew. It’s not over. It can never be over. It will just keep happening again and again, every time feeling like the last, but promising that there will be another. No matter what is said or done, it happens again and again, and all we can hope for is that, in those precious moments of peace and calm between them, we draw together as simple, common people, take comfort in the solidarity of the damned, and pray together for a redemption that we know will never come.

Yup. It’s time for me to bitch about bad sleep, feeling like crap, and weird dreams again.

It’s not like I have a choice in the matter. I only write these foggy groggy bloggies when I am too incoherent and craptacular to think of what else to write about or choose content to include. Right now, I have a headache, watery eyes from allergies, and a strong urge to hibernate.

But first, I need to talk to you nice people.

I have been pondering my ups and down of health lately, once more attempting to discern a pattern that would allow me to synthesize a strategy and maybe even be able to avoid some of these potholes and even take the whole production to a higher level. Higher highs and higher lows, too. Imagine.

Yesterday was like this, but luckily, it cleared and I was able to produce something at least marginally competent about brains and stuff. But tonight, I will be doing dinner with my dear friends, and afterwards hanging out and watching video with my friend Felicity, and so I can’t wait around till I feel better.

Gotta get this done before I lapse back into troubled slumber,and that means…. well, it means you get what you get right here right now, folks.

I promise, I will write something intelligible tomorrow.

It’s not as bad as I sometimes make it out to be. It could be a lot worse. I could have all the same symptoms, but also have a job, responsibilities, deadliness, a schedule, and all that good stuff. At least with my current bone idle lifestyle, I just have to manage to string 750 words or so per twenty four hours.

It’s like being Dave Barry, but without the money or the audience or the proofreeding.

I have definitely been feeling worse lately. I am guessing it’s probably just because it’s summer. Like I mentioned last week, I do not handle summer well, even on tensely and tersely gray days like today.

If anything, I am happier when it is hotter but sunnier. Then at least the blue skies and sunshine make me feel better and counter the general crappy feeling. Right now, I feel trapped and stifled and tense and kind of like throwing heavy objects throw large closed windows and enjoying the resulting John Woo style orgy of breaking glass and generally reveling in the carnage.

You know, like people do.

I have my fan on and pointed at my poor chronically overheating brain case. I wish I could install some vastly more efficient form of cooling and pressure regulation into this head of mine. Something with big heat sinks, high tech material fans, and cooled with super efficient high tech fluids.

Then this big bad brain of mine might actually be good for something other than holding the my hairdo up.

Speaking of which, work continues apace on slowly and painstakingly trying to create some kind of positive self image for myself. I feel good about myself more often lately. I keep reminding myself that I am a charming, funny, intelligent, sweet fellow, and yes, admittedly, not real good at practical things, but nobody is perfect. I should just be glad I have the gifts I have instead of hating myself for the ones I do not.

Nobody gets to be great at everything. There is always far more that we cannot do than that which we can. I have a lot of things to be grateful for, and the more I harp about what I don’t have, the more I am ingoring the plenty before me.

I still want paid work and a boyfriend and so on, but more often than not lately, I can forgive myself for how my life has gone and remember that there’s no such thing as a normal life.

There’s just the life you get, and it’s best to make the best of it.

Sorry I was gone from LJ for so long. The plugin that I use to crosspost from WordPress to ElJay was not working, and it turns up I was barking up the entirely wrong tree when trying to fix it.

Sad. But anyhow, it’s all working again, and due to the magic of retroactive crossposting, all the entries I have made since the plugin stopped working are now exactly where they would have been in my LJ archive, just exactly as if none of this had ever happened.

So feel free to go back and read all the really neat stuff I wrote this year!

It all started with this documentary.

(I’ve only watched the first half, so, no spoilers!)

In it, I learned about an experiment in which researchers implanted electrodes in a rat’s brain (poor rattie) in order to control the rat’s behaviour.

Two electrodes were implanted in the areas that controlled their respective sets of whiskers, namely the right side whiskers and the left side whiskers. With these wireless electrodes, the researchers could give the rat the sensation of having either its left or right side whiskers stimulated.

That did not disturb me. Animal rights issues aside, there are no big scary implications lurking in messing around with a rat’s whisker.

The part that scared me greatly was that there was a third sensor. It was put there to help encourage the rat going where the researchers wanted by being able to reward the rat for compliance.

By stimulating the pleasure center of the rat’s brain.

Now THAT, so to speak, blew my mind.

As all Larry Niven fans know, the ability to stimulate the pleasure centers of a brain gives you possibly the most potent possible tool to completely control said brain.

Niven wrote more than once about a future which contained (amongst other things) the phenomenon of wireheads, people who become addicted to direct stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain via future technology. It is the ultimate high, because it completely bypasses reality and simply feeds your brain pleasure with no intermediary.

In Niven’s work, predictably, wireheads do not have very good lives, often starving to death because they can’t stand to leave their wire stimulation long enough to eat.

Even more frightening is Niven’s invention of a weapon called the tasp, which does the same thing remotely. Think of it as a Pleasure Ray. Point, zap, bliss.

With a weapon like that, a person could be a Skinner master of any person, given sufficient time to condition them. Do what I want, or no more joy juice. It’s like being the ultimate drug dealer.

The idea that we can literally do this now frightens the hell out of me.

Because you know that if they can do it with a rat, they could do it with a person. It might be a very difficult surgery, but it is at least possible, and in the future^[1], we may very well have the ability to stimulate any part of the brain from outside the skull entirely.

And despite all our mental sophistication, a human being is as vulnerable to simple operant conditioning as any other animal. We do what brings pleasure and avoid what brings pain. Ample experiments exist in the annals of science proving this. We will even invent elaborate justifications for doing so, in order to convince ourselves that we are still acting out of reason and knowledge.

But really, we are just pressing whatever lever makes the food pellet drop into our bowl.

All of this has got me thinking dark thoughts about the future. I love brain science, it is my favorite field of medicine and psychology, but it also scares the sweet loving shiznit out of me because I know what is happening and what is coming, and it gives me highly uncharacteristic “are there things which are simply too dangerous for us to know?” thoughts.

With the advent of the fMRI, we are now capable of watching thoughts occur in the human brain in realtime. Minute changes in bloodflow can be monitored, recorded, and someday, interpreted.

We are on the brink of making telepathy a reality. At first we will simply be able to read someone’s thoughts, but after that, it will not be too long before we can rewrite the entire contents of the human brain as easily as we reformat our hard drives.

And I truly worry that humanity’s sanity simply cannot withstand the potential feedback loop of brains reprogramming brains reprogramming brains, not to mention the obvious worries about the sanctity of the human mind, privacy, humanity, human rights, and just plain creep factor.

Perhaps this is merely the paranoid stirrings of my eventual decrepitude, and worries like mine will seem as silly as all the worry about mind control and brainwashing in sixties science fiction. Perhaps I will be ab absurd old man some day, railing against perfectly wonderful technology because I think it is trying to steal my brain and make clones of me.

But the fact remains….. the future of brain science is both incredibly exciting… and positively terrifying.