My Annihilation

A quiet life, no friends, but if someone approached me I responded personably enough.

What is a “self”? Under a particular set of circumstances, it becomes impossible to tell.

These “long-term memories” are said to be stored in the cerebral cortex, which is the same portion of the brain affected by ECT

Because the brain requires a moderate amount of “information.” An excess of information will cause disturbance in the brain as well, but when information is seriously lacking, the brain is unable to perform its usual functions and greedily desires stimuli

In other words, instantaneous visual information is able to pass through the consciousness, or “self,” and act directly on the unconscious. The unconscious then delivers feedback to the conscious “self,” who starts wanting to eat popcorn.

Most people have heard about the experiments that Russian scientist Pavlov performed on dogs. The main idea was this. If you consistently ring a bell whenever you provide a dog with food, eventually the dog will salivate from the sound of the bell alone. Lenin, the leader of Russia at the time, was deeply moved by this discovery and is said to have declared, “This guarantees the future of the revolution.” What most people don’t know is there was more to the experiments.

First you ring the bell and give the dog its food. Once the dog gets used to this, it gets confused if you don’t give it food. If the dog gets worked up, you give the food as promised. But if you approach the dog calmly and ring the bell nonstop without giving it food, the dog will soon become extremely anxious. Not so much because it wants the food, but from a desperate need for the “predictable, stable sequence” of the bell signaling mealtime. If you then ring the bell and give the food as usual, the dog will become reassured and salivate on cue.

From there, if you immerse the dog in water or otherwise make it feel its life to be in danger, it will completely forget about the “habit” it was forced to learn. Meanwhile, the very personality of the dog will change.

He was known for having hypnotized his patients, uncovering repressed events, and successfully replacing them with different memories. As a result, the condition of his patients had improved. Freud and his peers then adopted the practice, though eventually abandoned it. But why? And how come hypnotherapy was no longer utilized in psychoanalysis? The answer is that for the most part, the improvements seen in patients only lasted a short time. The human brain is not something that a doctor can manipulate at will, and the replaced memories will eventually come back. A memory you think you have successfully erased will flap around inside a patient, soon making its way back to where it was.

this treatment was a process for awakening the patient to the unconsciously repressed problems inside of them, to the root causes of their ills.

To whoever reads these words . . . What are you feeling as you read them? I’m thankful for your time. But I’m afraid that it may be too late for you . . . YOU’D BETTER RUN.

Returning to the “eruptive personality” mentioned earlier, in many cases people with dissociative identity disorder will reassign their “angry” feelings to a separate personality (the physical embodiment of anger).