Mole
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- Joined
- Mar 20, 2008
- Messages
- 20,284
that interesting, it's the chicken or egg thing. I had my first true hallucination when i was 10 or 11 (saw the virgin mary, she told me to come to her, convinced it was actually the devil i ran the other way) and was having peripheals well before than and extreme paranoia to the point i wouldn't sleep. but i didn't smoke until i was 15 did i get worse naturally, or did me smoking make me worse???
The chapter on schizophrenia in, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", by Julian Jaynes may interest you. Here is a taste -
Most of us spontaneously slip back into something approach-ing the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that no-where, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind.