Sunday, April 6, 2014

A Sampling of How the Mind Can Suck

When you look around and consider that all the people you see are alive, it's kind of a miracle. There are so many diseases to have, so many freak accidents that can occur to anyone, that it should make you wonder how you're even able to sit on the computer and read high-quality blogs like this one. However, even if you continue eluding death, you can easily be subjected to some pretty crappy disorders or phenomena that, for the most part, will make you want to be dead.
 
For your edification, I picked some of the more obscure ones to describe, and hopefully you can see the humor in them. If not, I totally understand, because very rarely does the body mutate or deteriorate in a good way.
   

Perfect Pitch
 
Or maybe the body's freak changes don't always feel like a kick in the crotch. Of all the ways your body can mess up, this one is probably the coolest. And when I say probably, I mean you cannot get a better birth defect than perfect pitch.
 
Suppose you're listening to a fourth-grader try out their instrument for the first time. You know they're not playing it right, but aside from the numerous squeaks and squawks, you can't figure out what exactly is going wrong.
 
If you have perfect pitch, you can tell that student that they suck because they couldn't be flatter if they had two dimensions. This is absolute perfect pitch, and it means you can pick out notes without having to hear a reference note first. It's kinda cool, because you don't need to Google on what note toilets flush (for most, it's Eb, or E-flat).
 
There are some variations to this, like passive perfect pitch and relative pitch, but these are skills anyone can learn, and are not nearly as awesome as the approximately 1 in 10,000 odds of having absolute perfect pitch.
 
Exploding Head Syndrome
 
So you're one of the 9,999 people out of that 10,000 who do not have absolute perfect pitch. Perhaps what you have is significantly rarer: exploding head syndrome.
 
Brace yourself, because this is where mutations become hideous nightmares that make you want to hurt yourself.
 
No, it's probably not what you think: your head does not literally explode, as the name suggests.
 
      atimetoget.com
    Though, that might be pretty cool for spectators...
 
Imagine you're in your nice, fluffy bed, warm under your imported comforter and goose-down pillow, snuggled in for a long sleep. You're eyes have closed and you're at that semi-unconscious bliss between reality and dreaming.
 
Out of nowhere, cannons boom, thunder clashes and every loud sound you could possibly imagine roars within your room. You sit upright so fast your cat is flung from your chest, but you don't see anything. It was all in your head.
 
You lie back down, wait twenty minutes and are almost asleep, but the whole thing repeats itself. Sleep evades you the entire night, but you have to get up the next morning anyway, groggy and miserable.
 
This is the reality of Exploding Head Syndrome. Sufferers of this disorder are insomniacs, and though no real damage is caused, the sounds that are mentally conjured can destroy a person's well-being. They're technically called hypnagogic auditory hallucinations, which simply means “monsters in your head mess with you while you're trying to night-night.”
 
And what's worse is that there's no cure or treatment (sleep aids actually make the conditions worse), and the condition may not be evident until a patient's twenties or thirties.
 
Sweet dreams.
 
Stockholm Syndrome
 
The basis for this syndrome comes down to the cliché of an abusive relationship, where one is a complete piece of crap who should be lynched, and the other is always defending the abusive partner, saying “I know they're bad, but I can change them.”
 
Everyone's seen this type of thing before, but it took until 1973 to describe this phenomenon, when a group of Swedish bankers were taken hostage by some idiots who failed in their attempt. The bankers identified with their captors, going so far as to resist rescue from them and raise money for their legal defense.

 
This sounds stupid, right? Well it should, cuz it is. But it happens all over the place, and it's widely considered to be a coping mechanism, an intentional blinding to work through the horrible experience.
 
But it's not always bad: one of the bankers eventually got engaged to one of the captors.
 
Dissociative Fugue
 
Do you watch Breaking Bad? If no, then you should probably skip to syncope, unless you want some spoilers. If yes, you should probably skip to syncope, because you already know what this is.
 
Remember how Walter White got naked in that grocery store, and Marie was so worried it was CostCo (and she didn't wanna continue shopping there since he embarrassed the family) or whatever? He claimed it was dissociative fugue (guys, it totally wasn't), which is actually an incredibly terrifying event that can happen to anyone.
 
Take a moment to define yourself. If you have any answer other than, “...uh...” then you do not have to worry about being in a fugue state. Sufferers of this condition temporarily lose sight of who they are and what they're doing.
 
To put it another way, if you're Joe Schmo pencil pusher, you may forget this and become Captain Awesome, Hero of All, which does seem rather convenient, doesn't it?
 
You forget your identity: your family, your occupation, where your home is, yourself. You may pick up and leave and simply wander for awhile until you figure it all out again, but until that happens, you may be in for a pretty wild ride.
   


Yeah, this is pretty much what happens.
 
Syncope
 
This bodily screw-over is actually very common, but most people wouldn't recognize it by this term. Somewhere between forty and fifty percent of all people experience it in their life: passing out.
 
Most people use the term “blacking out” to say completely unrelated things like, “oh yeah, I blacked out when I used that Sharpie,” which is definitely not what it's intent is. It's meant to mean “Blood flow was not ideally dispersed throughout my body, therefore I blacked out.”
 
It's a sucky problem, and there are various ways to get it. I include this one specifically in this list because I have a friend with something called Dysautonomia, which is definitely derived from the Greek for “my body hates me.” It's a autonomic nervous system disease that ruins your body's natural ability to perform basic functions like heart rate, digestion and temperature. Just a little side effect is syncope, and most patients with this problem will collapse every day.
 
Point is, passing out sucks, Dysautonomia sucks A LOT, and mostly everyone will experience syncope at some point in their life.
 
 
 
  
Lucky you, with the body that will screw with you before it actually kills you. Remember, the darkness is slowly creeping toward us all.
 
 

 
If any disease or disorder did not make the list, and you feel it should have, I am very sorry. Things like autism, aphasia, boanthropy or ANY delusion-related problems could easily have been included, so I apologize for being like your body and screwing you over.

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