Friday, April 22, 2016

Article: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-autism-treatment-cost-me-my-marriage/?_r=0

The full title of the NY Times article was a bit long to put in my own title, plus it's clickbait.  (Clickbait is something that is clearly titled or described such that grabs you and insists you drop everything and read whatever it is, right now.  Fine for important things, really not fine for the latest diet pills.  As you can imagine, the latter example tends to be much more common.  As with all abuses of psychology, it annoys me.) 

The author of this article is the renowned John Elder Robison, and while he's written a book describing this experience, I thought it quite interesting to read this short description of the transcranial magnetic stimulation, or T.M.S, therapy he underwent. 

Besides the results, which were apparently remarkable, I found the description of the therapy (noninvasive, applied magnetic pulses to stimulate the brain) oddly similar to the premise of LENS. The major, and apparently excruciating difference in the results, is the speed of those changes.  The LENS, when used by my doctor, changes your brain's connections and signals a few at a time.  That's on purpose; in harder-hit cases, even a few changes can turn a person's world upside down in good and bad ways.  Therefore, they progress as the client is comfortable, giving them and their families time to adapt.  This honestly strikes me as wiser than slapping the person with all those changes overnight, and hoping bad times won't ensue. 

I feel rather bad for Mr. Robison, honestly.  In a sense, connecting him to the emotions of others basically peeled several layers of his emotional skin off, leaving him vulnerable.  And this is not a happy world we live in.  Negative emotions are often shouted, positive ones are usually quiet and subtle.  For example, you can tell a scowling, stomping, angry man a mile away from the noise and the fact that he may get in your face.  But most of the smiles we give other people in a day are because of politeness, not true happiness.  Being handed a very useful coupon at the grocery store, unexpectedly, might produce a real smile.  But how often does that happen in a day?  In addition, humans are weighted to remember the negative things consciously, meaning he got a double whammy of negativity.

So Mr. Robison suffered.  I sympathize, because while I can shake off empathized emotions, I tend to absorb them without meaning to.  Years of living like that has perhaps made me more resilient to that experience that Mr. Robison was, at first. 

I find myself vaguely bemused that Mr. Robison had thought being able to read someone's emotions would tell you who they are and all of what they want.  Humans lie to themselves at least as often as they lie to others.  Reading emotions off someone definitely helps to get a sense of how they themselves are feeling, but it's no look into their soul.  We keep a lot hidden from everyone.  He figured that out eventually, and adjusted successfully, but it wasn't a pleasant process.  

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