Michael McMahon

The brain can be a big mystery where a lot of the brain is viewed as being for emotional processing. Yet we forget how strong the heart is when it never stops pumping where a lot of the brain might be interconnected with monitoring the heart. Could the brain be like the speed dial on a car? We don’t often think of the brain as being like an engine rather than just a computer so could anxiety help us breathe more passively?

In 2016 I was in a psychiatric ward for a month and a half with anxiety. It felt as if I was breathless but somehow I wasn’t physically drowning. One possibility is the breathlessness was the opposite of a lucid dream where I wasn’t fully self-aware in the real world as if it were like a negative symptom of schizophrenia in terms of apathy. So one version of breathlessness is as a form of extended sleep paralysis where breathing is hard even as you walk around. I couldn’t understand how meticulous the pain response appeared to be in changing forms between chest pain, overheating and breathlessness yet the body controls our smooth transition into unconsciousness during sleep. For example during sleep our body keeps working to move blood through the valves with the calf muscle pump when we roll around. So a sensation of heavy legs with shin splints could mimic a sleepy calf muscle pump. “Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious but unable to move. It occurs when a person passes between stages of wakefulness and sleep. During these transitions, you may be unable to move or speak for a few seconds up to a few minutes. Some people may also feel pressure or a sense of choking.” webmd “Calf muscle pump (CMP) promotes venous return from the lower extremity and contributes to preload and cardiac output.” pubmed To some extent the pain of breathlessness might have served as a reminder that the brain is also physical in helping to control breathing and heart rate as a way to counteract dissociation when we can’t touch our own brain. To some extent when we feel lightheaded our brain is like a dumbbell weight that we can detect by lying down. Perhaps the anxiety wasn’t drowning but the fear of drowning! Titanic 1997 - Rose rescues Jack (axe scene)

“Alternating current is an electric current that periodically reverses direction and changes its magnitude continuously with time, in contrast to direct current (DC), which flows only in one direction.” One way to view the neurons in the brain is as alternating current rather than direct current such that our mind would swing between both halves of the brain like a pendulum. For example some synapses in the brain are multi-polar with multiple dendrites. So the way we can close one eye and lose some of our conscious awareness of blackness on that eye while looking out the other eye might feel as if our mind’s eye mind was in one brain location with both eyes swapping like each eye were an alternating scope. The partial blackness on the winking eye can help your depth perception where if you rotate your head towards the winking side and look out the same corner then the blackness of phosphenes above your nose will stand out a centimetre forward. An irony of viewing out with only one eye is that you might think your locus of consciousness was behind the middle of that eye instead of behind your nose as if your visual cortex swapped to the same brain hemisphere as the open eye. With monocular creatures like horses it’s possible to think if the creature had no brain then shining light through one eye might go straight out the other eye as if light had been teleported between both eyes. That way parallax could be helped by tiny time differences between both eyes as if the brain could virtually wink between both eyes were we to look at an angle towards a light bulb. Our mind is somehow levitating between both sides of the visual cortex with the nerves from the left and right sides of each individual eye diverging in the optic tract towards the visual cortex. I was musing beside a horse a few days ago! If both of our human eyes acted like projectors towards the back of our skull then they might naturally superimpose into one image.

Apologies for one last spider analogy but I think it bears directly on optics. One way to think of a tarantula’s eyes is as a mirror maze. One way a tarantula can inflict karma is that the creature has good short-sighted vision as if each peripheral eye served as reading glasses for the central eyes such that to objectify the creature can accidentally risk objectifying part of our own vision. One ironic reason the huntsman spider below felt creepier than the jumping spider in post 4 is that the jumping spider had larger peripheral eyes to deflect from their central vision whereas the huntsman spider has relatively smaller peripheral eyes as if to emphasise binocular vision like a human. On first impression the lower peripheral eyes on the huntsman spider were almost like an eyebrow frown to give an angry expression which is a creepy anthropomorphism. So if the retina of the eye in a huntsman spider served as a concave mirror to reflect the image back onto the rear-eye side of the convex lens only to magnify the image back onto the retina then each eye would recursively reflect the image to other eyes like a mirror maze or infinity mirror. So even if the tarantula had good short-length vision then that doesn’t mean the tarantula is conscious of all of their vision because the peripheral eyes would make their vision too difficult for the tarantula’s small brain to understand. I’m not necessarily trying to promote a fear of tarantulas but those who don’t fear them might not actually know why others fear them. My first instinct was to focus on the central two eyes and lower peripheral eyes but glancing at the top two eyes on the side of the head can help reduce anxiety as if the creature almost had eyes on the back of its head as a source of bewilderment for the spider. That way the way spider’s vision is made more unconscious like how the faster speed of quadrupedal wolves doesn’t make them more conscious than a human.

I understand and will try to avoid snake and spider analogies. For my previous point in terms of optics I was merely alluding to how an 8-eyed tarantula with 6 more eyes or 3 more pairs of eyes than a snake doesn’t directly have an extra 3 times more consciousness than a snake.

One reason many Australians and Brazilians might not be too afraid of large spiders and snakes might be that the head-size of tarantulas are comparable to a snake head even though a snake would have a much longer body. This might help to counteract the mysteriousness of their minimal psyche even though I’m not too sure if most arachnophobes also have a fear of snakes. I was slightly creeped out looking at online photos of tarantulas yesterday only to have a dream of carrying a snake box last night as if to neutralise the initial fear of tarantula images.

Judging by the jumping spider one way to think of a tarantula being less creepy might be to try and focus on either the head or the eyes separately rather than simultaneously in order to avoid multitasking the reflection of the eyes with the slight neurological complexity of their brain. Viewing their retina as a concave lens might imply that the tarantula is mostly neurological whereas viewing their retina as a concave mirror might make the creature appear more transparent and photonic. The eyes are often hidden in smaller spiders such that it’s easier to view the creatures as neurological without the need to view their retina as a lens where the retina might be as small as a concave mirror. In other words if you’re afraid then you could dilute the creature as being deterministic and neurological or as being thoughtless and visual. The way the jumping spider’s eyes are black might imply that their vision is tinted darker or black.

One way to view the retina as a periscopic concave lens is to view the image as a virtual image going backwards rather than forwards seeing as the concave retina is larger and might be more powerful than the pupil’s convex lens. https://mammothmemory.net/physics/lenses/concave-lenses/concave-lens--object-at-different-distances-from-the-lens.html Then the incoming inverted image from the pupil’s convex lens would deflect off the hypothetical concave lens of the retina in a way that remained inverted in the vitreous humour as shown in the image above. However the deflected image from the retina might be re-inverted upright as a double negative after exiting the pupil’s converging lens for the second time although this time landing outside the eye in front of the head. This might happen for distant objects in human vision depending on the accommodation of the lens and ciliary muscles. The way some tarantulas can be way creepier than others like the less creepy jumping spider below might relate to their mysterious eyes. The lenses on such tarantulas are so small that whatever the creature sees might be demagnified due to the tiny focal lengths where objects in their vision would be beyond the focal point.

Were the retina at the back of our eye like a concave mirror then is it possible the image would be reflected back out the converging lens (under the iris)? So the inverted image above is already formed in front of the retina (B’) and might essentially be re-inverted upright(B): https://www.teachoo.com/10826/3118/Concave-Mirror---Ray-diagram/category/Concepts/ Then the image might be re-magnified on attempting to exit back out the converging lens under our pupil to potentially create a virtual image in the eye to simulate the reality we see: https://www.teachoo.com/10838/3118/Convex-Lens---Ray-diagram/category/Concepts/#google_vignette Cornea face reflection: That way any appearance of eye beams from the eye would be passively reflected rather than actively emitted. However I don’t know the exact focal lengths of a potential retinal mirror to fully work out any resultant image. An alternative theory might be to view the mind as being like a hidden periscope in the brain such that we’re desensitised to having an upside-down vision. Then the retina might function like a concave lens to minimise the image even further in order to reduce contrast with an upside-down version of the image: “A researcher wearing goggles that inverted everything stumbled about wildly at first, but soon enough he was able to ride a bicycle.” https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down

I added lemon and lime slices to a fish pie only to find how harsh the lemon was. I likely ate too many slices in recent days. I figured that if people ever threatened evil or tried to glorify themselves then you could try not to vomit by eating lots of lemons in order to counteract other sweets and gain self-control!

One reason sweets can be addictive is that healthy food is almost unlimited such that healthier people would still be outcompeted by even healthier people. I’ve never ate a whole raw lemon and lime until now where I had plenty of lemon and lime juices in the past. So many sugary sweets during childhood are almost mere preparation for how extreme it could be to eat lemon and lime slices. I ate the lemon yoghurt afterwards as a recovery warm-down! I put a handful of raw popcorn in my mouth on a drive to the beach and it took the full 30-minute length of the journey for the popcorn to melt in my mouth before it became chewable and ingested. Yet in spite of the blandness the raw popcorn was as great as chewing gum in distracting you from overeating other foods.

Not only walking past sweets but also spending time observing sweets in a shop after you’ve already had a big meal is one way to deter you overeating sweets! “Point-of-purchase merchandising uses strategically placed products -- usually near the front of the store or by the cash register -- to spur consumer impulse buying.” smallbusiness chron com

I ordered baked potatoes with cheese and onion to counteract the free cheese and onion crisps!

Perhaps euthanasia and suicide are equally painful in terms of the physical body but it's possible euthanasia might be less mentally stressful seeing as the euthanasia patient could meditate more during the death whereas a suicide patient might struggle harder to distract themselves during death. One point overlooked during the suicide debate is that many suicide victims might not have been physically strong athletes meaning that they're not capable of being mentally extremely strong to begin with when it comes to tackling mental health issues. That is to say there can be a connection between physical and emotional strength. The alleged romanticisation of suicide is parodied in Holland where both prostitution and euthanasia is legal! Euthanasia isn't really required by many with suicidal ideation but were society already indulgent in a lot of other areas like welfare and capitalism then perhaps euthanasia could be a bonus form of charity to suicidal people. "I might hang myself tomorrow..." Avicii Lonely Together ft. Rita Ora "Lonely Together" is a song by Swedish DJ Avicii, featuring English singer Rita Ora. The song was released on 11 August 2017" One year later(!): "Avicii fans were devastated when the Swedish DJ took his own life on April 20, 2018." nypost

The problem of evil is in every political and ethical belief system. So people who don't care much about other suicide victims and then die by suicide themselves are capable of doing so for frivolous reasons. Yet anyone who's evil can kill themselves to downplay martyrdom in ethical people yet that doesn't mean that others can't be martyred in suicide against other evil people. So suicide could be resolved by individualism where we can tolerate suicide victims without always viewing them as representatives of a suicide collective.

Shooting to death those accused of cowardice in WW1’s British army exposes the ambiguity of suicide because any soldiers used as machine gun fodder without being given enough covering fire in WW1 are technically on a suicide mission relative to modern combat. Those who deserted their posts in WW1 might in retrospect have been influenced by having been abandoned by other troops as well rather than deserting by cowardice alone. Hence no matter how much people dislike or support suicide it’s all relative to a collective population that likely isn’t very ethical even if the collective is slightly ethical. So maybe humility in the context of suicide means not to love or hate the concept of suicide too much!

A mental health condition isn’t always fully communicable but art and music is capable of catching onto negative vibes. For example the kaleidoscopic song below parodies what would otherwise have been a dissociative emotion by equating happiness with rebellion without really defining what the rebellion is: Katy Perry - This is How We Do

I like your style. Nuclear destruction of multiple countries simply isn't very relevant!

Offering light criticism can often be a backhanded way to downplay just how threatening other people could have been! I feel the entirety of China could be sacrificed in any nuclear exchange just to achieve destruction of critical targets in the west!

The idea of fast food parodying healthy food can be the same for many drugs being a victim of their own karma. For example alcoholics might dislike being highly extraverted by overdrinking with others to try and disprove how ethical they were to talk to one another. Humility is very ethical but is easily hijacked by perversion. For example marijuana might make those already prone to spirituality to downplay their spirituality by attributing too much of their insights to drugs when a lot of their thinking might still have been internal. Wiz Khalifa - No Sleep Yet another factor in obesity is that a lot of athletes can be too emphatic without being sexy enough. The dilemma is that many top athletes are able to be sexy if they tried to be but are often unwilling to let slightly less hardworking athletes be viewed as sexy. For example as a teenager I always counterbalanced cardiovascular exercise with weightlifting because no matter how strong and handsome bodybuilders and marathon runners can be they often downplay how nice they are by not being slightly androgynous. As such no matter how superior I try to be at walking I can always mislead others into how egalitarian I can be just to pride myself on walking stamina!

Some fast food can be healthy in a sarcastic way to disprove people who overeat healthy food. For example it’s very easy to think you’re nice to enjoy a ham and cheese sandwich but the catch is if you stuff the sandwich with chicken and eggs too along with toasting it to make the butter and cheese resemble pizza then you might still be deterred from overeating cold and simple sandwiches when you’re not a marathon runner! Likewise the blatant indulgence of hot chocolates can prevent you being addicted to the asceticism of milk when you’re tall enough to require more calcium only that it requires a lot of masculinity to find a balance between addiction and self-ridicule. Eating chips places a self-deprecating limit on eating potatoes with too much butter and gravy where you wouldn’t be meditating sufficiently on the potatoes anymore!

I once got a beetroot and cold salmon dish in a restaurant in Dublin and tried to learn from it by adding beetroot to a pre-made lasagna: I used to be addicted to sweet and sour chicken and so I tried to sweeten up an Indian chicken tikka dish with a fried mandarin orange along with adding lemon marmalade to the sauce:

We could get metaphysical about food. If the English upper class was ever redemptive to other countries it’s that any ounce of supremacy was about a posher demeanour and not a physically fitter body. The harsh reality is that capitalism can extort middle class people to feel defensive against the segment of working class people who are smaller in stature in order to deter physically strong working class people against the threat of violent insubordination. It’s because we don’t have many subsistence farmers that we forget that most poor people in ancient history might have been physically extremely fit. Unfortunately rich people can downplay the supremacy of poor African athletes by being too distinct from poor white people. Not one person should feel extorted to defend their wealth class unless they root in nuclear war! Obesity as a physical defence would makes sense if you were capable of a blasphemous rage matching the toned physiques of Chinese communists! If a few lower middle class people dislike champagne socialists it’s possible that a contributing factor is that middle class champagne socialists are mentally or physically stronger and downplay how extortionate it is to identify as a capitalist against communism. As such if I identify as an absolute socialist it’s to outcompete the idea that I’m a champagne socialist because I won’t take responsibility for third world poverty as a belief system if poor people vouch for capitalism!

A tip for overweight people when it comes to food shopping might be to truly exploit mass production and international trade to an extreme extent. So instead of getting marmalade and peanut butter I recently got lemon marmalade and a jar of coconut and peanut butter! We forget that chocolate is technologically mass produced too where it takes mass production of healthy products and not just willpower to overcome a sweet addiction. After all a collectively made product whether it be healthy or unhealthy might always taste more smooth than a homemade product. Restaurants often focus on presentation which helps you meditate on the food but if you’re used to improvisation then there’s no harm ignoring aesthetics the odd time. So I once mixed a solid apple with peanut butter when I ran out of bread just to help me eat more apples!

In the past I’d often overspend by eating out. I loved toasted sandwiches with ham, cheese, chicken and eggs or full Irish breakfasts simply because it was prepared better than anything I could cook. I knew I could prepare the meals myself way cheaper but somehow my unconscious didn’t seem to care too much. Perhaps to cook better you actually have to eat better food beforehand in order to consciously analyse the taste as a way of setting a high standard. As such richer people can often have an advantage in healthy eating simply because they can passively learn from the chefs that cook their food for whenever the rich customers have to cook for themselves. The same could be said for wannabe musicians needing to actually hear lots of concerts first-hand from other musicians so that they can hedonistically relate the beats to their own. Prospective sports players from poorer backgrounds might forget to actually watch lots of professional games in the stands and not just on TV in order to better assimilate the tactics and feel the pressure better.