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Cognitive Dysfunction

Schizophrenia: seems to be like dreaming while awake—for the visions and voices seem to be coming from somewhere else. Unlike waking imaginations, which don’t get in the way of reality since they are 99% transparent, schizophrenic reality seems to be fully there.

Obsession: seems to come from persistent thoughts that come from an imbalance in neurotransmitters. It ranges from the “mildness” of being a neat freak or a controller to carrying a coffee maker to work everyday to make sure it was turned off.

Anxiety: seems to come from persistent worry, again from imbalances.

Low-lifes: imbalances.

Grouches: imbalances.


For sure, many of our impulses and aversive behaviors are certainly no longer useful to us in the specific sense. Negative feedback mechanisms in our central nervous systems, in particular, continue to send out thousands-of-years-old messages. How easily these emotionally primitive messages lead to most of our problems, cravings, and addictions. Perhaps this type of knowledge should be the most often taught course in elementary school and high school.

As for blaming evil on outside influences, the devil does not whisper to you, but low serotonin does, affecting mood, usually for the bad, and, in the long term, causing mental illnesses or at least a crummy life.

Low levels of the mood-regulating neurotransmitter, serotonin, can lead not only to anxiety, depression, and persistence of thought (obsession), but also to anger, hostility, violence, and, with a low standing heart rate, inducing fearlessness, to crime.

Low serotonin can be the result of genetics, stress, or lack of exercise. You don’t believe that low serotonin causes problems? Are you not irritated at things when you’re under stress, things that never would have bothered you otherwise? Why do you kick the cat or the dog for the same noise that was OK and cute last week? Well, the brain, when irritable, associates the irritability with the most recent happening.

As for emotions in general, the mind is rather weak in fighting off emotions since they seem to have a separate and direct pathway into consciousness, thus bypassing all of the rational brain areas. Our highly valued feelings and emotions are merely molecular events; they are sometimes meaningful and sometimes merely spurious, but, either way, have a way of overwhelming any logic that one might manage to dredge up from any sanity. Emotions often take sole control, obliterating logic completely.

This non-coordination of reason and emotion is probably all there is to tell, really, about all the miseries and follies of human history, the many great and “deep” theories of historians not withstanding.

What to do about all these evolutionary relics? Well, to further reduce the strange thoughts, meditation can help. Practice letting undesired thoughts just sail on by into oblivion. The mind becomes quiet.

Then, next time a “false” crisis arises, you will know how to instantly quiet your mind. Soon life becomes euphoric as you reach the higher modes of being, true paradise being simply an attainable state of mind. You will become fully present for the moment, enjoying life completely, as regrets of the past and fears of the future fade away into meaninglessness. You are fully alive—you are in the zone, in the now, where you cannot miss, where everything you touch turns to gold, the world looking like one big wish. You have reached the Treasure House, instead of stumbling outside in the dark over trifles, even in TOE forums.