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Scientists Discover Way To Reverse Memory Loss
electricbern writes "Scientists have accidentally discovered how to reverse memory loss by stimulating a specific part of the hypothalamus. Good news for people with Alzheimer's and those who just forgot where they left the car keys."
I forgot what I was going to post.
Everytime I shock myself I remember fresh why I don't like shocking myself.
I find I lose more than half my memory when I load Vista.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I may be wrong about sex drive, but I think your post reveals some other side-effects.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The mind is the essence of who we are. People who have not gone through these experiences like to think that their personality, their very being is an innate feature of themselves, unchangeable.
It's not. Who you are is merely chemistry. Fuck around with that chemistry, and you become a different person. I've experienced that. Most doctors haven't.
People look at things simplistically, they focus on ONE aspect of the brain's function. Memory. Depression. Hand you a pill that they know raises the levels of mood-enhancing chemicals, and there's your depression cure. Anything that happens that's unrelated to your depression is simply labelled a "side-effect," and unless it seems to be immediately life-threatening, no further attention is paid to it.
But the person experiencing it can come to regret their choice. The immediate effects can be subtle, and the perception of the person can be altered so that they don't realize the change themselves, much the way stroke victims often don't realize the extent of their disability.
You can end up a wholly different person. And even if others around you don't make the connection, you may find some day years later that you've lost yourself as a person.
I don't expect most of you to understand that. But what I'm saying here is that when it comes to the brain, you may like the initial results, and that's all the docs will care about - your memory is better. For some people that will be fine. For others, they may find that with their newly refurbished memory comes severe depression, stress, or a change in personality that years down the road they find intolerable.
In my case, doctors tinkering with my brain caused personality changes that initially seemed exhilarating. It was only years later that I recognized that I was behaving like a sex-crazed manic depressive. The initial problems I had were minor and temporary compared with the results of their "cure."
This space available.
I have problems with memory, because I have intractable epilepsy with a cluster of seizures every few weeks. Nobody knows what causes them; it's not an aneurysm or anything like that, because MRI, PET, and CAT images all look normal. My neurologist said I was apparently born with a "wiring abnormality", which actually sounds kind of cool. So I get a chance every few weeks to experience recovery from severe brain trauma, of varying degrees, with no permanent physical injury. It severely impairs memory and recall, but after you go through it a couple hundred times you remember enough to get a pretty good perspective of what recovery from brain trauma is like. And you can pick up a couple of insights about how brains work and what you experience when your brain has to reconstruct its state from scratch after a hard reset.
First of all, one thing I've realized about being stupid is that it's hard to recognize your own stupidity. (Which you might guess.) A seizure can trigger an IQ drop of 80-90 points and it takes a good part of a week for it to drift back up to 160 or 170 or whatever it is. I sometimes think it's over and that I have all my wits back, but then three days later I have to rewrite all the shitty code I've been writing for the past few days. It's generally well formed, looks OK, and is easy to read, but it somehow lacks direction and it turns out to do nothing useful.
Short term memory is consolidated into long term memory through some pipeline that involves several days of processing. If it gets disrupted by an episode of brain trauma, the result is retrograde amnesia: memories formed during the previous few days are damaged and dim. Stuff learned then will usually have to be relearned. There is no hard edge to it; there are memories right up to the point of failure- but they get dimmer and dimmer up to the day of the seizure, which is just a fog of blurry memories. I can actually teach people things that just a few days later they'll have to teach back to me.
The most terrifying times are when short term memory doesn't work at all, when things go in one ear and out the other. That always produces mind-numbing terror that never stops; you're perpetually surprised by it. I can tolerate it once in a while, since it's brief and not permanent, but if I ever get diagnosed with Alzheimers or a degenerative dementia I'll make sure there's a gun in the house. My grandmother is like this now and she is always scared whenever I see her. She doesn't recognize any of us anymore. This was a really proud woman most of her life, a little snooty even, and now she doesn't even know where the toilet is in her house.
Occasionally a seizure can produce a fugue, where you wander around in a daze, totally incoherent. This happened to an epileptic friend of mine just last month- she was walking around Salt Lake City in a fugue, underdressed in 7 degree weather at 3 AM when the cops found her. When this happens, it's not always obvious what's wrong. I usually just think I'm looking for something. What, I can't remember, but it doesn't occur to me to think about it. It's easy to get lost, and I've found myself in some pretty weird places. One time (back when I had a car) I got lost driving home from work in a fugue. I didn't hit anybody or run any lights, just like my code looks OK and compiles, but the longer it takes to do something, the more likely it is to get screwed up.