Findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes, identity (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes, identity (2016)

newyorker.com

48 pointsbenbreen16 comments

My personal experience with milder form of depression, is that you can significantly help yourself by stop taking your thoughts that seriously. Everything you think about yourself and the world is just thoughts. So it helps if you go meta - i.e start thinking about what you are thinking. In the article, one man had constant voice in his head ordering him to do stuff. If one is able to look at it from another angle, and to instead of trying to do stuff the voice tells, for example start marveling at human intelligence that is able to think in sound! Not just sound, we can think in all the ways we experience the world. Through abstract thought, sounds, visually, through movement ... Help yourself, go meta :)

My thoughts and experience exactly. But then: Do we know that everybody else can manage that level of self-insight? I have had prolonged and very close contact with severely affected bipolars. None of them seemed capable in any way whatsoever to take that crucial step backwards and look at themselves from a somewhat more external vantage point. My feeling - nothing else - tells me that that failure was part and parcel of their illness.

I have bipolar 1. What I do is "go meta" and think over the situation and discuss it, how I feel, and how I perceive the situation with a friend or counselor to sanity check. There are times when this fails (co-morbid anxiety disorders), but I find being able to talk through a situation helps immensely. Most of the time, I can even reason out of an anxiety attack or panic attack if I have support close by.

I agree completely.

It seems that the ability to think about thinking and having an outside view of yourself is the big difference between sanity and insanity.

The sane man knows himself to be a fool while the insane man believes himself to be sane.

Groups for people who hear voices talk about roughly similar coping mechanisms.

It can be a bit tricky, because for some people the voice is as real as an actual person standing behind you and talking would be, except there's no one there.

That provides an extra level of challenge to ignore.

Here's a short interview clip from someone who lives alongside voices: https://twitter.com/BBCBreakfast/status/859351603131936768

Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) offers kind of a spiritual framework that has this notion as a core component, in case anyone is looking for a "guided" way to try this approach. I think it is well worth investigating.

Beautifully written article.

I'm reading Julian Jayne's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" at the moment and was glad I had started to read it before reading this article as there were some fascinating jumping off points in both directions.

I didn't realize it when I posted, but I looked back at Mukherjee's book The Gene: an Intimate History and realized that this article is an excerpt from two parts of that book. Awhile ago I gave up on it a quarter of the way through, bogged down in an interminable section on fruit fly genetics, but have picked it up again now and am enjoying it.

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend the book more for his personal narrative (the one that the article hones in on) than for the rehashing of Mendel or the Watson/Crick/Rosalind Franklin story, and in some ways it feels like a bit of a Frankenstein's monster a result of stitching together so many different stories. But he really is a beautiful writer. I'm starting to think of him as the successor to Oliver Sacks (RIP).

C4A and over-pruning are both very interesting takes from the article. Any recommended further reading?

I really wanted to read that article, but it kept jumping back to the top of the page every 30 or so seconds. Plus, the bar at the top would randomly pop back down a couple seconds after I would scroll.

Use uMatrix or similar to disable JS for all but newyorker.com itself. They've got the crappy scrolling stuff on some other site.

Is it possible to use uMatrix disable javascript on twitter.com? It seems to me I tried but couldn't figure it out for some reason.

Last I checked, uMatrix by default enables everything for 1st party sites. So if you are at twitter.com, all stuff originating from twitter.com will be allowed.

You should be able to remove this rule in uMatrix's settings in the "my rules" tab. Just click on the rules you want to remove on the table on the right and click on commit to save your changes.

You can also just click the box for scripts of a given site to turn it red (blocked).

Similar but not identical annoying behavior on 9" iPad Air 2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com