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You should pick up a copy of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Although it sounds like a Dr. Seuss title, it's by Dr. Oliver Sacks and infinitely more fascinating.
I'm not sure if this is exactly the kind of book you're looking for, but The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat has always been one of my favorites. I think it does a good job of walking through a lot of history and basic neuroscience in the context of some pretty bizarre neurological disorders. Here's a full text if you wanna give it a look.
Certainly is associated in the sense that autistics will tend to find change and lack of order distressing. The unpredictable nature of people in general, and their movements, is destabilizing.
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https://www.amazon.com/Control-Your-Anger-Before-Controls/dp/0806538015
Sucks for you OP. As far as specialized doctors go I would look into the amen clinics www.amenclinics.com he has written a couple books that are really good. He uses SPECT brain scans to detect areas that have low levels of blood flow and can make various diagnoses and treatments specialized to you. I also suggest picking up one of his books http://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Brain-Life-Obsessiveness/dp/0812929985
Wow, well, you are certainly doing all the right things. You seem like someone that is very thorough and introspective about your body and what you're dealing with. I can relate!
Another direction to pursue is Dr. John Sarno's book The Divided Mind. It talks about the subconscious and its ability to create physical symptoms. Mostly these are chronic pain related, but I wouldn't put it past our devious psyches to inflict HF on a person. What they have in common is that (in his theory at least) it is the body's ability to control blood flow that enables it to create pain in a variety of locations without any true injury.
Many people, including myself, have worked through chronic pain conditions by understanding his ideas. And that's the best part! Simply understanding the philosophy can be curative. Maybe it will help you. At the very least it's an interesting read from a really kind and determined person.
https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Mind-Epidemic-Mindbody-Disorders/dp/0061174300
There is a concept called 'completing the stress response' that might apply here. The idea is that when we get stressed out about something we either do something about it (fight or flight) or we don't/can't (freeze). If we get stuck in the 'freeze' part of the stress response we have symptoms such as dissociation, helplessness, lack of motivation and depression. Having a burst of adrenaline and DOING something with that stress response can break you out of the stuck 'freeze' episode. You can read "Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma" or the first chapter of "Burnout" for more info.
If you're curious about prosopagnosia and other rare neurological differences, I would recommend "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Dr. Oliver Sacks. It's a collection of case studies from a neurologist who worked with people with prosopagnosia, aphantasia, and other perceptual and intellectual differences.
It's a good read, and it raises some great questions about these things. Like, how common actually are they? Many people with aphantasia, for instance, don't even realize their mind works differently until they are well into adulthood and live life with no apparent deficits.
This book has helped me with coping mechanisms for depression.
https://www.amazon.com/Get-Done-When-Youre-Depressed/dp/1592577067
I feel you though. The days with 0 motivation reinforce the feelings of depression.
If you can, get a morning routine going. Like get up, hit the shower as much as you dont want to, brush your teeth, take your meds etc.
Hope this helps. Also if you are lonely/isolated and need someone to talk to I literally feel exactly like you do right now, feel free to reach out.
I'm going to make a reading recommendation for you, assuming therapy is out of reach (for now) & you can look at the situation with an open mind (& not take offense to it).
https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Mind-Epidemic-Mindbody-Disorders/dp/0061174300/
You can get a kindle copy for $7, used paperback copy for $8
>The problem lies with my shoulders unable to work for very long, or depression rendering me useless in the right conditions. (doctors can't find what's wrong with my shoulders, so I'm dieting and exercising trying to fix it)
What this book is going to make clear for you, is that you are likely making yourself physically sick due to the mental depression. They go hand in hand.
& what is the root cause of both? It's possibly unexpressed anger/rage. There is something in your childhood/background that you are upset about, and you are suppressing it rather than outwardly dealing with it. The act of suppressing it can make you depressed, sick, can cause body pain, etc.
Once you deal with the source of the anger, express it & let it out...& accept that you're making yourself sick, you will likely find that the physical symptoms subside. Therapy would force you to do this, but this book can accomplish a similar thing if you are willing to accept that you're doing it to yourself without taking it personally.
You really have to buy into the idea & read the book a few times for it to sink in (& obviously you need to let out what you are suppressing). This can be difficult if the depression & the physical symptoms have become a "crutch" that you use to allow you to just check out from everything & various responsibilities. Giving up the crutch is not easy if you've learned to depend on it as an "out".
Sorry, I'm not willing to wade through another wall of text with so little punctuation.
But I got through this:
> I don't understand what other people mean by "feeling" in expressions such as "talking about feelings" and "talking about emotions" and "describing feelings" and "describing emotions." I just guess.
Which honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me unless you're alexithymic. And even then, there's little mystery to what those things mean - even to someone who is.
Might try one of Damasio's books? Would probably start with this one: https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-What-Happens-Emotion-Consciousness/dp/0156010755
Read another book once and a while.
Try Mathew Alpert God Part of the Brain only $25!
That little rosy feeling you get when you think of god is a chemical reaction on your brain. You can force it to happen anytime you like.
There have been ~3000 gods worshipped by humans. I only believe in one less than you do. You are almost there!! You can make it. I have faith in you!
I second Oliver Sacks - Hallucinations or this oliver sacks book. Also "Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons" is good and provides a more general overview
I heard somebody in this thread mention that depression might be what is stealing your productivity and then my mind went to a book that was INVALUABLE for me getting shit done during times when depression was raging.
Check it out :)
Yes, there's a book by a woman with longstanding severe chronic depression called Get it Done When You're Depressed. OP should check it out. Because the author has lived with crushing, disabling depression, even while writing the book, it's a really good read and not at all "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
It basically, if I recall correctly, says a lot of what you're saying. Setting and meeting very small goals can create a positive cycle, like the reverse of not getting things done at all and then feeling even more depressed about that.
edit: Sounds like the therapist should have explained how even very tiny steps can matter and how this works so as to not sound callous!
This author writes about the nature of the human brain vs all other life forms. "The brain is the secret. In our brains lie nature's survival mechanisms in which god is nothing but a protective lens through which humanity is "programmed" to view the world." https://www.amazon.com/God-Part-Brain-Interpretation-Spirituality/dp/1402214529/ctoc -- https://www.amazon.com/Icarus-Brooklyn-Spiritual-Quest-Wrong/dp/0966036719/ctoc
> Like, the idea of "things" is too imperfect of a model of reality to try and do things like reliably say "this is a ship" or "this is a whale.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Because you seem to be saying that we can't reliably recognize and name things and that's just completely false. In fact, when people start having trouble reliably recognizing and naming things, neurologists like Oliver Sachs write books about them because it is so unusual. The book, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an amazing book anyway; you should check it out sometime.
The fact that there are edge cases sometimes that are harder to classify and name doesn't change the basic facts.
Oldy but goody:
Oliver Sacks, Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat:
I haven't read this yet, but it might help: Get It Done When You're Depressed. It's written by someone who's lived with depression for a long time. The basic idea is that people with depression think they have to "feel like" doing something in order to do it, but that this is not true.
I have a similar struggle with ADD. If I wait until I feel up to tackling a complicated task or motivated to do it, I'll never get it done.
If you'd like to read about some of the strangest real cases of amnesia, check out this book about it:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Mistook-Wife/dp/1491514078
the basic answer: while some memory disorders; like the one in memento where someone remembers everything up to an incident, and now forgets every few minutes; do exist they have happened to literally 1 or 2 people in history.
Most memory disorders have very consistent symptoms, none of which are shown in movies.
Fiction amnesia based on an old 'trope' from fiction and never had a basis in real medical cases.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks has a bunch of stuff about neurology in the form of case studies - I highly reccomend it.
Also some of Steven Pinker's stuff, notably <em>The Language Instinct</em>.
Thanks in advance! I'm a voracious reader and could always use some quality recommendations.
- The Three Musketeers
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- The Poisonwood Bible
- ASOIAF/Kingkiller Chronicles (EPIC! FANTASY! Not-crap writing (which plagues fantasy everywhere!)
- A Prayer for Owen Meany
- American Gods
- Rebecca (Gothic! Gorgeous!)
- The Lace Reader (WOOOOoooo, unreliable narrators!)
- The Time Traveler's Wife
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Cognitive Science!)
The example you provide is not about metaphors, and not what this article is referring to.
In your example, you make a distinction between "fast" and "slow" decisions. What you are talking about is the distinction between decisions made without "conscious", prefrontal input (that is, extremely rapid decisions made by our subcortical structures, based on past experience but made without consciously accessing those past expereriences) and decisions made with conscious deliberation (slower decisions made by accessing our prefrontal structures and mesial temporal (memory) structures). There are about 100,000 articles on this distinction, but for a layperson summary you could start with Lehrer's How We Decide.
This article is talking about the influence that relational frames induced by metaphor have over our slower, frontally-mediated decisions. That is, by using a metaphor (e.g., "crime has infected our city"), you induce a frame in the listener (e.g., sickness), which activates some memories, biases, and general knowledge (e.g., those related to sickness) but not other memories, biases, and knowledge. The point of this article was to show how much influence these activated memories and knowledge have over our decisions.
More generally, the point of articles like these is to counter the "intuitive-seeming" types of points that you are trying to assert. Often, we assume that we can rationally "think" our way through things and reach reliable conclusions -- so much so that you suggest we needn't bother with research like this. In fact, as this and many other articles show, our "rational" thought is heavily influenced by factors we tend to be only minimally aware of (if we are aware at all), such as single words used when framing the question we are thinking about.
I've just read a book you might find useful, called Change your Brain, Change Your Life. The doctor who wrote it does scans of a working brain, which show the parts of the brain that are actually working (as opposed to MRI scans that just show the brain structure). He found that overactivity in specific parts of the brain will cause specific behavior problems for the person--e.g. if the cingulate area is wildly overactive, the person will have trouble with anxiety and difficulty switching his attention (getting "stuck" on thoughts).
He has strategies to help alleviate problems related to specific areas of brain overactivity, but I think the biggest benefit of this book is that he shows that these problems aren't just someone being lazy, or obsessive, or whatever, and that the problem is something specific that can be addressed.
Anyway, I hope you can find some respite from your brain. I'm glad you have friends who accept you.
This book is well worth picking up if you find this video interesting, very, very interesting:
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
Yes, it's unfortunate, but that's they way it is. It's part of how our brain works to rely on emotions/ feelings/ gut to make important decisions -- in part because we need to do that for survival, we need quick reactions in some situations so our brain uses these emotional shortcuts. However, there are plenty of times (like in the cases we're talking about) where this emotional reaction is wrong and misguided, but it still happens. A good book on the subject is "How we Decide" by J. Lehrer. http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0618620117
If the book The "God" Part of the Brain is right then there might be a physical part of the brain responsible for someone being religious or at least tending towards being religious.
If that's true I'd hope it would be possible to create a virus that would either cure or kill people with it.
No kidding.
the man who mistook his wife for a hat
a brief tour of human consciousness
not sure either are what you're looking for. i liked both - the former more than the latter
I just sent her the link. I'm not sure if she's see it yet. Here's a blog she recently started following that she likes: Scalpel or Sword?
I also just bought her the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, which she finished in two days.