OT: Another little update

[Mike Amick]

Yea know Evan .. the improvements you have been noticing could easily be caused by
the positive things happening in your life.

It's obvious that you have been depressed for quite some time now .. and it is no
secret that depression has no limits on how it can affect your well being.

So it's very probable that the good things going on are bringing you out of your depression
and those negative effects of your depression will slowly go away.

Either way ... good for you.

[Evan]

You are absolutely right about the depression as I so very well know (in my early years I majored in computer science and psychology). And yes, the depression I have had for many years is finally lifting to the point of being gone. Still, what I am now finding about my face blindness is so easily explained by the circumstances I now find myself in and it makes perfect sense. I have been face blind since I was a child. Had I stayed at or near sea level it may well have faded away. Not much is known about the disorder. But, I have lived at an altitude where any good exercise I got was nullfied by sleeping every night when I did not breath properly due to my CCHS. That has now been nearly 45 years and then I just moved here 4 1/2 months ago. My breathing is perfect. The studies that were just published show major improvements in hippocampus size and function in just six months. They were only looking for verbal function as a result, not prosopagnosia. But prosopagnosia is related to the hippocampus, in part.

This is almost feeling scary. Already I may have found a treatment for those few that are born with CCHS hypoventilation. Now it is starting to look like I may have identified a possible effective treatment for prosopagnosia, for which there is no known treatment. I am especially good at putting together seemingly unrelated bit and pieces of information and always have been. I have no idea why but that is just how my mind works. It very much applies to what I am now seeing regarding how just exercise may well improve face blindness. That would be incredible if true. It could help an uncountable number of people. I feel like I am dreaming right now and will sadly wake up to reality. But maybe not.

From the Lancet medical journal: "Update on the global pandemic of physical inactivity"
I am not including the link since you need a subscription. It is just the point I am making. Prosopagnosia seems to be far more common than it was.

[wtrueman]

Evan, good to see you here again. I have been sporadically here over the last few months. Wayne.

[Evan]

I will be on and very likely off for various periods of time. I expect to be busy in the near future with a large group of friends to play with. I have no clue what it will be like for me. The way I am living now is a very new experience.

Once I am certain that I will be working in the neurology lab I will post some info about the place I expect to be working. Then all that care will be able to see where and what it is. I meet with the professor later this week.

[darryl]

Well Evan, you certainly do have a group of friends here that care, interested in keeping up with your findings and glad to see the positive turn in your life.

[Evan]

Yes, it most certainly does help to have friends here. The last five years of my life have very much sucked. Finally it is turning around for the better. It wasn't at all clear that I would make it this far. Now it seems I may have some more time.

Last year in particular began as a time where things were finally improving. Then a person that was supposed to be helping me made a bad mistake. That was followed by more incredible mistakes by others that are hard to believe and ended up destroying much of my life. I had no control at all over the events that took place. I am finally back to a point where I do have some control over what happens next. It isn't all what I want but it is far better than I expected could be possible. And, it seems to be improving day by day in ways that are hard to believe. I very much wonder where I am now headed.

[TGTool]

Evan,

Not quite on topic, but tangential to your direction.

Do you have any experience with the open source EEG stuff? I experience something, not deleterious, that I'm curious about but my neurologist won't answer any questions. He's got EEG's on record so theoretically I could request my medical records and maybe figure it out.

It looks like these days I could gather my own data with the lowered cost and wider availability of electronics including DSP's. And open source analysis programs.

[Evan]

I will let you know fairly soon. I will be doing some work with a device available here: http://www.choosemuse.com/
This is what the professor used in his research at Mt. Everest and also uses to teach his students. He has 16 of them but needs more so I am going to buy one for myself to experiment with. It isn't terribly expensive, $300 CAD. It has all sorts of capabilities not advertised to the general public. For the public it is a meditation assistant but it can also measure many of the standard medical brainwaves in the usual chart presentation. It is limited by the simple fact that it only measures from the frontal area of the brain (forehead) but that is good enough for much of what is really needed. There are some important very specific brain waves I want to measure such as the N170 which is temporal lobe. That is directly related to face processing as well as emotions. For that I suspect it won't be too difficult to simply move the location of a sensor. I already have the proper type of leads and skin connectors since I own an ECG for the heart.

Also, the lab has developed some special apps that makes it more usable in certain ways. It can connect directly to a laptop or smart phone.

As far as my own ability to interpret EEG waves, I do not know much about that as I have never had the opportunity to work with such devices. I am sure that is something I will be learning soon. I know some of the general theory but not in actual use and interpretation.

[TGTool]

Thanks. Interesting. That looks like a good choice for his purposes.

There are options out there that look less consumer oriented but perhaps more flexible with this outfit more on the DIY end. http://openbci.com/

and a wikipedia comparison of some options even. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...ter_interfaces

The usual dilemma of start at the small end to get educated and then figure out what you really should have gotten instead or jump in with both feet and expect to learn your way around new and strange territory.

I'll be interested to follow your journey on this.

[Evan]

We shall see but I fully expect to be doing something at the university. If nothing else I will most likely be able to work with the engineering students in the machine shop and teach them some degree of machining as well as safety procedures. However, my skills in digital imaging seem to be better than most and that is where my training goes back to day one, including medicine.

I have always been fascinated by how the human brain works and is what I began studying when I first attended at UC Berkeley. I haven't ever lost interest in that. The brain is so incredibly complex I tend to think along the lines that someone else once said: "To fully understand the human brain and mind will require a higher order of intelligence than we possess."

We still don't really have any working concept of how we think. That alone is greatly hampering the idea of creating any sort of true artificial intelligence. That is what I wanted to work with when I first started school. It didn't take long for me to realize that it was going to be far more difficult than others thought or even impossible to do at all.

Not many are aware of just how a Von Neumann computer really works. It is ridiculously simple at the bottom end. Only two logic statements are all it takes to build any digital computer currently in existence.

If A then not B

If A and B then C

That is it, nothing else. When I first saw that it became clear to me that we can never create something that thinks like the human mind based on something so very simple. Even just a single neuron in the brain is affected by the presence and levels of over 1400 proteins as well as dissolved gasses, electrical fields, chemicals of many different kinds, fluid pressures, movement, light, sound etc and all in widely varying analog quantities. That is just one neuron. Each of those neurons can have thousands of connections to others. And, they are never fully independent. Each neuron is affected by the operation of many more in the near and sometimes not so near vicinity. Some are connected but even ones that aren't also affect others. The complexity is insanely high.

Studying how the brain works is the ultimate challenge.

[Evan]

Oh yes, just one other little item. I just had liver sonography done and it appears I do not have liver cancer hanging in there, thank goodness.

[TGTool]

Oh yes, just one other little item. I just had liver sonography done and it appears I do not have liver cancer hanging in there, thank goodness.

Nice to hear that good news.

Several years ago my brother in law recommended A Symphony in the Brain, by Jim Robbins and that got me cranked up about the potential for using fairly sophisticated biofeedback to alter brainwave patterns and affect a whole range of disorders. It was copyright 2000 so no doubt more has been learned that might either support or refute what was thought back then. I don't have a disorder (that I know about) but I'd like to know a lot more.

[Evan]

The lab I will be working in is operating with a very new concept in neurology, Neuroeconomics. They use a lot of computer based simulation of how parts of the brain figure out what to do at levels from the bottom, such as the body's abilities to control basic functions such as blood pressure, right to the top, such as your aware methods to decide what to do next and why. It is all about decision making throughout the brain. It is a very interesting concept, treating nearly everything the brain does a some form of decision. By looking at it that way it is a lot easier to write computer algorithms that come somewhere near matching what actually happens. What I like best about all of this is that it fully integrates the way the mind works with the actual brain. That has been utterly missing from how psychologists look at the mind and in my long held opinion is wrong. The mind is completely dependent on the physical functionality of the brain. It cannot be otherwise.

The general term for this way of thinking now is neuropsychology and it very much depends on actual neurology, the physical function (or malfunction) of the brain.

As far as "disorders" are concerned, there is plenty going on in your mind that can very likely be improved, with no "disorder" involved. A lot of what they have in the past considered to be a disorder is now being thought of as simply a different way of thinking. A very good example of that is so called "Asperger's Syndrome". It is now very clearly spelled out in the DSM5 and under that new diagnostic manual I am not in the slightest any sort of "Aspie". Yet in the old DSM4 I was along with about 30% of engineers. The only reason I ever fit the definition is mostly because of my face blindness. Face blindness is NOT a psychological disorder. It is a malfunction in how the brain processes face images. So much is rapidly changing in how we understand the brain and mind.

I already have some questions about this concept to discuss with others in the lab. I see some possible inaccuracies or even mistakes in how the simulations currently function. I know that they are already well aware there are some areas that are not well simulated and need a lot more work but I think I am seeing some they are not properly considering. Even the bit about Hypnagogia is an example (hypnagogia is not common). This will be extremely interesting to discuss and debate with the team. It is also strongly associated with plain old psychology, some of it even back to the old Freudian level of thought about the mind and its functions. The good old Id, Ego and Superego come into play, I think. I just hope I can at least somewhat keep up with the crowd I will be working with.

It will be very interesting to work in an area that is in part considered a "Soft" science. They are trying to make it as "Hard" as possible.

If you want to do some interesting reading look up "psychology of science". That is a quite new field.

[Jim Williams]

Evan,

I am fascinated by all the hardware in your spine. I am now 85 years old and suffering from severe spinal stenosis in my lower spine, and some in the neck. I do not have significant pain when seated, but am finding it difficult to walk more than about 100 yards or stand for very long. I have not had any encouragement for surgery from the neurologists I have seen. How old are you, and what is your take on the possibility of any type of surgery to improve my standard of life? I have to add that I spend 3 1/2 hours, three days a week on a dialysis machine.

Jim Williams

[PStechPaul]

Those X-rays were of my spine. I am now 67 years old, and my congenital spinal stenosis started giving me severe problems in 1983 and had caused episodes of debilitating sciatica ever since. There were periods of a year or so when I could play volleyball or tennis and go on 7 mile hikes with minimal discomfort, and then periods of a few days to several months when it was quite bad. In 2013 I had hip replacement surgery, that relieved some of the pain in my right side (where I also had sciatica), but when I tried resuming more activity the sciatica from my spinal stenosis got worse. MRIs determined that I had stenosis throughout my spine, but was bad enough to warrant surgery on my cervical spine (neck) and lumbar spine. The ACDF was needed first, and was the most risky (since problems could cause quadriplegia), but it went well and I fully recovered after about 6 weeks.





I had the lumbar surgery June 16, and I felt almost immediate relief with very little post-surgery pain. I was limited in activity and had to wear a back brace for 6 weeks, but now I am 95% pain free and I am working out several times a week at a local gym to build cardio function and muscle strength.

The back incision looked a bit ugly soon after staples were removed, but now it looks much better. [warning - graphic]

http://pauleschoen.com/pix/Incision_3018.jpg

My surgeon showed me X-rays of cervical spine surgery he performed on a 91 year old man, so you should still be a candidate if your cardiac health is OK. I don't know about the kidney issues. You could contact my surgeon - he is excellent!

http://drfedder.com/