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THE NEW WORLD VIEW
EMERGING FROM MENTAL SCIENCE - 2005 TO 2035:
IMPACTS VIEWED 30 YEARS FOLLOWING A NEUROSCIENCE
REVOLUTION
Author:
By David Alan Goodman, PhD, Newport Neuroscience
Center, San Marcos, CA USA
Correspondence:
David Alan Goodman, P.O. Box 803, San Marcos,
California USA 92079-0803. Email: davegoodman@juno.com
To view full biography
and CV click
here
Scarcely
fifty years ago, antidepressant and tranquilizer
were absent from the dictionary. Lithium
could be found in the periodic table. LSD
was jumbled Mormon letters. Hash, pot and
coke were more likely to be found in the
kitchen than in an offspring's briefcase.
Only one in 30,000 children had ever used
a narcotic. Chronic medication was provided
to epileptic and diabetic children while
the rest were given an occasional aspirin.
What these facts indicate
is the cyclic nature of human history. Even
for an industry whose net worth is measured
in excess of a trillion dollars, drugs have
been dominant in the lives of children for
less than a human lifetime. Indeed, many
persons reading this report, being business
administrators and teachers as well as grandparents,
clearly remember the days when youth in
the Western world remained remarkably drug-free.
Despite these remembered
facts, there still exists one school of
thought eager to proclaim our generation
to be the end of history. They affirm that
in the future for prescription and street
drugs, use by children is assured. When
confronted by contradictory evidence about
the existence of historical cycles, they
reply confidently that mental drugs will
be with us always. Knowing what they do
about the financial and informational reach
of the drug sellers, they are confident
drug use will continue in the schools.
Yet no matter how confident
are the favored few that drugs will remain
dominant, histories and empires seem equally
divided between rises and falls. Believers
in the end-to-history school might be more
than a little shaken by impending budgetary
deficits that can translate into a steady
decline in access by the schools to drugs.
After all, drugs by prescription and purchased
in the streets require grants and freely
flowing funds.
Even more frightening
to the experts must be that any conceivable
shift in economic therefore political power,
away from Anglo-America, while moving towards
China, India, Japan, Korea and Taiwan as
well as Russia and the Slavic states, and
Germany and France, in these states interest
in American prescription drugs is secondary
to educating the youth as to how their minds
are driven by natural rhythms. These nations
prefer education to natural rhythms, instead
of classroom education to drugs. Nor does
the Muslim world seem impatient to embrace
American-style drugs.
These observations on the seesawing of public
interest between knowledge of natural rhythms
and educations for drugs have been ongoing
for more than 30 years. It is only since
about 1950 that doctors and drugs and mental
illness became a concern in the American
and British schools. Before then, drug use
was rare or absent. Knowing that history
tends to be cyclic, perhaps the time has
come to look ahead to brain science, as
it can be 30 years from today. It is an
aim of this essay for readers to experience
in advance the competing worldviews in the
struggle to win over youthful minds.
Now is the time for
the educated world to learn a great deal
more about the influence and scope of Mental
Chronomics, on the children.
Background
Thirty years ago, the
author, a neuroscientist, intrigued by the
world of the brain and the mind taught the
course "Alternate Futures" on
campus at the University of California,
Irvine. The founder of a basic research
firm for brain research, he instructed students
to think ahead to the future and to foresee
the American and British future where the
emphasis had shifted away from drugs. Class
members rose to the challenge, concluding
that drug use spreads as long as physicians
do not know how the brain works. Should
a brain revolution arise of Copernican variety
decoding critical mechanisms of the brain,
these teachings would be certain to outstrip
psychiatric-based brain education in the
schools. The problem remained that scientists
were not likely to decode mechanisms of
brain like those producing moods and dreams,
for example, before the end of the century.
Therefore the class
wrote two scenarios about life at the century's
end. Scenario One was the expansion of present
policies where long-term manifold trends
prevail, drug use grows incrementally, cash
flow grows by 15% a year, and scientists
display only minor interest in decoding
the brain. By contrast, the second scenario
devised by the class presumed the human
mind comprised multiple intermeshed cycles
whose integrative mechanisms were knowable.
Scenario Two therefore spoke of breakthroughs
of the Copernican variety that could raise
disquieting issues about both short- and
long-term effects on rhythms of mental drugs.
After pondering Scenario
One comprising the future expected and Scenario
Two being unexpected, he decided to implement
far-teaching changes in his firm devoted
to basic research. Hopes for acquiring funding
by the drug industry gave way to a quiet
operation to favoring detection and analysis
of biological rhythms. Here might be found
the operating codes for the brain, in long-slow
rhythms whose interactions produce the mental
phenomena that researchers call moods and
dreams.
Within two years the
author's firm called the Newport Neuroscience
Center had placed its drug work on hold
in favor of enlisting human volunteers willing
to spend months and decades accumulating
data on their moods, dreams, emotions and
mental states. The volunteers were instructed
to keep notebooks of their emotions, moods,
sleep and dreams and to persist in the effort
for as long as 20 years. They were instructed
to take pen in hand, then in notebook after
notebook record how they felt, their relationships,
dream records during the night, and note
their mental states. They were informed
as to how their data would be analyzed in
the future providing normative data on how
the human brain works, and for mathematical
analysis of rhythms related to healthy operation
of the mind.
When questions were
raised on why a minimum of 20 years, the
answer provided was linked to the cycle
of sunspots believed to last 11.2 years
and thought to exert an influence on the
human mind. A second reason for the long-term
studies was found in the writings of biological
rhythms discoverer Franz Halberg who suggested
there might be found in human data sets,
evidence for a dozen rhythms or even more,
lasting from minutes to months and years.
The decision to examine data from 20 years
or more could be useful for finding out
how the multiple rhythms intermesh and how
the interactions might change during one-third
to one-half of a lifetime.
Now about 29 years since
the inception of the study, data from the
most dedicated volunteer subject comprises
more than 10,000 days for tracking moods,
more than 25,000 dreams, and during the
past seventeen years a time series that
represents continuous recording. An added
benefit is the dreams timed and annotated,
being attempts to link them to sensory experiences
earlier in the day and during the same phase
of previous cycles. The effort was simplified
by numerous journal entries during the day
on communications and interactions that
conceivably influence dream content.
These data submitted
to preliminary analysis, as well as data
from a dozen additional subjects, male and
female before and after the climacteric,
comprise the core results for the launch
of the new science of biological rhythms
perhaps of greatest appeal outside of the
United States and Britain. The name for
the new science now in place to capture
the interest of most of the planet and following
recent advances in biological science is
called Chronomics.
Chronomics
Chronomics was formally
launched in a famous Science magazine editorial
by Denis Duboule in July 2003. Addressing
"Time for Chronomics." The biologist
observed how Genomics required the sequencing
of base pairs in DNA. Out of analytic science
would come a newer discipline tracing to
the cycling of sun and moon in the heavens,
influencing vertebrate behavior for hundreds
of millions of years. It was the goal of
the emerging new science of Chronomics to
discover how genes code for the fourth dimension,
which is time. The key to understanding
required answers to how rhythms from the
environment became embedded in the DNA.
Then, how do the gene instructions from
the nucleus of cells traverse the cytoplasm
to influence cell function and ultimately
mental function and behavior?
The origins of a Mental
Chronomics can be found during the years
2004 and 2005. The second of these papers,
by Martha Gillette and Terrence Sejnowski
identifies the interaction of multiple biological
"clocks" in the generation of
complex somatic functions. The earlier paper,
by Tore Nielsen isolates four of the biological
rhythms for their joint effects on the content
and emotional tone of dreams. Out of these
papers is emerging an agenda comprising
four questions that tell what Mental Chronomics
is? The answers at least tentatively have
been proferred by the author's research
group. We shall return to these critical
questions and answers as soon as contemporary
Mental Chronomics is defined, and readers
are told what cannot be subsumed as yet
in the emerging new biological science.
Contemporary Mental
Chronomics Defined
Mental Chronomics 2005
is the emerging new science dedicated to
detection and analysis of multiple rhythms
whose diverse interactions and modulations
are thought to form the material basis for
the unconscious phenomena that can be defined
as moods, emotions dreams and generally
mental states. Its goal is to assemble time
maps to predict sequences of these mental
states in everyone.
Incremental Growth
of Mental Chronomics
Before plunging into
core teachings of Mental Chronomics (MC),
a few words are necessary on the information
that provided the tipping point for launch
of the new science. The author while teaching
"Alternate Futures" in 1974 happened
to see a book by Gay Gaer Luce outlining
a future rhythms science. She provided the
concept of the time map of humans, advising
interested parties to keep detailed journals
of feelings during different times of the
day such as mood, attention, weight, symptoms
and vitality, as well as dreams during the
night, for months and years. She predicted
major impacts on psychiatry, drugs and biological
rhythms research.
Implementation of the
author's research agenda followed the advice
of Luce's book, Body Time. The operative
concepts, those of a modulated mind and
the mental ecosystem of the mind being comprised
of intermeshed rhythms and biological harmony,
originate with Luce as well as the personal
drumbeat to be adhered to stubbornly, listening
for its personal instructions rather than
attempting to suppress a component of the
"self" with plastic-encased chemicals
swallowed regularly. It can be seen by a
careful reading to Luce what comprises the
science now called Mental Chronomics and
what certainly does not.
Mental Chronomics
is Not Psychiatric
The shaping of thought
in Psychiatry that mental rhythms are precursors
of or full-fledged disease arose in 1975
with the publication of the popular book,
Moodswing, by psychiatrist Ronald R. Fieve.
In coining a new word, the physician-writer
translated into conversational English the
traditional word for natural rhythms in
humans that was 'cyclothymia'. He followed
by defining the condition as depression
and decided that it could be treated with
a wonder drug that could ease the symptoms
of moodswing, short for bipolar depression.
Those learning from the Fieve's powerful
logic were in rapid succession to declare
that natural rhythms could be converted
into the diseases of jet lag, premenstrual
disorder (PMS), and seasonal affective disorder
(SAD). Today the newspapers are filled with
articles claiming that the person failing
to sleep eight hours a night suffers from
still another severe disorder requiring
medication.
Mental Chronomics
is Not Bio-Rhythmic
The generation of adults
growing up since 1975 was raised on the
concept of Bio Rhythms. Spokesmen for this
discipline teach how humans have three mental
rhythms, among them the Emotional, Physical
and Intellectual. The Emotional Rhythm is
alleged to last precisely 28 days; it never
varies in frequency even by a thousandth
of a second during a lifetime. Allegedly
it is triggered at birth, traces out a perfect
sine wave, and never interacts with any
other rhythm of the body including the Physical
and Intellectual. While these observations
have a surface credibility to practitioners,
claims for perfect since wave rhythms lacking
variation in frequency or amplitude sound
more than the output of a Nineteenth century
dynamo than the times output from the timekeeping
biological genome.
Mental Chronomics
is Not Psychopharmacologic
The primary logics underlying
Mental Chronomics can be summarized thus:
Multiple rhythms provide the foundation
for human wellness. Being healthy is the
proper coordination of diverse cyclic processes.
Mental health can be defined as the meshing
of multiple biological rhythms. These biological
rhythms and their interactions provide the
source for moods and dreams. The rhythm
responsible for moods and dreams has been
named the Modulator. It therefore makes
little sense logically to attempt to medicate
away rhythms defining mental health. Drugs
of the current generation often disrupt
this rhythm. Therefore, drugs taken daily
providing control of moodswings, for example,
now providing the mainstay for medication
regimens, seem to oppose rather than support
the discovery of natural rhythms.
Mental Chronomics
is Discovery of Multiple Biological Rhythms
Knowing that Mental
Chronomics (MC) is not Psychiatry and Bio
Rhythms and Psychopharmacology, now we can
answer the four questions defining what
the new science is. The first, of course,
rests on describing what are these multiple
rhythms? To the ancients, the wake-sleep
rhythm was known. They observed too the
shifting mental states in women during reproductive
years. They witnessed seasonal migrations
of land animals and birds. Since antiquity
the rhythms of sleeping, eating, seducing,
copulating, and seasonal migration were
known and most likely were discussed widely.
During the past century,
the number of biological rhythms described
was to grow dramatically, Rexford Hersey
in 1931, reported research on the "monthly
emotional rhythm" in adult. Hersey
shattered the masculine ego by reporting
how in 29 workers studied on the job as
well as in the home, all 29 including Hersey
himself, experienced an emotional rhythm
lasting about a month. Few researchers since
Hersey doubt that the rhythm can be routinely
detected can be found in at least half of
adult men.
Twenty-two years later,
in 1953, Eugene Aserinsky working with Nathaniel
Kleitman reported the presence of a mental
rhythm today called the "biological
hour." While cats and dogs slept, they
experienced a cycle called REM lasting 85
to 110 minutes. Renamed the BRAC, short
for the basic Rest-Activity Cycle, it was
observed in humans during the waking hours.
Few researchers today question the presence
of a rhythm lasting about 90 minutes in
healthy men and women.
In 1980, Dwight H. Bulkley
a researcher working out of his home published
a popular book which reported on 28 years
of research into a cycle lasting 12.3 hours.
It could be linked to the ebb and flow of
tides. A sidelight of the Bulkley report,
not only did the rhythm of the tides influence
mental function, but harmonics as well.
The majority of Bulkley's report concern
a biological rhythm lasting 37 hours.
The presence of a weekly
rhythm in humans probably independent of
the cultural work week only in 2001 was
confirmed by Halberg, Cornelissen and their
collaborators.
Nor does the list conclude
with reports of rhythms lasting an hour,
half-day, day, week, and month. The author
between 1995 and 2005 reported at scientific
conventions evidence in dreams for an "anniversary
effect" that is recall during sleep
to recall details of traumatic event experienced
exactly 365 days earlier. He observed and
justified mathematically the presence of
a mental rhythm lasting 260 days. It has
been replicated and reported in the scientific
literature. A third cycle, this one lasting
about 9.2 years has also been published
in the literature, and confirmed by Halberg
in personal communications.
The foregoing should
raise the issue that biological rhythms
may be more common than formerly believed,
and that among the long-waves that can be
detected on data collected long term are
these: biological hour, half-daily, daily,
weekly, monthly, annual and decadal. These
seven biological rhythms and their intermingling
seem to provide the content and emotional
core of nightly dreams.
Mental Chronomics
is Discovery of the Mental Modulator
Concerning the multi-rhythms
presumed surging back and forth within the
brain, a second question would ask whether
there is a dominant rhythm. The daily rhythm
(also known as circadian) has been widely
heralded. For the understanding of moods
and dreams, however, the emerging new science,
a prime candidate is the Mental Modulator.
Formerly known as the monthly emotional
rhythm, it has been recast as the continuous
modulator of the emotions, detectable as
moods during the day and as dreams during
the night in adult men and in women regardless
of their chronological age.
The Mental Modulator,
unlike the monthly emotional rhythm from
the past, can be shown as a complex mental
function unique to the individual at a particular
time of the month and stage of personal
life cycle. The old concept of the emotional
cycle as a simple sine wave has been replaced
by the new concept of the complex mathematical
function. It can be shown to be oscillatory
as well as being chaotic and fractal to
the limits or resolution.
Current thinking establishes
onset of the Mental Modulator during adolescence,
then over a lifetime it can change in frequency,
amplitude and stability. It can be sufficiently
unique to the individual that some have
described this complex function as one's
"own drummer's drum."
Mental Modulator
Consists of Four Repeating Phases
Speculation is sufficiently
prevalent in the investigation of the unconscious
and conscious minds, that it has been deemed
important to point out how in every individual
studied thus far, the Mental Modulator comprises
four phases. Male or female, awake or asleep,
public moods and private dreams appear to
be cadenced by the Mental Modulator comprising
a sequence of four emotional states.
During the typical month,
volunteers report a personal sequence of
four mental states, each lasting about a
week. This comes as no surprise to women
during their reproductive years. They report
that following cessation of their monthly
flow, they generally feel calm, energetic,
fatigued, and tense during their first,
second, third and fourth weeks. The sequence
with minor differences tends to reflect
the monthly cycling of the rhythm lodged
in their DNA rhythm of emotions where clearly
a great deal more research needs to be done.
For men, they too experience
an emotional rhythm comprising four phases.
Named after its founder, the Hersey Cycle
established a predictable sequence for men's
emotions. It is often less correlated with
cycles of the moon than the hormonal rhythm
of woman. Men often report they can detect
this "monthly" rhythm although
it appears to be of lesser intensity, more
variable in frequency, and therefore less
detectable compared to women. Despite these
subjective claims, the evidence, especially
from the record of dreams, tends to validate
the appearance of a cycle detectable during
nights dividing their nightly dreams into
four predictable phases precisely as in
women.
The upshot of this is
in men and women during their reproductive
years and after menopause, they dance to
a cycle comprised of four phases, although
the frequency, amplitude and stability appear
unique to each individual. The shared rhythm
in certain ways is similar in the series
of moods detected and in the emotional content
of dreams during the night. This suggests
greater similarities between the sexes than
previously suspected thereby answering the
second question, that of general interest
in the findings.
Mental Chronomics
Reveals Perfect Brain Balance
When men, similar to
women, experience monthly bouts of feeling
calm then energetic, then fatigued and tense,
they are revealing evidence for perfect
brain balance in healthy people. Certainly
calm and tense are opposites as are energetic
and fatigued. The person experiencing these
pairs of opposites in a predictable series
can be described as displaying mental stability
through operation of a doubly opponent system
Scientists who have
studied doubly opponent systems report that
they are exquisitely homeostatic. The special
organization of four subsystems enables
the person to become more calm and more
tense, and more energetic and more fatigued
in a predictable sequence. The binding of
opposites in a fixed system tends to aid
in the return to balance when momentary
extremes disrupt the homeostatic state.
The presence of homeostatic
balance in opposed states tends to raise
still another question in Mental Chronomics,
that of the presence of ostensibly positive
and negative states. Based on information
available, ordinary persons describe feeling
fatigued and tense as negative states, and
feeling calm and energetic as positive states.
This is recognized in public service announcements
declaring that a person experiencing negative
moods for more than two weeks should see
his doctor. Of interest certainly the steps
taken by the doctor in prescribing drugs
whose purpose when taken daily appears to
be induce an enduring imbalance -- meaning
that the drug taken as a corrective actually
creates a chemical imbalance.
Mental Chronomics
Reports Exactly What is a Dream
Earlier, the author
indicated that at least a half dozen rhythms
can intermesh. The result of this intermeshing,
at least in the analysis of the data in
hand, results in the dream. This concept
may be in need of illustration, now provided.
Here is a typical dream:
A chimpanzee riding
a bicycle eating a banana on a tightrope
across Niagara Falls. Half way across the
tightrope, the chimp slips, begins to fall
when balloons hidden in his wristbands inflate
carrying him up towards the heavens.
Obvious questions are:
Why is the chimp in the dream? Why the bicycle,
banana, tightrope, and Niagara Falls? Why
did the chimp slip and why his rescue by
inflated wristbands? The answer can be found
in the interaction of multiple rhythms that
are positioned at the Chronomics' core
First, the chimp --
where does he come from? Look to the dream
about a biological hour earlier, in the
preceding REM cycle. The dream 90 minutes
earlier the same night features a chimpanzee.
The banana persists in memory as a residue
of the fruit eaten for lunch 12.3 hours
earlier. The bicycle being peddled represents
the residue in memory of the dream of repairing
a bicycle 24 hours earlier. This leaves
the tightrope and Niagara Falls still to
be interpreted. The answer can be found
by examining the dream from 28 days earlier
during the identical phase of the preceding
cycle, a honeymoon visit to the Niagara
Falls museum.
Why the chimp is saved
by inflatable wristbands can be attributed
to the dream during the time of the month
for feeling calm. Imagination abounds in
dreams during this phase of the cycle, and
certainly the wristbands are an imaginative
way to save the life of a chimp. This answers
the fourth question, about the importance
to science of the Mental Chronomics findings.
Mental Chronomics
Developing as Comprehensive Science by 2035
Today, hundreds of scientists
around the world are carrying out dramatic,
exciting research to explore the world of
Mental Chronomics. The great adventures
undertaken by the scientists investigating
the Mental Modulator, four phases, own drummer's
drum, intermeshed rhythms and dream synthesis
speed up the acquisition of new knowledge
and the instruments to analyze the human
brain's analog operating system, and how
the multiple rhythms can be converted into
mechanisms of mind.
Progress until now brings
to mind how difficult is prediction of the
future. The observations of the doubly opponent
system, and the powerful homeostatic drive
to the unconscious processes as well as
remarkable cycles lasting multiple months
and a year suggests that civilization may
be on the verge of new ways to view the
brain and the mind. The emerging new science
based on empirical data over decades can
be of profound interest to scientists and
youth in Anglo-America as they were 40 years
ago attracted to drugs. Mental Chronomics
has the added advantage in enabling them
to discover the origins of moods and dreams
in the motions of ancient heavens. In the
narrow sense that is curiosity, the new
science, can generate great interest in
the mainstream. In exchange for drugs, the
emerging trend can be towards the motions
of the mind.
For peoples already
encouraged to investigate natural rhythms
and interest in the motion of nature, including
human nature, consider the discovery of
four mental states, four moods and four
dreams. Doubly opponent they collapse into
four discrete states in a two by two matrix.
This brings to mind Jung's four personality
types. Galen's theory of the four humors
fits in well. The ancients believed four
personalities types linked to excesses of
black bile, blood, phlegm and bile. Yet
are not these terms being melancholic and
sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric doubly
opponent? Does it really make a great difference
if the four humors can be upgraded to the
presence of four chemical transmitters at
the base of the human brain?
Mental Chronomics may
ultimately provide rational explanations
for a wide variety of phenomena. The meridians?
MC originates in sequential activation of
brain circuits linked to neural transmitters.
Psychic phenomena? MC is the science of
intermeshed rhythms, therefore of waves
and wave interactions. Astrology? Here the
emphasis is heavenly influence, four houses
and the clustering of twelve astrological
signs into those known as earth and fire,
air and water, again a doubly-opponent system.
The anticipated growth of MC points towards
the coming world of 2035, being 30 years
from the present day, should present trends
continue MC becomes a sophisticated mainstream
science.
Two Competing Worldviews:
2035
When Michael Ellis requested
that the author write this essay, as an
aside he mentioned: "Clarke's Three
Laws." Michael was certainly being
psychic. In a wire basket two feet to the
left as the author types these words can
be found - a tattered paperback copy of
Profiles of the Future written by Clarke
more than 40 years ago, and quite brilliantly.
Clarke devised two routes
to the future, being the expected and unexpected.
The former derives from the acumen of forecasting
experts frequently well compensated who
just happen to perceive the future as amplification
on present trends -- towards rapid economic
growth, global population stabilizing, speedy
acceptance of replacement technologies,
and support for the dispersion, almost inevitably,
of prescription drugs to larger and larger
segments of the world population.
Spokesmen for the expected
future also known as the normative future,
being committed to the end to history, believe
that solutions to most problems can be found
on drawing boards in government and mainline
corporate drawing boards.
Unexpected futures,
as Arthur C. Clarke points out almost gleefully,
can be found in the imaginations of independent
thinkers looking ahead as much as 20 years
of the corporate and government funding
sources. These are the innovators, creators
of the future who in the past dreamed up
no fewer than: X-rays, nuclear energy, radio,
TV, electronics, photography, sound recording,
the ionosphere, carbon dating of the past,
relativity, quantum physics, transistors,
lasers, masers, atomic clocks, superconductivity,
detecting invisible planets, and interferometry
of distant stars.
Granted the list was
compiled 40 years ago and alas the discoveries
of Nikola Testa, classified on his death.
are missing from the list, the message is
conveyed that unexpected scientific and
technological discoveries occur outside
of the scientific mainstream.
To honor of Arthur C.
Clarke, we preview two worldviews, the expected
and the unexpected. Psychiatry linked to
Pharmacology is expected; its challenger
Mental Chronomics, unexpected. Granted Clarke
wrote: "With few exceptions, scientists
seem to make rather poor prophets,"
still the author emboldened by the course
"Alternate Futures" dares return
31 years later, with apologies in advance
for blind spots and anachronisms, would
like to compare two worldviews, Psychiatry
and Pharmacology (P&P) and its likely
challenger, Sophisticated Mental Chronomics
(SCM).
Comparisons of Two
World Views: 2035
1. MAINSTREAM NEUROSCIENCE:
2035
P&P: Physicians'
Desk Reference grows to eight times thicker
than it is now or the type size is reduced
to one-eighth. Drugs represent the end of
the human agenda. Neuroscience exists to
support drug research, corporations now
supplying the primary source of support
for them.
SMC: Unexpectedly, the
range of drug research contracts to the
efforts of corporations and scientists on
their payrolls. Research in the mainstream
of neuroscience is directed towards decoding
brain mechanisms. The greatest scientists
seek to discover how the brain works, and
thereafter the human mind.
2. NEUROSCIENCE INVENTIONS:
2035
P&P: University
laboratories subsidized by corporations
and government continue to broaden the classes
of drugs available to consumers. Where once
leading edge drugs were those called recreational
and medical, brain research now surges ahead
now into cosmetic and cosmic drugs.
SMC: In millions of
homes around the world enlightened citizens
map the structure of their intermeshed cycles.
Families learn to discover through dreams
the sum of their personal drumbeats converted
into algorithms revealing their personal
time structures and exchanging software.
3. POPULARITY OF DRUG
USE: 2035
P&P: Seventy-five
percent of creative people on prescription
medication; 40% of those age 65 or older
on five to 150 pills daily; 70% of youth
take proeuphorics, empathics, gnosticants
and creatively atypical anti-psychotics.
SMC: Wellness revolution
being in full swing, tens of millions map
their enormous amounts of data into a global
brain data base, complete with frequency,
amplitude and stability of emotional rhythms.
The existing drug firms use these data to
roll out new classes of drugs attuned to
mechanisms of the decoded brain.
4. PREVALENCE OF MENTAL
ILLNESS: 2035
P&P: Advances in
biochemistry enable physicians to determine
with greater efficiency indicators of shadow
syndromes and genetic deficiencies inflicting
what they call chemical imbalance. Combining
these shadow syndromes with statements that
drug addiction reflects mental illness,
fully one third of the Russians, Chinese,
Indians, and Muslims diagnosed as mentally
ill.
SMC: Mental illness
following Fahrenheit 451 destruction of
psychiatric manuals continues to downgrade
the incidence of mental illness to levels
of about two percent of the population that
it was in 1950. These represent benchmark
numbers for depression, manic-depression
and schizophrenia.
5. SPREAD OF PSYCHIATRISTS:
2035
P&P: Teams of American
and British psychiatrists transported worldwide
to establish in China, India, Korea, Russia,
Germany, France, Iraq, Iran and Antarctica
for high-profile screenings for mental illness,
and the establishment of support groups
led by professionals for one-third of the
foreign populations and almost half of the
Anglo-American population diagnosed as depressed,
manic-depressed or schizophrenic.
SMC: Incredible discoveries
in the sequential activation of the brain
transmitters serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine,
and norepinephrine cause millions to question
why the psychiatric profession having incomplete
knowledge prescribed medications that raised
and lowered these critical chemicals without
concern for long-term consequences. The
profession shrinks.
6. EDUCATION IN THE
SCHOOLS FOR THE BRAIN AND DRUGS: 2035
P&P: Education continues
to discourage purchase of chemical substances
sold on the streets. Teachers and journalists
instruct students how the illegal drugs
cause brain damage. Identical chemicals
sold by drug companies for treatment of
adolescent mental illness and mind enhancement
are designated as safe and effective.
SMC: Children educated
to the sequence of brain chemicals called
transmitters and modulators secreted during
successive weeks of the month. They are
shown how it is in the power of humans to
use their healthy cerebral cortex in the
frontal lobes to overcome high-amplitude
swings in moods disrupting the healthy brain.
7. TEACHING OF MENTAL CHRONOMICS WORLDWIDE:
2035
P&P: Mental Chronomics
treated with the same grudging acceptance
that Homeopathy receives now. Stories sent
directly to targeted computers warn of how
Sophisticated Mental Chronomics can become
addictive requiring psychiatric therapies
and group support.
SMC: Mental Chronomics
taught as antidotal to taking drugs capable
of disrupting natural recurring states for
months to years. Admittedly some patients
actually feeling better, then telling friends
they have been helped -- until the symptoms
return. Youth find MC offers more guidance
than drugs.
8. THE WORLD AS IT CAN
BE: 2035
P&P: The world of
policies dictated by government bureaucrats,
medical psychiatrists and community specialists
trained in treating a myriad of diseases.
The goal of the hierarchy is to cleanse
neighborhoods of mental disorders. Camps
surrounded by barbed wire for those insisting
they can survive as a minority of mine.
Camps named: Sick or Well.
SMC: Industrious, hard-working
innovative individual scientists also working
in teams devise ever-more Sophisticated
Mental Chronomics outside of the government,
corporate and university facilities. The
spirit of social, cultural, and then governmental
change originating in the grass roots generates
powerful interest in the authentic nature
of human nature.
The Summary
These 16 short paragraphs
compare and contrast two worldviews, of
P&P and SCM, looking ahead to the world
where the 14 year old of today turns age
44. Two worldviews confront the youth today
and when they reach the age of the climb
to power. The Alternate Futures seem clear:
The one that is expected can be dominated
by people taking multiple tablets, caplets
and capsules intended to help them become
as perfect as the contemporary technology
permits. The unexpected second focuses on
or emphasizes inner timing, and rhythms
mapping, discourse in the community about
feelings and inventions and observations
of parading "selves" during different
weeks of the month.
Which? We do not know.
Culture tends to be dominated by pills and
news handed down from the top. Homogeneity
is praised more than variety although they
teach in the schools evolution through variation
and natural selection. Other solutions aside,
the greatest hope for the future would appear
to be the surge by the public towards understanding
how the brain works. Then the persistence
of perceiving the public as receptacles
for drugs can weaken the grasp of merchants
lacking knowledge of the recurrent ecosystem
that is the human brain and the human mind.
Conclusion
Mental Chronomics therefore
can be seen as more advanced than the drugged
society of today. It is the foundational
science emerging today in basic research
outside of government support. Being the
product of independent science, it represents
a throwback to scientific inquiry as it
was practiced 50 years ago. It represents
the coming of an open system towards dispensing
news about the authentic operating system
for the brain. It represents the science
without which society remains impoverished.
The emerging new science
bases its appeal on its emergence from out
of the home being driven by independent
spirits. The science requires no professional
expert visiting the home no need for an
illness diagnosis, then sojourns to the
pharmacy. The technology required for engagement
is limited to the expense account of the
ordinary adolescent, being a calendar, pen,
notebook and clock. It remains for the children
and their parents so armed to discover the
secrets of inner timing and mapping dreams
and predicting moods along with a new autonomy
combined with the "growing up"
of human relationships.
The messages learned
in deep ecology of the human mind, and its
organization into unvarying sequences can
challenge the contrary teachings. Success
would seem to depend on the eternal Aha!
Experience, that history is cyclic and during
the 30 years ago before drugs, the most
intelligent parents and children woke up
mornings to map their moods.
All that is required
now for society to return back to the future
is:
1. Everyone charts their moods.
2. They remember dreams.
3. People embrace competitors to drugs.
FOOTNOTE
Note:
Newport Neuroscience Center operates for
thirty years as a sole proprietorship. Its
absence of hierarchical structure and reliance
of adjunctive scientists permits rapid distribution
of time series, algorithms, analytic instruments,
and consumer advisories.
Email: davegoodman@juno.com
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