September 9, 2012

Why Do Schizophrenics Hear Voices?

In a way, you're never alone. Your inner consciousness is always there to keep you company. That voice inside your head is reliably available for conversation. These intensely personal and comforting self-to-self dialogues are splayed across the humdrum of a typical day. "I think I'll wear the blue polo to my date tonight." "Enchiladas: that's what I want for lunch." "Oh my gosh, cute kittens!"

But what if there was a foreign voice inside your head? An entity over which you could exact no control. Wouldn't that be the worst invasion of privacy imaginable? Wouldn't that be disturbing?

For the majority of schizophrenics, this dreadful plight is a vexing regularity. Fortunately, schizophrenia is rare, but that's no consolation to the 24 million people afflicted with the condition. Moreover, there is limited understanding of its underlying causes, and treatments -- often in the form of antipsychotics -- are far from perfect, presenting their own loaded plate of perturbing side effects.

This is where Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman enters into the discussion. Widely regarded for his work on the brain's perception of time, synesthesia, and neurolaw, Eagleman is now foraying into the study of schizophrenia. It wasn't something he originally planned on.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/08/is-schizophrenia-simply-a-matter-of-time.html

September 8, 2012

Back to the streets ...

Medical pot returning to underground

A stocky onetime mortgage broker is speeding through Costa Mesa in an old pickup with two pounds of weed in a paper bag. He wears gray cargo shorts and flip-flops and a faded cap with the image of a marijuana leaf stitched on the front. He just smoked a joint thick as a knuckle.

Cypress Hill thumps through the cab.

I'll hit that bong and break ya off somethin' soon

I got ta get my props,

Cops, come and try to snatch my crops

These pigs wanna blow my house down

For a man whose apartment was raided recently and now faces felony drug possession and cultivation charges, he doesn't seem particularly worried about the mission at hand. Ricky rants about a federal and local crackdown on medical marijuana that closed various dispensaries that he ran and forced him back to the streets, where he began as a teenager in the 1970s. (Except then, he was a dealer. Now he is a "mobile dispensary.&quot

"It's too late!" he bellows. "The genie is out of the bottle. A huge demand has been created. It's back to the underground. Anyone who is smart is just going to take it back to the streets."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pot-delivery-20120907,0,6377677.story