Brain Blogger publishes articles on neuroscience, psychology, and health, covering topics from brain function to dreaming and perception.
Commenters cite it as a source on topics like schizophrenia, facial recognition in the fusiform gyrus, and practicing skills in lucid dreams.
Re: Marijuana
Weed can have an incredibly devastating effect when used as an escape. We have all been told that weed has no withdrawal symptoms and is safer than water. This is simply not true.
Being involved in startups can obviously be extremely stressful. Like Jody, I used weed as an escape after a hard day. It allowed me to clear my mind, sleep, and be at peace with the storm that was my life. Over time, the weed worked less and less, I needed to smoke more and more to get the same feeling, and my emotions started to go up and down dramatically, even when stoned.
One day, I had a nervous breakdown over something that really wasn't a big deal. After a lot of introspection and discussion with friends, I realized that weed was making my situation worse. It had turned from an escape to a nightmare. It was like a light bulb turned on and I could see everything clearly. For example, I would get really bad headaches and start feeling nauseous around the time I would usually smoke on weekdays (5 PM). If I was in a meeting, I would usually become very moody and frequently had to leave. I never realized it was from the weed, though. I always wrote it off at every occurrence as a virus or a bad meal or just lack of sleep.
The day came when I decided to quit. I will give a brief outline of what it was like and how it felt.
Day 1: Felt really good and positive about the whole situation. I had cravings at night but was able to ignore them.
Day 2: Started to have a hard time…
>Women still make 77 cents to the male dollar
False. Women get paid equally for the same work and the same hours. Averaging all women vs all men is dishonest. http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf
>Women have much higher incidences of anxiety and depression disorder
Women have higher incidences of being diagnosed with depression. Men have much higher incidences of suicide. What does that tell you?
>Women are substantially more likely to be the victims of domestic violence
False. Repeated studies have indicated that domestic violence is equally likely to be perpetrated by men and women, and equally likely to happen to men and women: http://brainblogger.com/2008/06/08/woman-comparable-to-men-in-domestic-violence-stereotypes-and-their-consequences/
>1 in 5 are raped
False. This statistic is often repeated (and varies from 1 in 3 to 1 in 6 depending on who is repeating it) but is based on deliberately misrepresenting the findings of studies on the subject. http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2009/09/11/rape-statistics-1-in-4/
>you know that men and women are treated differently in our society
And those differences manifest as both benefits and drawbacks, for both men and women. Characterizing that as "women have things harder" is absurd, and is only ever done by people deliberately picking and choosing the downsides and benefits they want to use to push their agenda.
"A decade ago"
Attaching a time horizon on things which evolve causes many things to lose meaningful perspective relative to the discussion at hand.
The fact that things evolve does not negate my opinion that DevOps is a meaningful term.
Heck, I am currently watching the "That DevOps Guy" youtube channel (~50k subscribers) in order to learn about Helm Charts (related to kubernetes).
Clearly, people use the term DevOps to meaningfully communicate today. 10 years ago? This is a post from 2022, not 2012. So, you're referring to a discussion from 10 years ago... Yeah I don't know that its very relevant in a discussion of "DevOps actually does mean something [implied in today's age]"
a little over a hundred years ago a barber was a surgeon ("Up until the 19th century barbers were generally referred to as barber-surgeons, and they were called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. They treated and extracted teeth, branded slaves, created ritual tattoos or scars, cut out gallstones and hangnails, set fractures, gave enemas, and lanced abscesses." [1] )
and a farmer was a soldier (WW1, US Civil War, & previously)
[1] https://brainblogger.com/2011/05/06/from-haircuts-to-hangnails-the-barber-surgeon/
I highly recommend looking into the work of Paris Williams:
http://brainblogger.com/2012/08/07/schizophrenia-and-psychosis-brain-disease-or-existential-crisis/
http://brainblogger.com/2012/06/23/is-schizophrenia-really-a-brain-disease/
http://brainblogger.com/2012/05/29/full-recovery-from-schizophrenia/
He also has a book called "Rethinking Madness" which is amazing.
Basically, there is no medical evidence for classifying schizophrenia as a disease. He believes that it is a state the mind creates for itself when it's surroundings stress the person out too much. There are very high recovery rates for schizophrenia in 3rd world countries, which he believes is due to the lack of medication.
Still, genetic regulation changes would somehow have to end up pushed into gametes in order to make it to the embryo. Or maybe there could be a placental mechanism for passing genetic regulation from the mother to the embryo. The latter would be more likely to work, so I'd bet on that if the mechanism exists at all. Either way, finding a bit of Lamarckian flavor in nature would be something else, after all these years.
A link I just found when searching news for lamarckian evolution: https://brainblogger.com/2018/01/08/lamarckian-evolution-is-making-a-comeback/
Not exactly the same but there are a few documented examples of people developing astonishing creative abilities as a side effect of degenerative brain disorders:
http://brainblogger.com/2012/09/23/what-is-creativity-art-as-a-symptom-of-brain-disease/
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-bolero
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188