Understanding Mania

At present this page is a sketch of my thinking. The aim is explain how my manias (with and without psychosis) appear to me, with my background in mathematics, computing, and physics, and with an interest in the Spiritual aspects of life and Mind.

What Sort Of Problem

Having earlier discussed a number of problem solving perspectives and mindsets, we are minded to ask just this question: What sort of problem are we dealing with? And in particular What do different perspectives and mindsets tell us? I'll give you my take.

Psychiatric Problems are not medical problems: they are Mental Problems, and the medical side is only part of the solution. If our computer is malfunctioning, it may be a hardware problem, or it may be a software problem, or it may be an interaction between the two. Indeed things may be a hardware problem in one case, and a software problem in another, and yet manifest the same outward signs and symptoms. If it is a software problem, we must fix the software, even if it looks like a hardware problem: if we only fix the hardware, and the software remains faulty, the machine will still malfunction.

When it comes to solving problems, it is critical that we have a useful point of view with which to understand the problem: forcing the problem to conform to a particular paradigm is naïve, foolish, and ineffective. We can't choose the problems life gives us, but we can choose how we view them. And how we view them changes the kind of solutions we seek, the strategies we make, and the effect the problems have on us.

Medicine is only part of the picture, as is psychology, Spiritual Discipline, and many other areas besides. To try to reduce Mental Health to a single, well-defined discipline such as medicine is akin to seeing computing as just another branch of electronics.

Phenomena

To my viewpoint there are myriad phenomena at work in mania, especially as viewed from the inside. I hope to set out a few, but this list is far from complete.

Chaos

One recurring thought when in the midst of my first serious mania was `all this is a chaotic feedback loop'. Thus there is need to explain what I mean and understand by chaos and feedback.

TODO Explain Chaos

Feedback

Feedback is when the output of some process is used as input for that same process. It turns up in myriad ways, more so if you take a general view of what constitutes feedback. Some examples:

• Microphone and Speaker: Most of us have heard the loud screetchy sound we hear when a microphone connected to a PA system is held too close to the speaker. These days PA systems have got better at filtering this out, especially now that things are more digital and the needs of online videoconferencing has made suppression of feedback a necessity of communication.
• Dynamical Systems, Recursion, and Evolution:
  • A dynamical system is a mathematical system with some kind of state whose evolution with respect to time is described by a set of differential equations. This is a major topic in mathematics, as it pertains to aspects of life such as weather prediction amongst many others.
  • Recursion is when a subroutine or function in a computer program calls itself, usually with slightly different input each time. It is a major topic in areas of mathematics related to the theory of computation.
  • We can (very roughly) view the universe as a complex system where the state now is fed into a procedure which generates the state of the universe a fraction of a second into the future. (I am aware that relativity makes things far more complicated than I am describing here.)
  • In the same way, we can look at life on this planet as a complex state of what is alive now, which is determined entirely by what was alive a fraction of a second ago, and which via the laws of physics and nature, determintes what is alive in the immediate future. As such, we can think of a magic box which transforms the state of life now into the state of life in the immediate future, and then the state of life in the immediate future is fed into the same box to get the state of life slightly further into the future.
• Brain State
  • Much like I described physics and biological evolution as a game of feeding current state into a magic box which yields future state, I take a similar view to the workings of my brain and to brains in general.
  • Consider how we balance. Our brain needs to take in information via our senses so as to know which way is up, and where we are with respect to this `up' direction. Then if we are slightly to the left, we move ourselves right, and similarly for other directions. Naturally balancing is much more complex than this, and it plays a major role in how we move, in the martial arts, and in sport. So far as feedback is concerned, the motor output of our brain has a direct impact on the sensory information going into our brain. Thus we have another instance of feedback. In this instance it is very much like how a differential amplifier is used in electrical engineering, how a self-balancing scooter keeps itself upright, and how a servo motor positions itself correctly. I explain these a little when I cover Awareness and Intention in the context of Taiji.

Distortion

• Filter Instability
  • Amplitude increases without bound. In the mathematical setting the numerical amplitude just flies off to infinity, usually at an exponential rate. In practical applications there are always limits, and so distortion is the result.
• Filter Resonance
  • Resonances dominating and extinguishing actual signal (Moog Filters)
• Amplitude, Saturation, etc,
  • Harmonic and Inharmonic distortion.
  • Some distortion can be useful, both in music, and in our thinking.
  • Psychosis as akin to inharmonic distortion being processed and amplified by our natural brain processes, and treated as genuine ideas, thoughts, or perceptions.

Computational Complexity

TODO Expand

Describing literally what one experiences in psychosis is difficult in general, and impossible to do in any precise way. There is just too much information. cf. Kolmogorov Complexity and the incompressibiliity of random data.

When our brain is being driven beyond its normal limits, masses of additional information is being injected into its processes, possibly leading to more runaway thought processes. In a sense, in psychosis, we are trying to make sense of random data being piped into our brain by an invisible demon (though understand that this 'invisible demon' is a metaphor).

The thing with random data, as compared to intelligible data, is that there is essentially no way to accurately communicate it except to do so verbatim. The problem then is that the rate at which we can describe things in words is astronomically lower than the rate at which we would need to communicate in order to accurately describe our experiences. Thus psychosis becomes a personal experience that is increasingly disconnected from the rest of reality.

Problems and Solutions

• Signal Processing analogies
  • Distortion, Clipping, Compression, Limiting
• Software Development analogies: Crashes, Debugging
• Science Experiment analogies: making sense of unexpected observations. Theorising, planning tests and experiments, analysing and concluding from results of earlier experiments.
• Mathematical Perspective: looking for abstract phenomena which can be drawn out and considered in abstract isolation