A memetics reader: “Throughout 1996-1997 I researched Richard Dawkins’ meme (a cultural unit of information that propagates across our ecologies of mind) and considered specific applications within advertising, cults and postmodern ‘designer religious viruses’ (Richard Brodie). My research trajectory was influenced by my fascination with the late Gnosis Magazine and the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. I was freelancing for the Australian science/culture magazine 21.C and considering the initiatory/philosophical implications of Cyberpunk while in the Temple of Set. In mid-1997 I discovered Clare W. Graves through Dr. Don Edward Beck and Chris Cowan’s book Spiral Dynamics, and a synthesis began to form.” disinfo

“Oh, laddie, go tell it to the Marines!”

In the mid-70s, I attended a full day seminar by the wonderfully eccentric, British psychiatrist R.D. Laing. At one point in his address, given before an audience of rather tight-assed, Calgary, Alberta, psychiatric professionals, he explained what the term, hubris, meant to him. It was a wonderful, dramatic moment. And while I no longer have my notes, I recall the scene clearly.

Laing stood on a stage before a microphone, no podium, no notes. There were several hundred in attendance. “Hubris,” he said in his Scottish brogue, “means to miss the mark. Let me illustrate it more literally. Imagine that I am a Greek archer and my target lies behind you at the back of this auditorium.” He pointed over the audience toward the rear exits. Some heads turned.

“Now, he said, “I am the Greek archer.” Slowly, he raised his imaginary bow. Just as slowly, he drew the bowstring back to his cheek. Then, deliberately and carefully, he began to turn until his back was to the audience, the “bow” still held in position. “And now,” he said, “I release the arrow.”

Again, slowly, he turned to face the audience. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is modern psychiatry. The target is out there,” pointing to the exits, “and we are loosing our arrows there,” waving to stage rear. He had alienated his audience, of course, and spent the rest of the afternoon jousting with them.

Last night, was a restless, sleepless night, and my thoughts turned to this memory of Laing and to the arrows loosed internationally and domestically by the Bush administration. The end of the old year and beginning of the new used to be a time to take stock, to determine which marks were hit, which were missed, and more important, were the targets appropriate in the first place? I could be wrong, but I don’t think this type of assessment is practiced much anymore. Too bad.

Wonderful image, from this psychiatrist’s favorite anti-psychiatrist. And applying Laing’s incisive irreverence to my favorite target, the risible Bush administration…

Terrorism Beyond Islam: “Whether the purest form of Islam or the most perverted, it so enveloped the hijackers in religious zeal that the centrality of Islam to the attacks is hard to deny.

So let me try.

It is easier to try that here in East Asia. The kind of defiant and violent antagonism to the West that we now associate with Islamists was for centuries linked instead to places like Japan, Korea and China.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

A Quiet Revolution for Those Prone to Nodding Off. The New York Times reviews advances in the treatment of narcolepsy, especially modulation of the neurotransmitter orexin by the first of a promising new class of drugs which may have much broader potential to modify fatigue and sleep disturbances. Surprisingly, the new drug, Xyrem, contains the compound GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), which has gained notoriety as a “date-rape drug.” The developers of Xyrem plan to distribute it by a novel mechanism to preclude its diversion into recreational use, sidestepping the abuse that is virtually crippling other medically essential but highly abusable drugs like Oxycontin. An added dividend from this article is the news, which which I had been unacquainted, that narcolepsy appears to be an autoimmune disease. Autopsies of narcoleptics show severe deficits in orexin-containing neurons in the CNS, suggesting they have been destroyed. While narcolepsy is not strictly a psychiatric disorder and thus out of my purview, it is of course true that disorders in sleep regulation and architecture are prominent in psychiatric illness, and I’m sure that the new discoveries about the role of orexin will have psychiatric applications. By the way, narcolepsy involves not only sudden sleep attacks but some other extraordinary — and frightening to patients — syptoms, including cataplexy (sudden loss of muscle tone, often in conjunction with emotional arousal, which can lead for example to people literally falling down laughing), hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (bizarre distortions in the perception of reality when on the point of falling asleep or awakening, often terrifying, which represent the intrusion of REM sleep into wakeful consciousness) and sleep paralysis, also terrifying. Some think, by the way, that the sleep paralysis of narcoleptic conditions may be the basis for alien abduction experiences.

In Dark Matter, New Hints of a Universal Glue: “Sometimes, defying its wont, science makes the cosmos look a little simpler. Recently it seems as if astronomers have been sprung from a long cosmological nightmare. Last month a consortium of astronomers announced that an analysis of some 130,000 galaxies showed that the the universe, at least on large scales, is structured pretty much the way it looks.

That might sound unremarkable, but it didn’t have to come out that way…” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

No, I didn’t deliberately change the text to lightest-grey-on-white; experienced a stylesheet glitch. And just when I’m moving between machines and not able to update regularly. Many of you have written to complain, and I am sorry. You can read it now, right? And there’ll even be content again RSN…