Electric Thoughts

January 3, 2022January 3, 2022 David DempseyLeave a comment

I have some personal experience with intrusive thoughts. There were times in my life where I have been overcome with thoughts that were not my own. It’s terrifying, especially when the advisors at my disposal just believed that I was completely losing touch with reality. But wait…in the Christian worldview, spirits exist. And Paul even says that we should ‘test the spirits.’ So not only do they exist, but we should communicate with them, and figure out whether they come from God or not. In short, the spirit world can communicate with us.

Neurologists can stimulate different areas of the brain and trigger thoughts. My only thought here is that if a doctor can do this with a probe why couldn’t spirits? If the brain is so altered, surely God [or spirits] could plant thoughts. (A Thousand Brains, p. 37)

And honestly, I think this is how the spirit world works, in part. A spirit would be an entity with a probe of sorts. The inception of thoughts would be plausible.

I say this to say that the statement that ‘thoughts are simply electric activity of the brain’ may very well be true, but the source of that electric activity is the question. If a doctor can simulate thoughts during surgery, surely an all-knowing creator could simulate thoughts as well.

I’d also like to reference the boy that Jesus cured of epilepsy in the New Testament. We are told that the cause of the epilepsy is a spirit. But does that jive with what we know about seizures?

We can induce seizures with electric brain stimulation. If seizures are simply electric charge on the brain, and the spirit world can manifest itself by way of electricity, I think it would follow that spirits could cause epilepsy. I am not saying that all epilepsy is caused by spirits. Or that all spirits cause epilepsy. What I do know is that both of these things are true, and this is how I reconcile them.

TLDR: Thoughts are electrical activity. Seizures are electrical activity. Spirits can plant thoughts, therefore, spirits can cause seizures. And if we can remove spirits in these cases, we can remove the seizures.

Strange Seizure Triggers

August 19, 2019May 21, 2022 David DempseyLeave a comment

With this idea in mind, I’d like to look at some unusual seizure triggers.

Low Blood Sugar. To me, this is the strangest of seizure triggers, because it involves something that we don’t typically even relate to the brain. To answer this question, I need to borrow from a post I wrote about diabetes about a year ago. We know that the brain’s primary source of energy is glucose. Imagine that the body’s job is to regulate this glucose. If that is true, low blood sugar would require the body to speed up processes, to fuel the brain with what sugar is left. If the body speeds up its work process to fuel the brain with remaining glucose, the optic nerve signal would increase. And we know from how transistors work, that’s no bueno.
Sleep Deprivation. I view sleep as a quantum cooling of the brain. Therefore, lack of sleep would result in extra electric charge. Not to mention, the transistor likely reacts throughout the day, and becomes less and less forward biased. Therefore, if sleep is a process that charges the aqueous, lack of sleep causes higher brain entropy, which increases the number of free electrons in the vitreous.
Alcohol. This is from a different angle. If the eye works like an NPN transistor, alcohol would affect the internal voltage source, the optic nerve. As the alcohol stresses the brain, the optic never charges the collector of the transistor more than the emitter. This could force a reverse bias mode.
Stress. It works basically the same as alcohol. The internal processes reverse-bias the transistor.

Essentially, all of these triggers work in the same way in regards to the collector of the transistor. Each factor would seem to increase voltage across the wrong portion of the transistor, leading to what may be a reversed bias situation, or even a laser cascade.

Rethinking Epilepsy

July 18, 2019May 21, 2022 David Dempsey

Preliminary Reading: Laser Cascade, Too Much Light, and How a Flicker Causes a Seizure

I’ve recently covered a completely new electrical function of the human body. The input mechanism as well as the necessary output balance. It the last post, we defined a seizure as the body’s natural way to rid the body of excess electrical charge.

Risk Factors:

Babies who are born small for their age
Babies who have seizures in the first month of life
Babies who are born with abnormal areas in the brain
Bleeding into the brain
Abnormal blood vessels in the brain
Serious brain injury or lack of oxygen to the brain
Brain tumors
Infections of the brain: abscess, meningitis, or encephalitis
Stroke resulting from blockage of arteries
Cerebral palsy
Conditions with intellectual and developmental disabilities
Seizures occurring within days after head injury (“early post-traumatic seizures”)
Family history of epilepsy or fever-related seizures
Alzheimer’s disease (late in the illness)
Autism spectrum disorder
Fever-related (febrile) seizures that are unusually long
Long episodes of seizures or repeated seizures called status epilepticus
Use of illegal drugs such as cocaine

Triggers:

Missed medication
Lack of sleep or disrupted sleep
Illness (both with and without fever)
Psychological stress
Heavy alcohol use or seizures after alcohol withdrawal
Use of cocaine and other recreational drugs such as Ecstasy
Over-the-counter drugs, prescription medications or supplements that decrease the effectiveness of seizure medicines
Nutritional deficiencies: vitamins and minerals
Poor eating habits, such as long times without eating, dehydration or not enough fluids
The menstrual cycle or hormonal changes
Flashing lights or patterns
Specific activities, noises or foods

The cause of most cases of epilepsy is unknown. Now we have a puzzle worth solving.

Certain disorders occur more often in people with epilepsy, depending partly on the epilepsy syndrome present. These include depression, anxiety, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and migraine. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder affects three to five times more children with epilepsy than children without the condition. ADHD and epilepsy have significant consequences on a child’s behavioral, learning, and social development. Epilepsy is also more common in children with autism.

What happens biologically during a seizure?

A seizure is a period of symptoms due to abnormally excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Outward effects vary from uncontrolled shaking movements involving much of the body with loss of consciousness (tonic-clonic seizure), to shaking movements involving only part of the body with variable levels of consciousness (focal seizure), to a subtle momentary loss of awareness (absence seizure). Most of the time these episodes last less than two minutes and it takes some time to return to normal. Loss of bladder control may occur.

What causes a seizure? There is evidence that epileptic seizures are usually not a random event. Seizures are often brought on by factors such as stress, alcohol abuse, flickering light, or a lack of sleep, among others. The term seizure threshold is used to indicate the amount of stimulus necessary to bring about a seizure. Seizure threshold is lowered in epilepsy.

Even in someone with epilepsy, there are factors that make this event non-random. Seizures do not happen all the time. People have certain triggers, and warning signs that a seizure is coming. Meaning that the mental state that causes seizures is not stationary, and it is not random. The fact that it can be triggered means that it can be targeted and mitigated.

How can we best describe the mental states that produce seizures? High entropy. We describe in previous articles those people with Alzheimer’s and Autism as very high entropy. Also, the fact that psychological stress and lack of sleep may be triggers add to the case that the seizures are caused by a heightened brain state.

What about Tourette’s? Would a Tourette tic be considered a mild seizure?

Here are the risk factors associated with Tourette’s:

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Autism spectrum disorder
Learning disabilities
Sleep disorders
Depression
Anxiety disorders
Pain related to tics, especially headaches
Anger-management problems

If time doesn’t exist in the brain, and a seizure is abnormal electric activity. Then Tourette’s is epilepsy. The duration and frequency of the seizures is different.

Tourette’s is defined by these tics. Involuntary muscle movements or speech. We know that the involuntary muscle movements are electrical signals. And the speech is too.

If Tourette’s is a series of involuntary electrical signals, it is no different than epilepsy. If the two are the same, why is one so much more frequent than the other? It’s the stress and rest pattern of the brain. Once the brain reaches the seizure threshold, it produces an undesired result. Higher energy individuals would naturally trend higher on this scale.

Sources:

How a Flicker Causes a Seizure

July 18, 2019May 21, 2022 David Dempsey1 Comment

Preliminary reading: Laser Cascade and Too Much Light

We know that some people can have seizures brought on by flashing lights. Previously, I tried to tie this to seasickness. Let’s explore this concept from another perspective.

What happens physiologically when a light turns on? Your pupils contract. Then as the light turns off, your pupils dilate, controlling the amount of light that enters the eye. If we put the person in front of a strobe light, the cycle of light/dark could outpace the mechanism designed to keep excess light out. At very least, there is a lag time between the light, and the eye’s adaptation to the light. This process, over the course of seconds, gains photons in the eye. It simply cannot keep up with the rate of change.

Factors that are pertinent here are max pupil size, resting pupil size, and speed of contraction. With these three factors we can accurately draw a curve for the pupil size over time.

In normal individuals, this is not an issue. But in with people with epilepsy, they already exist at a higher energy state. A bunch of extra photons could push them to their charge threshold.

A seizure is the body’s built in mechanism to remove excess electric charge.

Sources:

Did Pirates Cure Seasickness?

February 6, 2019 David Dempsey

[Alternate titles: Were Pirates Epileptic? + Seasickness is flicker vertigo is photo epilepsy.]

I think they did.

So why did pirates wear eyepatches? Mythbusters says that it was for dealing with the low light of conditions below deck. I think it’s because seasickness is a mild type of photo epilepsy, and covering one eye helps mitigate seizures. Let me try to prove it to you.

Let’s start with some facts about photosensitive epilepsy: Photosensitive epilepsy is a form of epilepsy in which seizures are triggered by visual stimuli that form patterns in time or space, such as flashing lights; bold, regular patterns; or regular moving patterns.

For about 3% of people with epilepsy, exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or to certain visual patterns can trigger seizures.
More common in children and adolescents.
Becomes less frequent with age.

So essentially, flickers cause seizures. But there is thing called flicker vertigo.

Flicker vertigo is an imbalance in brain-cell activity caused by exposure to low-frequency flickering (or flashing) of a relatively bright light.” It is a disorientation-, vertigo-, and nausea-inducing effect of a strobe light flashing at 1 Hz to 20 Hz, approximately the frequency of human brainwaves. The effects are similar to seizures caused by epilepsy (in particular photosensitive epilepsy), but are not restricted to people with histories of epilepsy.

So…what if these are the same condition? Obviously nausea is not the same as a seizure, but seizures can cause nausea. Let’s keep looking.

What is motion sickness? This is when people get sick in cars, planes, boats, space, and even in front of screens. The jury is still out on what causes it. Here are some facts people agree on.

It’s most common in children and pregnant women.
It’s more common in people who get migraines.
Asians are very susceptible.
Medications can cause it.

Treatments:

One ear plug technique. Why in the world would this work?
Caffeine has shown to be effective against it.
Closing your eyes has been shown to effective in mitigating symptoms.

So seasickness is a type of motion sickness. How is this similar to photo epilepsy and flicker vertigo? If you look at the sky and ocean as contrasting patterns, the waves beneath you would create a “flicker” of sorts as your head bobs with the motion of the boat.

The frequency of ocean waves is 4-15 waves per minute And the boat will rock up and down on each wave. And every time your bobs, you’d see sky and ocean. And the faster the boat goes, and the more frequent the waves, the more people will find themselves hanging over the side.

It would explain why staring at the horizon would help. It would help eliminate some or all of the person’s “flicker”.

And why cloudy days make things worse. The contrast with the sky and the water is greater, and more wind means more waves.

What about body language? This article tied seasickness to body sway. The scientist had people broaden their stances, and reduced their seasickness. It makes sense. The less you sway, the slower the sky/ocean cycles in your vision. But with this theory, he can only predict seasickness sixty percent of the time. Why? Because he ignores the other factor that seems to induce the same nausea: sounds.

So why would an ear plug help? Because your eyes are not the only things sensitive to these vibrations. Ocean waves have infrasonic sound frequencies from 0.4 to 16 hz.

Deaf people do not get motion sickness. This is important, but only to show that when the brain is impaired, you don’t get nauseous. So the nausea is a healthy reaction to the stimuli.

Why would pregnant women get motion sickness more often? They have added physical and mental stress. And the physical stress is the key. The baby bump changes the mother-to-be’s center of gravity, making them less stable, and more prone to swaying.

In summary, seasickness is a type of photo epilepsy. Pirates didn’t just wear eyepatches because it made them look tough, or so they could see in the dark. They wore them to prevent abdominal seizures that we call seasickness.

Sources:

Don't Read This Blog

unproven ideas that will never change the world

Tag: epilepsy