“Time Collapse” and My Broken Brain | Hacker News Reader

“Time Collapse” and My Broken Brain

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142 pointsssclafani64 comments

Glenn Beck's article reeks of a promotional piece and I am somewhat skeptical of the reporting of his medical symptoms. It's like 'telephone' where a lot is lost in transmitting the information, because it doesn't sound reasonable to me that a physician would say any of the things he said. For example, you always hear the whole, "You've got x number of years to live," but in reality almost no physician I've ever worked with would say something like that. They will give you data in cancer survival for example, but someone with an undefined illness as he describes could not be given a prognosis! And then the moment he refrences this 'healing center' that performs 'miracles' my alarms were going off. I think you need to also consider that a lot of the symptoms he was supposedly showing are commonly seen in facticious or somatization disorder.

Open up his medical record to scrutiny by other physicians and let me see the data, otherwise I am very doubtful of his 'facts.'

I got the same vibe; top of the first Google SERP for the "Carrick Center":

http://neurobollocks.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/brain-balance-...

"Adrenal fatigue"?

I poked around their website, and found their FAQ (http://carrickbraincenters.com/learning-center/faqs/). The answer to the question "How long has this treatment been around? Does it work?" is telling:

The chiropractic practice of functional neurology is at the heart of our practice here at Carrick Brain Centers. Pioneered beginning 35 years ago by our namesake, Dr. Ted Carrick DC, PhD, functional neurology leverages the rapidly expanding knowledge of the brain and central nervous system to build diagnostics and individually targeted therapies that stimulate brain plasticity, the restorative power of the brain to build new neural connections in response to stimulation.

If you google "functional neurology", the first hit is: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Functional_neurology

Sounds like woo.

For what it's worth, it lost me at "chiropractic", and completely spiraled out of existence when it was followed up by "neurology".

This isn't meant to be flippant at all, but I wonder if Arrington has had his Vitamin D levels checked recently.

VitD plays an important role in memory, and people with extremely low levels often report brain fog. Working all the time indoors over the span of many years, tends to deprive people of proper access to the sun (or peak sun, when you'd normally get the bulk of your VitD). And it's impossible to keep your VitD levels up at ~40 or 50 where they should be, with diet alone.

The sustained lack of Vitamin D has also been increasingly linked to neurological disorders.

I had similar difficulties and since I've been taking cod liver oil I've been much better, so I think low Vitamin D might have been a problem for me.

I was feeling depressed and experiencing brain fog for around a year before I asked a doctor what was going on. He suggested I try taking vitamin D and sure enough within a few days of taking the 2000IU tablet each day, I was feeling like a hundred bucks. I swear by the vitamin D.

Do you have any more resources to read up more on these effects? After working in a windowless office I've started to notice some psychological issues with the lack of sunlight, especially during the winter, and with what you're saying I'm starting to wonder if the problems are worse than I'm even realizing.

I got a blood test back that registered a 5 on my Vitamin D levels (30 being the desired floor, and 40 or 50 being closer to ideal). Everything else was perfect except for that VitD level. I was shocked, but after reading up on Vitamin D it made sense: I've had maybe two tans in 15 years, I don't get anywhere near enough sun exposure, and diet hardly makes a dent in the amount of VitD it takes to bring your blood levels up to a 40 or 50 range. I also felt fortunate after reading up on what very low levels of VitD can cause. I spent a few weeks reading just about everything I could get my hands on relating to VitD and what it does.

I don't have all of my sources handy now, but I can run through some of what I came to understand.

It has a role to play regarding depression, and or a general sense of malaise, having to do with serotonin levels. There are Vitamin D receptors in the areas of the brain linked to controlling depression. You'll find people often feel a significant pick-me-up when they correct low Vitamin D levels - often right from the first week of taking D3 supplements (whether that's a placebo effect or not, it seems to be very common).

VitD is now believed to be an important regulator when it comes to neurological diseases / conditions such as multiple sclerosis and alzheimers. They've found a direct link to low levels of VitD in children and M.S. - which you can see in the rate of M.S. in people in countries far north of the equator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_neurology#Vitamin...

There have been some links made to schizophrenia:

"A new study finds that vitamin D-deficient individuals are twice as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as people who have sufficient levels of the vitamin."

http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/07/23/vitamin-d-deficiency...

People with cancer and heart disease frequently have particularly low levels of Vitamin D. This is a bit tricky though, because that can just as easily tie into lifestyle; but it's interesting non-the-less.

Common fatigue and bone pain often ties into very low levels of Vitamin D. As is well understood now, it has an important role to play in working with calcium and magnesium.

VitD is very important to the immune system:

"Deficiency in vitamin D is associated with increased autoimmunity as well as an increased susceptibility to infection."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166406/

VitD seems to play an important role in memory, and staving off age related memory loss (and perhaps keeping memory strong in general):

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-vitamin-...

There has been a variety of interesting discussion around whether Vitamin D has a role to play in type 2 diabetes. It's often found that type 2 patients suffer from especially low levels of VitD, but the counter arguments are that those low VitD levels have more to do with lack of physical activity:

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2013/niddk-21.htm

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/34/6/1284.full

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/283275.php

It's claimed that Vitamin D can help reduce levels of LDL cholesterol:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/vitamin-d-may-lower...

Are you sure the blood sample was handled correctly? Vitamin D tests are cheap to do nowadays but most doctors have no idea that they have to immediately enclose the sample in darkness or it will be tainted. Vitamin D decomposes(?) in sunlight.

I was tested deficient by one ignorant doctor, then another tested again and everything was fine. The second one told me about it. It is a pain to google so I cannot find proper sources in English.

It's a fair question. It was done by a hospital's lab by a dedicated lab worker, as a comprehensive, and then sent off to Labcorp (versus being done in a doctor's office by a nurse etc). So hopefully they knew what they were doing.

Given the amount of Vitamin D you need to to get your levels up to a 30+ marker, and given most of the US population is Vitamin D deficient (and I get far less sun exposure than your average person) - it's probably a safe bet my D levels are very low.

A 5 was a bit surprising, but it's no exaggeration that presently I'm probably as close as you can get to being a vampire without actually being one, sun exposure wise. My primary curiosity is whether my VitD levels have been single digits for ... a decade at this point. I think I'm fortunate that I was very active outside growing up, and that I got plenty of sun - as apparently having Vitamin D levels as a child akin to what I just tested at, is particularly dangerous.

Thank you so much, I'll definitely look through these as soon as I have time.

I actually have similar symptoms on a smaller scale - I never remember my dreams, and I generally can't tell you if an event happened in the last month or the last year.

I get plenty of sleep, though, so I'm just going to chalk that up to having a bad memory.

Obstructive sleep apnea can cause lack of REM sleep and, as a result, no dreaming. Symptoms may be such that you have a long sleep period but are prevented from deep sleep by micro-arousals. Being overweight (as Mr. Arrington mentions in a linked piece) can cause or worsen apnea.

> I never remember my dreams

It was my understanding (and maybe this is incorrect) that someone only remembers their dreams if they wake up during them. Therefore, not remembering them could just be a sign you've had a good, uninterrupted night's sleep. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case for me–I remember my dreams if I'm woken up e.g. by a car alarm but never if I wake up normally.

I too thought this was the case. I very rarely remember what I dreamt last night, it may happen once in five months if I'm lucky. But I always thought that was perfectly normal.

I've always been told that you have to practice remembering dreams in order to get better at it. And the often-cited way of practicing that is by keeping a dream-diary that you're suppose to write in whenever you wake up.

Likewise, I've never heard of the whole "you only remember a dream if you wake up during it". Sometimes I go through a few dreams, wake up naturally, and remember some of the previous ones (and not the last one).

>Likewise, I've never heard of the whole "you only remember a dream if you wake up during it".

I can't speak to its validity, but there are studies like this:

http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00419

> Studies in cognitive psychology showed ... nocturnal awakenings ... are significantly related to dream recall frequency

Though there are clearly many other factors too!

(link via: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/clues-how-reme... "People who are better at remembering their dreams wake up more often during the night")

Interesting, I never considered my reliance on meta-data to place events in time to be a symptom of anything. I thought that was just how memory works.

You mean to say people normally remember approximately how long ago something happened? Like, not just from "Ok so event X happened, and it couldn't have happened before event Y, and Y relates to Z that I know for a fact happened in so and so year, so I think X happened D months/years ago"

Similarly, I have never been able to remember a name, but I can always remember a face for forever. To the point that I will see random people in the street and wont' be able to tell if I only saw them once randomly in the street or I went to high school with them.

Remembering conversations, hah, funny. People actually remember those more than just the two or three key takeaways?

Funnily I can almost always remember my dreams to the point that I usually can't tell the difference between dream memories and real memories.

I have poor short term memory (I'll often forget what I'm supposed to be doing at work), but I can usually remember when conversations happened within a rough range (a few days, a week, 2 weeks, months...) without relying on metadata, though I sometimes use metadata when I really can't remember. I haven't remembered a dream I've had in a few years, with maybe like ~10 exceptions.

Memory can be weird. I think recall of dreams is generally unrelated to memory though, and is more about sleep patterns (though poor sleep will worsen your overall memory).

I like that description, meta-data placement of events in time.

I suffer from memory fatigue. I remember most of life past my third birthday (though informational processing is hard--I can remember thoughts I had while the trig teacher in high school spoke, but not necessarily what the teacher discussed). About age 20 I stopped being able to intuit the "how long" something happened and switched to what you're describing.

I thought it was common knowledge that stress kills memory.

Stress and anxiety can cause all sorts of horrible cognitive side effects. Memory issues, cognitive impairment, dizziness, "brain fog" etc. are all hugely prevalent in today's society and people rarely think to attribute them to plain-old anxiety.

Churchill had alcoholism, which is probably a better explanation for memory problems than some mystery illness.

He also had depression, which is an even better explanation.

Last year, I read the autobiography of Isaac Asimov (the first two books, not the later memoirs) and he wrote that he was terrible at remembering names of the people he met.

I thought this was very odd, because he was famous for remembering millions of little facts about history and science. Maybe he experienced a similar phenomenon?

I am experiencing exactly this, and I have been reflecting over how it got worse recently. Can't say I process an insane amount of information, though. Could it be a warning sign that one might expect Alzheimer's later in life at this rate?

Probably not, but there are plenty of potential neurological illnesses, so if you feel that you're having memory problems you should definitely take time to see a doctor. They'd likely start with blood tests and some cognitive tests, and if they agree there are problematic results, they'd probably order an MRI, CT, or PET scan, or a combination of them.

When it comes to Alzheimer's specifically, less than 10% of cases are early-onset (where it is diagnosed before 65), and it's very rare for it to be diagnosed under the age of 50. My mother was diagnosed with it at 53, and there weren't really any symptoms until she hit 50. She was 52 when she had to stop working, and even then her doctors weren't willing to conclusively diagnose Alzheimer's until the next year. She passed away this year, about a week after her 62nd birthday.

I'm sorry for your loss.

So glad to come across this article. Thanks ssclafani and Michael Arrington.

I think I am coming across the same thing after my bout with Salmonella + 19 days of painkillers

Arrington referencing Glenn Beck is definitely cause for concern.

Yeah, came here to post basically this :-)

I mean, I think he's probably discussing a real thing, and is mostly on-target regarding the cause. But, he could have picked a better example - how was Beck processing a lot of information, unless we're just talking about batshit-insane conspiracy theories and what gibberish to scribble on the blackboard that night?

And comparing himself to Churchill is just more of the self-aggrandizement Beck is famous for (or self-deprecation, I guess, depending on your opinion of Churchill - but Beck certainly intends it as aggrandizement).

Pause for a moment, replace "Beck" in your comment with the name of any famous person you have even a little respect for, and then reread what you wrote as though it was written by someone that dislikes that person.

All the same thoughts occurred to me too. Then I realized I was being dumb, and fortunately one of the few graces of getting older is that I don't say what I'm thinking as often as I used to.

Hear, hear. I can't tell you the number of times I've drafted a comment on HN, revised it a couple of times, and think cancelled before posting.

That wouldn't have happened in my twenties.

I'm in my twenties and I do that all the time, though perhaps that's just anxiety more than wisdom.

So, should we not discuss the merits of a person who has a public life? Glenn Beck is a public and controversial figure, and controversial for good reason - in fact I don't think he would object to the supposition that he goes out of his way to be controversial. So, if someone brings him up in conversation or in a blog post, I shouldn't respond in kind because I might offend someone?

I mean, keep in mind, I didn't bring up Glenn Beck. He's a central part of the article, for crying out loud, and Arrington references his book multiple times, compares himself to him (and Churchill by proxy), and on and on. It is not unreasonable that discussion of this article would include Glenn Beck, since he's such an integral part of it, and it is not reasonable to ask that people keep their personal opinions of Beck out of that discussion.

Your comment is seemingly pretty benign, but I will tell you that I take a great deal of offense to it. You are thought-policing - simple as that. I don't know where you think you derive the authority to tell me what topics are and are not off limits - especially when those topics are referenced directly in the article at hand. And, for the record, I often do start to write a comment and then think better of it. This time I didn't. Perhaps you should have.

When discussing health issues the character of a person matters none.

PT Barnum would love to give you some health advice, I'm sure.

(The "miracle health centre" Beck is pumping in the linked piece reeks of scam. The phrase "Chiropractic Neurology" ought to send you running for the hills.)

Correct.

A big, scary part of HN is just pain crazy/not high in IQ. Really not sure how to block that out.

They are now taking medical advice from a quote of a quote from Glenn Beck from his doctor.

WTF (What the Fuck) does “TIME COLLAPSE” in science (AKA not magic) even mean?

[Edit] But this line at least was very funny

> Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

Doctors are also historians!

Doctors do have to be historians; any diagnosis they make (unless it's a disease that's never been seen before) will be in terms of other diseases. I was diagnosed with a fairly rare disease, and my specialist knew a bit about the history of the disease.

Knowing the history of a set of symptoms is exactly what helps doctors figure things out. If it so happens that a famous person once had the disease, well, that's an interesting fact and I'd probably tend to remember that/bring it up too.

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