A little silly to blog about blogs, but it’s just that I was struck the other day by the realisation that the blog is a really interesting written format. Sometimes a writing format is discovered/invented and it changes the way people write. The novel did that. It fostered the development of social satire and transformed the place of fiction in our society. I’m not sure that the blog is on par with the novel as a writing form. But it’s definitely got some similarities. Like the novel it’s very flexible, a small number of simple rules define it (the novel has chapters, the blog has posts and comments). Also, like the novel it is being used in a broad range of writings. By contrast, think of the sonnet, which is primarily used for romantic poetry. Blogs get used for all sorts of writing: news and current opinions, creative writing, diaries, education. I’m guessing that it won’t be many generations (maybe even the latest one) before, as with the novel, it becomes hard to imagine what the world was like without that format available.

I’m going to write about sleep deprivation because I am deprived (and depraved, but no amount of rest will fix that). Something I realised when I was doing the topic on sleep in a neuropsych unit, was that it is possible to sleep more efficiently.

To explain: Sleep involves a number of stages which can be distinguished by looking at brain activity. Stage I is very light and people woken from it may not even realise that they were asleep. The stages get progressively deeper with less and less activity until Stage IV, where people will usually be quite groggy if woken. But after that something strange happens: REM sleep. Named after the Rapid Eye Movements that occur, during this stage the brain activity suddenly jumps up to levels that look like Stage I or even consciousness. What’s even more interesting is that this appears to be when all the important bits of sleep happen. This is when you dream, and when you get, literally vital, rest (rats deprived of REM sleep die, rats deprived of the same amount of non-REM sleep do not). If you don’t get enough REM sleep you actually accrue a “REM-debt” where your body tries to make up the lost REM sleep next rest.

Sleep follows a roughly 90 minute repeating pattern of reducing brain activity through the stages, a sudden jump for REM sleep before dipping just as quickly down again and gradually rising back up to stage one. You only spend a small fraction of sleep in the REM stage. However, this cycle alters when sleep deprived. Your brain will progress more quickly into REM stage and will stay there longer. This means that a REM debt gets paid off quickly and even long periods of sleep deprivation can be recovered from within a relatively short time of healthy sleeps. (If only my financial debts worked this way!)

When I learned about this change it occurred to me that it might be possible to train yourself to get more REM sleep. People can train themselves to change many body rhythms when made aware of them (e.g. heartbeat rate, on a biofeedback machine anyone can quickly learn to alter their heart-rate at will). Unfortunately, since you are, by definition, asleep at the time it’s difficult to implement training. My thought was that if a machine was programmed to give a pleasant sensation (intracerebral drugs?) as long as you were in REM it might be possible to train the body to stay in REM stage longer. Effectively sleeping more efficiently. Of course there might be hitherto unknown necessities in non-REM sleep (sleep is not a well understood phenomena), but we can only know by trying, right? (-:

Unfortunately, lacking such a machine there is only one way to increase sleep efficiency and that is with deprivation. Although I only got 90 minutes sleep last night (deliberately timed it to give myself a full sleep cycle, which I’ve found is a great way to get the most out of a small amount of sleeping time) tonight I will have recovered most of my REM debt and therefore slept at nearly 200% of normal efficiency.

So last night I was not “burning the midnight oil” nor was I “pulling an all-nighter”. Instead I was “working on my sleep efficiency”.

I was just now struck with a what I think is a great way to begin a novel I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while. A short story I wrote a few years ago sparked the idea. I was trying to add depth to the short story by giving history and background, and it was pointed out to me that a novel was possible from the background I’d hinted at. I may put up the short story at some point, but for the moment, here is the opening page of the novel. (Those with a knowledge of mythology may recognise the main character.) All comments (criticism or praise) are welcome.

The Sorcerer’s Tale

They say I born of a witch’s consorting with a demon. I never knew the truth of that. By the time I was nine I had heard my mother tell so many different stories of my parentage that I knew only one truth: my mother was a liar, and not to be trusted.

Trusted no, but respected, definitely. Because I saw how my mother’s lies gave her power. (It was a technique I learned early, and good that I did. Before my twelfth birthday, it would save my life.) My father was one of her favourite lies. If she wanted sympathy, he was a rapists or her lost true love. If she wanted respect, he was a powerful lord who continued to watch over his bastard son and secret lover. If she wanted mystery, he was not to be spoken of, except for dark hints. And if she wanted fear, well then he was demon.

Whatever the truth about my father, my mother was most definitely a witch. And not one of the nicer kind. A lot is said about witches, and it’s all true. Not the details of course. The rituals talked about in taverns usually bear far more resemblance to the listeners’ wishes and desires than to any truth. But the essence of the tales are true. That they are healers who respect balance, or that they are ruthless women who ally with darker side of the world. Both are true, because witches are people. There is a power that comes from witchcraft and different women will use it for good or ill, by their natures. In my childhood I saw only the darker side.

So my mother had power from her witchcraft and her lies. (And her lies were part of her witchcraft, since witches make no distinction between truth and lies; the healing properties of a plant are the same as the healing properties of a person’s belief in the plant, they both work.) But it was a small kind of power, though it seemed large to me then. A whole village under sway, expertly manipulated to give her what seemed like wealth in comparison to the other villages.

Some say that all lies are eventually revealed, and I agree. For I have studied witchcraft (as much as a man can) and come to this conclusion: when a lie is found out, all this means is that someone has been given the opportunity to make it a truth, and has failed. When one such opportunity came to me, it defined the rest of my life.

I comment on a blog I regularly read (http://thecatsmeow.freeblogit.com/) got me thinking about the issue of “who should pay?”. Many regulatory changes involve shifting a cost. For example: work place injury compensation involves shifting cost of injuries from worker to employer. Another example: pollution controls shift the costs from the local community (costs such as asthma treatment) to the factory (in the form of expensive pollution prevention measures). And another: banning farmer land clearing shifts the cost to the community of biodiversity loss, to the individual farmer land-owner through reduced productivity.

Whenever issues like this come up the fundamental question is “Who should pay?”. This apparently simple question needs to be examined closely because it’s often miscontrued. The “who” and the “should” parts are often not subjected to clear thought.

First of all, dealing with “who”. People often talk about government paying or industry paying, but in reality these two entities never pay. They pass on their costs. In the case of governments this cost is passed on to taxpayers. In some cases the cost may be passed to the community as a whole through reduced services, i.e. the government pays the cost by cutting down services (e.g. health care or education) and diverting the saved money. However, regardless of this taxpayers are still footing the bill so they are the ones who pay (but it is worth keeping in mind that particular parts of the community, often the most needy, may suffer).

In the case of industry the cost is generally passed to consumers through increased product prices. There may be some cost to owners from reduced profits, but usually the whole or the large majority of the cost is factored in to pricing.  Of course there is the issue of business viability. If the increased cost causes a company to be non-viable then the owners do suffer. However, two points need to be kept in mind: Firstly, consumers will not go elsewhere if all companies increase prices. So if workplace laws mandate the businesses compensate for injury then sensible financing will mean that all businesses increase prices in order to put aside money to cope with employee injuries. Secondly, if consumers simply do not want to pay the added cost then perhaps the business shouldn’t be viable. If consumers don’t pay for workplace injuries involved in their product then this is, in effect, a subsidy of the product.

So, there are in reality three groups who can be the “who”: taxpayers, consumers of the relevant pruduct, and affected individuals.

Next looking at the “should”. This is often taken to be a moral issue. Usually people talk about what is “fair”. However, although we should avoid injustice where possible, considering what is fair usually leads to an impasse. Often the cost is no-one’s fault. Take the case of environmental regulations on farmers. When the farm was first set up, perhaps a hundred years ago or more, the owner didn’t know about biodiversity. Nor did taxpayers, or the consumers of the farm’s products. Everyone will say, perhaps rightly, that it’s not fair for them to pay, but there is a cost that needs to be paid. Somebody has to do it.

Considering what is fair only gets us so far. After that we can only consider what works best. Usually this means asking who pays the least if they pay. In the case ofworkplace injury, employers can, relitively cheaply, institute OH&S to keep injuries down. So the cost to the consumer is less than an individual would have to pay for treatment or taxpayers for compensation. In the case of environmental regulations it may be the government who is best placed to do the research on the most sustainable farming method, or it may be the farmer who can implement new methods most cheaply.

To best consider the “should” we have to assign costs fairly, but often no assignment is particularly just, and at that point the fairest assignment is to charge the group that will end up paying the least or who can best afford to pay.

In a nutshell, statements such as “it’s not fair to expect the company to pay” and “it’s not right that government should pay” show a lack of clear thinking. The question of “who should pay” does not refer to entities but to different groups of people and is not usually about morality but practicality. It might be more clear to ask: “Which group of people is best placed to pay?”

It seemed a bit of a cop-out digging into the archives for my first post so I figured this next one had to be new. Of course it’s not completely new since I had the actual idea a little while ago, but other than some quick notes in my organiser I haven’t put this one “on paper” (an odd phrase in this digital context). I worked out this idea in a debate with my wife and a colleague of hers. A lot of my ideas develop this way; in a conversation something someone says sparks a notion so I say it. Usually people disagree, or are at least sceptical, and so in defending my new idea, I work out it’s details. Moments like that are a major reason why I like conversations so much. But I digress, to my idea:

The study of mental illness is a relatively new field. Although people have always had mental illnesses and so there have always been attempts to cure them, the actual systematic study essentially started with Freud. This is very recent when compared with the systematic study of physical illnesses (eg the basics of recognising infection were set out in Ancient Greece). Interestingly, like the early medicine, clinical psychology is almost entirely symptom based. Theories of underlying causes are mostly absent or pure speculation.

What I mean is that up until the discoveries of bacteria and viruses, many illnesses had been categorised based on symptoms, and risk factors for contracting them had been to some extent identified, but the actual causes such as bacterial infection were not known. This meant there could be no final certainty of diagnosis and was a substantial limitation on research. Currently mental illnesses are in that situation, creating similar difficulties for the science.

Some may argue that there is no psychological equivalent to bacteria, but I would respond that since the concept of bacteria was inconceivable to ancient medicine, it may well be that an equivalent currently inconceivable discovery is yet to be made for clinical psychology. However, arguing that something exists but we just can’t understand it, is a fairly lame argument. (The same criticism could be levelled at most theologies, but that’s an issue I may get back to some other time.) So, I’ll give an example of the sort of thing that may be an underlying cause.

In the final chapter of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins (a fascinating and very influential book) he coins the concept of “memes“. It’s a little difficult to explain the concept briefly but I’ll do my best.

Genes are self-perpetuating chemical patterns, their forms cause the animal they are part of to exhibit certain physical characteristics and those characteristics have a survival value. Similarly, memes are self-perpetuating mental patterns, their forms cause the person they are part of to exhibit certain mental characteristics which have a survival value. Memes are replicating ideas and can be as mundane as a tune that gets stuck in people’s heads, or as important as a new religion or philosophy that sweeps across the world.

So perhaps certain memes are responsible for mental illness. For example, helplessness and hopelessness are regarded as characteristic of depression. Perhaps an underlying pattern of thinking and ideas, a meme, is responsible for this mental state. Or perhaps several different memes are responsible. What we now know as “depression” may in the future be regarded as a set of distinct illnesses with similar symptoms (in the same way that “falling sickness” in ancient times included a range of disorders that caused fainting or seizures).

This is what I mean be purely symptom based clinical science limiting research. Unless we have some method of certain and objective diagnosis, we may not really know what we are dealing with. Psychopathology is rife with the potential for this. Two examples: the range of different symptoms in schizophrenia may indicate that there are separate illnesses present; the high-co-morbidity of personality disorders may be because they are different expressions of the same illness.

I’m not saying that memes necessarily are the underlying cause of mental illness. I’m giving them as an example to show that an underlying cause is possible. Although psychology usually seems like a fully fledged dicipline, in my opinion it is an area of knowledge still in its infancy and the identification of some objectively verifiable underlying cause for mental illnesses would be one way for it to take its first steps as a mature field of study.