Sunday 29-Apr-12

29/04/12 07:47 [Sunday]
Yesterday in the course of a shopping trip to Stourbridge I returned to the location I referred to, to take this photograph:
(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.) 

The thoughts that occurred to me the other day when passing this poster started by noting that the artwork has a naiveté which originates from the use of different fonts, different colours and different underlining styles for the four words distinctly. Ordinarily through the use of parallel structures - even simply underlining styles - different parts of an ensemble are linked and shown up as in truth parallel this forming what the other day I called ‘larger-scale structure’. Just as here HOLA and ADIÓS are self-evidently parallel and this implies that the subsidiary text entries FRESCA and THIRST are too, so in a report the parallel between paragraphs or entire sections can be - usually is - pointed up through the use of identically styled headings (this something made easy and encouraged in Microsoft Word).

To be able to make sense of this - something as the word naiveté suggests children cannot do but most adults can do - the mind/brain has to unify the subsidiary structures - which as I say may be several paragraphs of text - and treat them as single entities. The unification of subsidiary structures arises from propagation of dopamine, causing one part of the structure to suggest or ‘prompt’ the other parts. Also necessary however is a top-down organising principle - this a function of the more frontal parts of the brain - which marshalls and keeps ordered the possibly numerous but distinct subsidiary structures.

A simple example of this is given by the words in a sentence. When written the words are nowadays separated by whitespace, but in spoken language they are run together. The brain has to hold together the components of each word - making the words entire - but it also has to marshall the different words in a sentences as units in separate relation to each other.

I will say that in conventional schizophrenia the ‘prompting’ due to dopamine - over-transmitted dopamine in the schizophrenic case - causes one concept to so powerfully and immediately lead to other concepts that the overall top-down structure falls apart. My case although diagnosed as schizophrenia is not exactly this.

Revolving the matter in my mind I can see that in my case the overactivity - no doubt it was overactivity of dopamine - led to my rushing from project to project without taking time to consider overall probabilities, in formulating explanations why things might be, for example. Because my computer got infected with malware I concluded without sufficient ‘testing against reality’ and even without sufficient pause for consideration of subsidiary explanations (that is how it might have been perpetrated): I concluded based on powerful structures already in my mind from years gone by that it must be spyware designed by the Department of Health.

And reverting now to powerful structures in my mind from years gone by, I can’t help but feel that had Armond not miscalculated, that is had he treated me with mild dosages of dopamine-blocking drugs - even the drugs then available - instead of with massive dosages, my life might have gone very differently and much better. (I remind readers that Armond is Anthony Dew Armond the NHS psychiatrist I had for about two decades.)