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I’d never heard of the guy but this passage from his book “Infinite Jest” strikes a very personal chord.

-Monkey

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace:
Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul’s core systems — these persons know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called `depression.’ One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia²⁸⁰ or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sud den to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . . . well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become sche mata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. i.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.

280. Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

David Foster Wallace
from Infinite Jest

(Via BlogAsheville.)

the prince:

more from the WSJ here.

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

Can Science Justify Strange Flings?:

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

PROGENE MALE SUPPLEMENT: BUY IT, OR YOU’LL NEVER HAVE SEX AGAIN:

This commercial I recently saw on Comedy Central for Progene male enhancement supplement warns men who are ‘not 20 anymore’ that, without their product, they won’t be able to satisfy a woman.

Here’s a screenshot of a graph from the video which purports to show how men’s sexual performance declines with age:

Of course, we women ‘know it’s not your fault,’ ‘it’s natural.’

Obviously you could could use this for a discussion of the increasing scrutiny men’s bodies are put under (much as women’s long have). But it’s also a good example of the way sex is often discussed; the implication here is that the only way to satisfy a woman sexually is to be able to have sex like a 20-year-old man, and the emphasis is clearly on penile-vaginal intercourse as the main source of sexual pleasure (though it does come with the handy DVD about the female orgasm). I might also use it when I talk about the ways we construct biology and treat some ‘natural’ processes as inevitable and unalterable while attempting to change others.

(Via Sociological Images.)

George Carlin’s Finale:

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

What Happens to Religion When It Is Biologized?:

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

Lou Gehrig’s Plaza:
(‘Representative path plots from one SOD1 rat and one control rat in the open-field arena. Image by Neri Kafkafi, et al.)

Research into Lou Gehrig’s disease has demonstrated that, at least in mice carrying the genetic mutation, it can spatially manifest itself as ‘very subtle’ but detectable behavioral patterns before the onset of symptoms.

Quoting at length a press release from the American Psychological Association:

Researchers led by Neri Kafkafi, PhD, of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, part of the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, mathematically analyzed about 50,000 predetermined movement patterns that resulted when rats roamed freely, one by one, in a small arena. The software created an abstract space defined by combinations of behavior such as speed, acceleration and direction of movement. Mining the resulting behavioral data enabled researchers to test many more facets of behavior than they could analyze manually.

After videotaping the movement of two groups of rats – one type with the mutation that results in an ALS-type syndrome, the other type normal controls — the scientists used the computer to ‘pan’ for differences between groups and identified a unique motor pattern in mutant rats two months before disease onset (which would equate to roughly five to 10 years in humans).

Of the multitude of behavior patterns analyzed, the predefined ‘heavily braking while slightly turning away from the wall’ showed a group difference. In two independent data sets, rats with the ALS-type mutation were significantly less likely than controls to brake and turn from the arena wall as they approached.

The benefit of this study is that ‘by being able to predict more accurately which carriers may express the disease before they experience symptoms (the ‘premorbid’ state), researchers could test medicines that might prevent symptoms from emerging.’

(‘Three-dimensional attribute spaces. Attribute spaces for one SOD1 rat and one control rat, corresponding to the same sessions shown’ in the first image. Image by Neri Kafkafi, et al.)

One wonders whether this sort of research, somewhere down the line, will result in public places getting littered with CCTV cameras data mining for the tell-tale signs of genetic diseases affecting motor functions. Similarly when traffic cameras take a photo of your license plate when you go over the speed limit and then get your ticket in the mail a couple of days later, these outdoor medical scanners take a photo of your face, match it up to a database at the CDC and a couple of days later, you get a diagnosis in the mail.

There will be a specially outfitted plaza where those without health insurance can get their free check-ups. Those with no more sick days can simply walk pass through on their way to work or linger about during their lunch breaks. Hypochondriacs will come in droves and stay there, like skateboarders to a Brutalist plaza.

It’s landscape as a diagnostic tool.

(Spot the pedophiles and the terrorists. Photo courtesy of Barco. Source.)

If there is a predictive behavioral pattern to a pedophile’s movements within the spatial confines of playgrounds and park (that is, if children still go outdoors anymore) as well as the streets bordering schools, you get a court order to receive some psychiatric counseling.

Do terrorists have a genetic mutation that not only affect their cognitive reasoning but also their motor functions, the pattern array of which is so perceptibly different with that of non-terrorists that you can ‘spot’ them?

In the Archives:
The Alzheimer House
My Garden Is Telling Me That I’m Abusing My Kids

(Via Pruned.)