Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWars

MetaBattle: Self-perception & Cognition: Battle II

I. Our own brains are out to get us
**II. Dementia comes for us all**
III. Narcissism is an underlying feature/bug of consciousness
IV. Try not look like a 40 year old vampire even if you are

This will be a continuing series, because it’s complex. How we think about fashion is just one aspect of how we think and perceive. I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s foundational. Per usual, I’m just articulating what you already know.

End of repetitive content.

When last we left our antihero, the lazy hacker we call our brain, it was lying on the floor, reading Wolverine/Thor AU slash fic because it wrote a shitload of subroutines to manage 99% of our brain’s traffic without our hacker having to be involved.

Our hacker is a slacker.

This is how our hacker likes things. Our hacker does not like work. The problem is those subroutines - AKA perception & memory - aren’t reliable because they’re the product of a lazy hacker who prefers slash to working, and this cycle is self-perpetuating.

Didja do homework? Didja look at optical illusions & get friends to describe colors to compare? Have you gotten a little comfortable with the idea that you shouldn’t believe everything you think, shouldn’t trust everything your perceive & your memory is sketchy?

Ok, let’s roll.

Battle II: Dementia gets us all in the end.

Our hacker is a sugar addict. Sugar is brain fuel.

Fat, protein? That’s for muscles & maintaining the stupid ship called the body. Our hacker’s ideal diet would be 24/7 Jolt Cola. Brains need sugar; they love caffeine.

I’m sure you can see the problem with this.

Seriously, brains can fuck up the body’s whole sugar balance if they think they’re not getting enough. Sure, your feet may fall off because Type II peripheral neuropathy became gangrene.

FEET aren’t necessary for life.

Brains are.

Brains also want dopamine (opiates), GABA (booze & benzos), epinephrine (uppers, caffeine, meth) & cannabinoids. They manipulate our behavior to get them (except the last), but sugar is the one they really crave.

Heroin addict rats pick no dope sugar water over salty dope water.

Fun fact: we think the reason pot isn’t addictive is because the brain can’t manipulate cannabinoid receptors to get more of those happy fun times neutrotransmitters. But don’t count on it lasting more than a couple generations given MMJ. Human genetics & epigenetics move FAST.

Other fun fact: caffeine & theanine (the caffeine variant in tea) seems to be more or less protective of cognitive function. The stronger uppers will eat holes in your brain, but the mild ones seem to slow down the dementias, at least at the population level.

But our cola addict hacker is lazy. Guess what our hacker didn’t write?

Good resource management tools.

We lack defrag.

We don’t have power management modules. The best we get is sleep, when a lot of maintenance runs, but it’s Win95 - if WinPlayer is running, nothing loads.

About 45-55/our halfway mark, having slacked its way through 700 episodes of Wolverine & Thor DO Hogwarts, the brain runs low on capacity. Neurons die, there are too many connections to important shit, the whole plot line of Loki & Logan is sitting dead center in the hard drive.

So the brain starts axing shit it may not need, or not recording incoming traffic. Haven’t used French since college? Chuck it. Keep a few curses, the bathroom & how to get laid. This morning’s staff meeting? It’s the same staff meeting we had last week, so why update?

In brains with relatively healthy resource management & selves with good coping skills, we come up with alternatives - we take notes, email ourselves memos, do memorable stuff like walking meetings - which slows the loss.

People who refuse to recognize that their brains are unreliable? They get defensive & practice asshattery.

This is why believing everything you think can get physically dangerous. It leads to over-confidence in ability. (Lots of 50 year old broken legs because skiing in 20s...)

But there’s good evidence that much of the brain damage we call dementia is the result of the brain manipulating us into consuming its favorite drugs: sugar, booze, opiates.

Both vascular dementia & Alzheimer’s, via different mechanisms.

Vascular dementia is what happens when the brain just doesn’t get enough oxygenated blood.

This is usually the result of
- a clot
- a broken blood vessel (aneurysm)
- a blockage (stroke) or
- because the arteries have become clogged with plaque so blood supply is limited.

Not enough O2 means brain cells die.

It can be diffuse, if some O2 gets through, or localized, in the case of stroke/aneurysm, or both if blocked arteries lead to clotting & transient ischemic attacks (TIAs, or mini-strokes) which become cumulative.

We used to think that eating lots of saturated fat caused arterial blockages, heart disease & stroke. But maybe not? Or maybe only when we consume saturated fat& refined carbs together. Or maybe it’s the refined carbs that are the problem— vegetarians get heart disease, too.

We don’t know; no butter is too simple. We do know fucked up blood sugar causes systemic inflammation, which contributes to cardiovascular diseases.

The brain + genetics & epigenetics, is responsible for fucking up blood sugar. (Also if mom dieted/starved before she had you.)

On the other side is Alzheimer’s, which is an accumulation of specific proteins in the brain, where they don’t belong. These ALSO seem to be related to systemic inflammation & correlates with high blood sugar in late midlife.

Alzheimer’s is possibly also related to a set of fucked up proteins called prions (but that’s for another day.)

The short answer: yes, brains fail, and the mechanism isn’t even mostly under our control.

We’re building the retrospective research now to identify how early and what brain failure looks like early on. (We can’t do these experiments. That would be bad.)

We know that all chronic dementias have a much longer leading edge than we used to think - decades, not months.

Acute dementias -stroke/trauma- can still be sudden.
People who take care of their parents w/ dementia report very similar behavior starting up to 20 years before dx.

This is our secondary failure mode: either our cardiovascular system breaks, or our brains fail, or both.

Dementia comes for us all; the elderly we call *spry* just have the best coping methods &resource management. We grade age on a curve that takes into account that they’re 80+.

All brains fail, because all of our hardware fails. We get less efficient as we age, and that means...

... less oxygen in the blood, less sugar in the cells, fewer neurotransmitters. We humans age & die.

Peter Thiel may be having a midlife existential crisis, but yes, he will die and no amount of high tech vampirism will keep him alive.

(He’ll always be an asshole, though.)

But we still have our lazy hacker at the brain control desk. That hacker is more than happy to shift subroutines around to ensure sufficient power to the subroutines most critical for continuing life.

That hacker does not wanna die. Brains shut down kidneys to stay alive.

Now remember talking about perception? Big blind spots & red hazes? That’s the easy definition & discussion.

Perception is complex.

Let’s talk about people who get their color vision after a lifetime of color-blindness or get cochlear implants and begin to hear later in life.

We now know the 1st sensory inputs people get are disorganized, distracting, noisy. With color, it takes a moment for color to click into place. With hearing, it takes a few days. With new sight, it can be weeks. But brains do it. Go watch this.

Babies do it in the 1st 3 months of life. (The 9 week software patch that does this is BUGGY AS SHIT. Babies totally change their sleeping & eating pattern for ~4 weeks, until the 13 week patch installs. Once it installs, they can see, recognize faces, start catching language.)

We have to learn to see, then remember what we saw. That’s object permanence & it’s huge when it comes to consciousness. But once we start getting organized inputs & object permanence, our brains *stop* making regular updates to the memory file of that thing. Because lazy hacker.

A memory file isn’t videotape. It’s not even stills that we animate by brain magic. Eidetic memory is an artifact of childhood (& massive spare capacity); it doesn’t last.

Memory is a lot more like a turn of the century video game.

Think Baldur’s Gate.

You’re in combat vs a bunch of gibberlings. The game calls resource files. You, Imoen, Minsc, Kivan, Xan & Jahiera.
The Player file, 5 NPC files, 6 armor files, 6 weapon files. Spell files. The terrain file. The monster (gibberling) file. The loot drop files.

All of those come together in the game engine and you just hit the gibberlings until they die. But this is also how our memories sort of work. We pull resource file codes to compile what we think we perceived.

(Remember, your brain lies to you. It edits like George Lucas.)

The thing is, if you know what you’re doing with the Infinity Engine, and you enable the CLUA console, you can get into the resource files & edit a lot of the game for better playability, or make CHARNAME poly pansexual or adopt Boo.

We do the same thing with actual human memory, all the time.

This rarely ends well.

Satanic Panic is a worst case scenario, but so is Fake News & Pizzagate & SovCits. We can manufacture memories, and our brains edit the hell out of the ones we actually have.

If 25 people insist you wore green to Prom, but you think you wore blue? If nobody’s got color photos? You’ll probably believe them. If you’ve still got the clothes, it’s easier to resist, but you can be gaslit into thinking the fabric faded or you recall a different event.

This gets serious when it’s a criminal trial, or bank passwords, or an intimate partner telling you not to believe your senses. Or when its your own brain cutting off access to subroutines because something else has become more critical to survival. Which the brain does.

(Write shit down, people.)

So we manufacture memories out of stored resources we don’t update often. Also, the more we use a resource, the more likely it gets corrupted.(My perfect example is Jay Wilds’ various stories to the Baltimore PD, but also personal repeated typos.)

Our stored memory files are why you don’t notice faded house paint until you return from a long trip, or can’t find your keys on a desk. Your brain edits from the master resources b/c it’s faster. There’s a reasan proof reeders offen start at teh botton of the pages & read up.

When we’re kids, we update these files a lot, because we’ve got tons of spare capacity. It’s like having a new phone you can fill with thousands of songs & videos. You start out thinking you’ll never fill it up... until you do.

How this applies to fashion? Well... we have a primary master file that’s our internal profile pic. Somewhere between 18 & 25, we define our own hair, face, skin tone, facial hair, eye shape, mouth shape. We record our body form, both looking down & in a mirror.

This sticks around until 45-50ish. We are fucking shocked when we notice grey hair, or wrinkles, or when our waist shifts upward 6 inches. Unlike most memory, though, that master profile pic is PROM, not RAM. It’s some of the hardest coded data we have.

(Fun theory: Venus of Willendorf looks like what a full term pregnant woman sees when she looks down. Male archeologists thought it was Neolithic porn, but female anthropologists make a very good argument that it’s a self-portrait made by someone without mirrors.)

At the time we make our master file, we’re also likely as fluent in the subtextual language of fashion as we will ever be. We’ve got an idea what feels best on our bodies, what we think looks good, and what other people have told us looks good.

Note that this happens usually around 21-22. It can happen a bit earlier or later, but not much. So we also imprint on the fashion of the time. If you were born in 1928, women look best in tea-length, full skirts (Dior’s post-war New Look); men in trilbys w/ narrow ties & lapels.

Born in ‘65? Well... ok, the 80s were bad, but jeans, sneakers, sweaters & oxford shirts are your staples. You’ll alternate between boxy & form-fitting. You mind men with hair on their collars or shoulders; blue eye shadow won’t bother you until someone else points it out.

Mid 70s? If Dana Scully was hot once, she will always be hot. This will never not be sexy for you.

You will update, but at age appropriate intervals. I had a thing for @wilw in my teens (he’s a little older than I am, and he’s stayed on my consistent hot list) but there’s no way I’ll ever find Taylor Lautner (young enough to technically be my kid) more attractive than a puppy.

(This, by the way, is why most pros will never consider pedophilia an orientation. Because it looks very much like stalled updating. Queer kids almost always knew they were queer before they had sexual feelings; their preference ages w/ them. Doesn’t seem true with pedophilia.)

With a healthy set of brain subroutines, you update your fashion choices. Skinny jeans? Those should’ve been a 2 year trend, not 13 year (& counting) permanent additions to our closets. But they’re comfy, generally attractive on most body types & available. So they’ve lasted.

(Available because they’re cheap to manufacture, you get a few more pair out of the same amount of fabric, they pack better than non-stretch jeans. For manufacturers, they’re a definite win, especially when oil -for Lycra- is cheaper than raw cotton. 2% matters when you make 1M.)

But look: we all know someone who has been wearing the same type of clothing since college. Who complains they can’t find baggy pleated tapered cargo pants in acid wash anymore. It’s not (always) a factor of weight/build/proportion/time management.

I’ve pointed out that both Paulie Walnuts & Donnie Two Scoops are still wearing the clothes that were hot in their prime, the mid 80s. With Donnie, it’s the suits; with Paulie, it’s the leisure wear.

This isn’t limited to people I dislike. Bruce Springsteen has worn the same stuff since the early 80s, and so has Bruce Willis. Sometimes the personal imprint is strong.
Sometimes we call it branding/uniform.

Note that I don’t give Barack Obama shit for 8 years of the same suit, or Steve Jobs for owning 10 identical black mock-turtles. A personal uniform is a way of conserving spoons.

It’s totally OK if a cast-iron sense of style is the only factor.

When it’s NOT is when it’s a cue.

I know 2 women in their late 60s who both still wear what they were wearing in their late teens & 20s.
Both wear only miniskirts.
One wears only v high heels & platforms; the other lives in a specific brand & style of sneaker. One wears oversized shirts & sweaters (early 80s)...

...the other goes braless in spaghetti tanks & peasant shirts. One of the women I do like, one I don’t. (I worry about both, because of this pattern.)

These women are not clients, not relatives, have never met, live far apart, I’m obscuring details. They’re both people I can neither treat nor diagnose, so all I can do is describe patterned behavior.

They both reject medicine; both use self-help that ranges from purely magical thinking (homeopathy & laying on of hands) to quackery (alternative treatments that are both passively & actively harmful). Both show significant signs of disordered eating.

They’re both grow defensive to hostile if anyone offers any suggestion that doesn’t strictly conform to the worldview they’ve built. They’ve both endured considerable trauma; both have become highly emotionally brittle in recent years.

Their uniform is 1 means of conserving an entirely too limited set of spoons.

They both refuse to see their lack of spoons as a problem.

Both are deeply jealous of their autonomy, and that’s grown in proportion to their adherence to self-treatment & self-harm.

They cannot admit the idea that their behavior set is contributing to their emotional & physical fragilities, because that admits their cognition has a fault, and then everything breaks down.

Their wardrobe is just a warning note of a cognitive issue when it’s not alone.

Neither one can see that they have serious physical issues because what they see in the mirror is their 40 year old profile pic.
I’ve seen both fail to recognize themselves in photographs.

The wardrobe was an outward, and early, sign that their subroutines are in trouble.

Because their hacker is axing subroutines & cutting off alternate information flows to maximize the hardware they have available. Their brains don’t have time/resources to update their internal profile pics.

I don’t worry about Bruce Springsteen/Barack Obama’s uniforms b/c they don’t show other behavioral signs of distress.

We should worry when too strong pattern adherence comes with defensiveness/defiance, or other repetitive, patterned behavior that won’t respond to social cuing.

And especially if it is coincident or intensifies with trauma/financial stress/abandonment or grief/career changes. If someone falls back on specific behavioral subroutines, that’s a clue they can’t hear or process a cue.

And that is a problem.

Clothes are just an easy one to ID because we all have to wear something, and clothing is subtext made into physical objects.

We pick what we wear based on our socialization & or memories and what we think. If we’re only picking from old memory, we might not be making new ones.

(The interesting thing with cheap & easy access to photo & video is that people may end up with more flexible personal profile images in coming years. Photos were expensive uuntil I was in my mid 20s. (Film & developing were $$$, plus time). Then they got REALLY cheap...

Yes, we’re doing this research now, but it’ll take a few years to have good data. Keep an eye out. Learn to take a selfie if you don’t know how right now. Even if you never post them online, keep visual images of yourself to help combat the memory flaws that our brains cause.)

And be aware if you start getting grumpy that you can’t find a specific type of trouser. Check your self-assessments carefully if you notice that. Ask trusted people for their assessment and if they poke you, go get checked.

Here endeth Battle II: Dementia comes for us all. Next up: Narcissism as a feature/bug.

If you came of age in the mid 80s, you *DON’T* mind men with longer hair. Sorry. Editing for 280 broke that one.