The Woolf-Pulfrich Effect

If you take a broken pair of sunglasses, or break a really cheap pair, so that only one eye sees darkened light, then your brain can perform amazing and apparently unrelated tricks. Yes, I’m going to talk about optical illusions on radio. You can try these at home.

In 1922, German physicist Carl Pulfrich observed that when a pendulum is moving in a straight line backwards and forwards in front of you;if you don’t fall asleep, that when you have one eye looking through a grey lens and the other eye clear, then the pendulum looks as if its moving in a big stretched circle. The two dimensional flat line of its path looks as if its moving in a three dimensional ellipse, going away from you and then towards you as it goes from left to right, or right to left, depending on which eye is looking through the dark lens. Pulfrich happened to try this because of an eye injury that caused a cataract in his eye. The theory is that the nerve cells in the visual cortex receiving the brighter image, actually process the image faster than the neurons processing the darker image. This separation in time causes a spatial illusion, because your brain integrates the two images as if they were slightly separated in space. So you get your view master stereoscopic 3-D effect, with only one image, and no messing around with polarized lenses or red/green glasses.

Flash forward to the 1990’s and people realized that fun could be had with this illusion on TV, wherever there is side to side movement, such as sporting events, parades, and action movies, and of course, video games. When the movement stops, the 3-D illusion goes away. A special Doctor Who episode called “Dimensions In Time” was produced especially to exploit the Pulfrich 3-D effect, and featured a cross-over with the soap opera “East-enders”. The BBC produced several 3-D TV shows to raise money for the “Children in Need” charity in 1993, selling the Pulfrich half-sunglasses.. In America, an episode of “Third Rock from the Sun” was made in 3-D, and an episode of “Married with Children”. In fact, you don’t even need a show with horizontal action, if you tune in to a dead channel and look at the TV “snow” while wearing the half sunglasses, then you will see the static of random dots boiling around in a big 3-D cylinder.

Old arcade games like R-type and Nemesis give a good 3-D illusion when viewed through Pulfrich half-sunglasses.

I took my Pulfrich half-sunglasses to a twenty-four hour science fiction movie festival in Melbourne many years ago, and had fun with the movies going into three dimensions whenever there was horizontal action. Then I had the surprize of seeing a movie where it STAYED in 3-D for the whole movie, even in the scenes without camera movement or horizontal action. I realized that the movie had originally been filmed in stereo with two cameras for viewing in special cinemas with red/green stereo glasses or glasses with differently polarized lenses. The cinema I was in, was only showing the view from one camera, through one projector. With the half lenses on, somehow my brain was producing a stereographic three dimensional illusion. I passed the glasses around the group of twenty friends, and they all saw the same illusion; it wasn’t just me. Since that time I’ve tested the effect on other movies originally filmed with two cameras, and then only shown on one projector, and it works for them. It seemed to be more effective in a theatre than for the same film shown on TV. My friends dubbed it the “Woolf-Pulfrich effect” in my honour. Since that time, I haven’t found any references to any prior claims. When I asked computer scientists who research screen optical illusions at the University of Technology, Sydney about just how and why the “Woolf-Pulfrich effect” works, they just refused to believe me.

Try it yourself with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” which was originally shot in 3-D but is usually screened in two-dee, and be a real scientist! But beware if your emotional point of view changes during the experiment. If you find yourself feeling anxious or depressed, then take off the half-sunglasses and change the lens to the other side, and you’ll feel better.

In a bizarre twist, Harvard Psychiatrist Dr Fredric Schiffer, is using half-sunglasses, as a form of diagnosis and treatment for some types of anxiety and depression disorders. Some patients have their anxiety and depression intensified when one lens is dark, and lifted when the other view is darkened instead. It seems that one half of their brain has an optimistic view, and the other has a more dismal view. He’s found that patients who respond to the half-sunglasses are good candidates for Transcranial Magnetic stimulation, a treatment that stimulates the healthy hemisphere of the brain with super-strong electro-magnets. Sixty per cent of depressed patients felt better when their right eye saw the brighter image, causing their left brain to be stimulated. It wasn’t reported if they enjoyed any 3-D effect under magnetic stimulation.

Poor Man’s 3D Video

Doctor Who in 3-D

nV News - 3D Imagery - 3D Glasses

The Pulfrich Illusion

The Pulfrich Effect: Discussions & Text Explanations

Pulfrich Glasses - 3-D Glasses Named After Astronomer Carl Pulfrich

Stereoscopy


Can Taped Goggles Heal Emotional Disorders?

Dual-brain psychology: therapy for both of your brains

Depression Research Supports Dual-Brain Theory

Internal Transformation

Variety isn’t just the spice of life, its also a weight loss secret. Ben Fletcher of the University of Hertforshire has invented a “no diet” diet that doesn’t involve having to worry about exercise or what you eat. The weight stays off, and you feel happier.

The secret is to act outside of your familiar comfort zone. For the structured first month, you pick a different option from fifteen pairs of contrasting behaviours such as lively or quiet, introvert or extrovert, proactive or reactive, and then behave that way during the day. This can be a challenge for extroverts to blend in, and for introverts to stand out from the crowd. Twice a week, they also had to choose an alternative to their usual behaviour, such as listening to a different radio station, or just reading a different newspaper.

After four months, the volunteers had lost five kilograms. Six months later, they’d kept the weight down, and reported less depression and anxiety.

The method is based on Fletcher’s Framework for Internal Transformation. When you are forced to change your routine, you have to think harder about all your decisions. So despite the volunteers not being given any instructions about exercise or diet, they ended up making wiser decisions in those areas, without needing the willpower required to stick to a conventional weight-loss diet and exercise regime.

It suggests that regularly changing your behaviour in minor and even random ways, makes it easier and more natural for you to change your behaviour over a longer term to be healthier and happier.

FIT Science

In their sleep

Ever thought that that attempt at seduction was so practiced that they could as well be seducing in their sleep? Well Australian sleep physician Peter Bucanan from Sydney’s Prince Alfred Hospital told the Australiasian Sleep Association about a Canberra patient who walked out of the house and seduced and had sex with strange men, and then woke up at home the next morning next to her husband, with no memory of the night’s events.

According to the June 2003 Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, people who suffer from “parasomnia”, can not only walk, but also drive a car, eat, have sex, or commit acts of violence, all without being awake and legally responsible for their actions. They catalogue eleven cases of initiating sex with someone in the household while asleep, but none of them included a seduction of an awake stranger in another building.

Dr Bucanan was skeptical at first, but convinced by the distress of the couple and their confusion.
The husband had been aware of some sleepwalking, and then had found strange condoms around the house. He eventually woke to find her missing one night and found her having sex with another man.

Dr Bucahan diagnosed her after extensive testing with sleep sex, a form of Rapid Eye Movement REM behavioural disorder, where her body wasn’t paralysed while sleeping, and so she was able to act out her dreams.

People only remember their dreams when they are woken during a dream, so people with REM behavioural disorder are often stunned and disbelieving when told what they have done.

Psychotherapy helps in half the cases, and medication can be helpful in others.

NASA gives us the Eye

Neal Newman, NASA attache to the US Embassy in Canberra unveiled his new sales pitch at the University of NSW.

Neal described his job as being to build interest in NASA.

The vision is to return to the moon as a first step. George W. Bush described the vision in 2003,…and there is still no concrete plan in place.

Neal Newman explained that the Apollo moon program was “not sustainable” - it cost five percent of US Gross Domestic Product, and this couldn’t continue. So NASA concentrated on the space shuttle.

The X-prize phenomenon was a shock to NASA. People happily spent twenty million dollars to enter a competition, to be the first to send private astronauts to the edge of space ,and win only ten million dollars in prize money. NASA wants to cash in on this enthusiasm.

Neal described President Bush’s 2003 new ‘vision’ for a future in space , paid for by international and private funding, rather than US government funding.
In May 2005 the repaired space shuttle launches again.

A mere five years later, in 2010 NASA retire the space shuttle fleet forever, to free funds of three and a half billion dollars per year for NASA to spend… in better ways.

In 2014, the replacement craft is scheduled to be launched.
Thats a PLANNED gap of at least four years when the US will not have any manned space flight capability at all. It looks like they are bowing out of manned space flight.

The private sector is expected to completely provide for the International Space Station personnel and supply transport. Perhaps persuaded by cash prizes, in order to gain the prestige of supplying the winning vehicle. Or perhaps another nation will create and donate the transport vehicle and staff it. They don’t know. It’ll work out somehow.

In 2008, the vision sees a Lunar robotic orbiter launched. The US already did this forty years ago.

In 2020, a mere fifteen years from now, Humans will land on the moon, …again.

Strangely, the only reason Neal could give for returning to the Moon was that it is a stepping stone to a manned landing on Mars. He’s just not trying very hard. He didn’t try to give any reasons for a manned flight to Mars, either. I guess he knew he was speaking to Space fans so he didn’t have to sell it very hard. Or maybe its been pushed so far into the future that NASA have no real plans in that direction. Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” program was more believable, especially when budget is such an issue. However its been dropped.

We were introduced to “Project Constellation”

The aim is to design modules for changeable targets and technologies so as not to commit to obsolete goals or tools. To be flexible enough to take into account advances in technology, and changes in political will.

They have catchy slogan about spriral transformation being a “system of systems”. Isn’t everything?

NASA will be offering competition cash prizes to copy the success of the X-prize, and calling them “Centennial challenges” There are no specifics just yet, about the amounts or even what the challenges are, just a web site.

No plan, just a vision.

Neal then dimmed the lights to show us a slide show of NASA’s impressive accomplishments of the past, while he played a CD of the Beatles’ song Yesterday

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me.
Oh, yesterday came suddenly.

Why she had to go I don’t know she woldn’t say.
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.

Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.”

It was like a eulogy for NASA! The party is over.

Neal turned the lights back up to give NASA’s 21st Century answer to “why go to space?”

Basically, the kids aren’t motivated to do boring industrial engineering careers, so they aren’t taking up engineering. Have a space program to excite them into taking up an engineering career, and they’ll be easily moved into the boring industrial jobs the Bush economy needs them to work in. No space program, and no motivation for young scientists and engineers that the mundane economy needs.

Neal then gave the new NASA answer for the question “why return to moon?”
Answer: “Its good practice for further away”.

This is a much worse fake answer than pretending the Enemy will launch attacks from the Moon if we don’t secure it first.

There are industrial and scientific reasons for returning to the moon, but it appears that the Bush administration and NASA aren’t interested in them, and more importantly, have no interest in interesting US, in them.

Why go to Mars?
NASA’s answer is to understand Earth better. A better scientifc answer, in everyday language, yet it doesn’t really say very much.

The vision continued:

n 2009 a robot rover will land on Mars with a fifty kilometre range.

Four years later in 2013 it will return a sample of Martian soil

After that, there is no date for humans actually landing on Mars

NASA promises to put the new Mars images straight to the internet for everyone to play with, instead of keeping them secret. This is an introduction to the new sharing philosophy at NASA’s spiral transformation.

Neal revealed at last an amazing and powerful new scientific toy, the NASA World Wind which he demonstrated for us.
Basically the NASA World Wind is a satellite mapped model of the Earth that you can access on your home computer. The broadcast images come from the Motis satellite. You can zoom in on apparently any place on Earth, and see images from the last satellite pass-over. On his laptop, he was able to zoom in to within 15 metres resolution, and find the Snowy Mountains in NSW, and his old school in California, where he could see how heavy the traffic had been earlier in the day.

The software is downloadable for free from NASA, and requires a 1 GHZ CPU and 3 gigabytes of hard disk space. They have written it so that the bulk of the rendering and search work is done over the internet by the NASA servers. They are encouraging schools and Universities to make the tool available to students and researchers, and they are adding world databases of biological, seismological, geological and geographical information to the model.

Neal recommends that the fastest access time from Sydney to the NASA servers is about 10pm.

Neal said that when online, there is up to ONE METRE resolution. This is an amazing tool to just give away free to the public. This is the sort of Big Brother use of satellites that we have seen portrayed on TV shows like Alias in the hands of unscrupulous Intelligence Agencies, now useable by anyone with a newish PC.

The software is Open Source. Its part of letting interested parties the world over help NASA. Open Source means that not only can organisations check there isn’t something nasty hiding away in the code, but that enthusiasts around the world can improve the software, and add new capabilities to it, or even sell it and make a profit.

The NASA World Wind software and databases are free because they are government funded. Thats the new philosophy. Very welcome, and unexpected.
Its also very clever. This is a fantastic and lasting Public Relations tool that instantly demonstrates some of NASA’s value without dragging people along to watch a space shuttle launch at 4am in Florida.

Another new slogan at NASA is that space travel “is a journey not a race”.

They hope to get space instruments built by foreign governments like Australia in return for Australian scientists working at NASA.

There has been concern at the aging of NASA staff, and a recognition of the need to get new blood and new thinking into the organisation, and to make use of people’s interest in space travel by listening to their opinions and suggestions.

I need a new computer so I can run the fancy software and plan to take over the world while gloating over an accurate photographic three dimensional globe of the world, while other people zoom in and watch ME.

Rejection really hurts

ABC’s Catalyst reports http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1195656.htm a story about how the pain of a broken heart is felt in the same region of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, as physical pain.

In the evolution of humans as social animals, rejection from the group can mean life or death, or at least affect your ability to have offspring and your status.

Fortunately, the researchers also found the brain’s mechanism to relieve the pain of rejection in the right ventral prefrontal cortex, over the eyebrow. This region of the brain is exercised when you describe your distress either in writing or in conversation.

So rejection genuinely, physically hurts, and talking to friends and writing about your experience really helps to turn down the pain.

Nuclear medicine overboard!

On August 9th I broadcasted on 2SER my argument that if a country wishes to reap the benefits of nuclear medicine, then it is unethical for them to push any environmental costs or dangers onto another country. In short, its unethical and NOT green to import nuclear medicines. Any nation using them should make them, if there is any real risk to making them. If there’s not any real risk, as I explore in the report, then there is no argument for closing down the Lucas Height research reactor in southern Sydney. I posted this on the blog on August 10th.

On 30th August 2004, a bunch of press releases hit my inbox about a new report from a professional protest group called ” the Medical Association for the Prevention of War”, which I’ve never heard of before. The first was from the Australian Greens party titled ” no need for nuclear reactor”, and didn’t contain any facts or arguments except for the URL of the MAPW web site http://www.mapw.org.au, where they claimed you could read the shocking new report. I checked the web site, only to find that the report was “to be released on August 31st”. This explained why the Greens failed to present any new arguments or facts - they hadn’t read the report, they’d sent off the press release, without checking the facts.

Three hours later I received a second press release from the Australian Conservation Foundation, titled “Nuclear Plan Fails its Medical”, quoting the same report, this time introducing the idea that we should import nuclear medicines, but not saying where from. It also introduced the lie that nuclear medicines can be made in cyclotrons. Nuclear medicines are made with neutrons, and synchrotrons can only manipulate electrons and protons because it uses magnets to push their electric charge. Neutrons can only be obtained from reactors. The report was referenced again, but it still wasn’t available from the web site to see if it had some new information.

The report has finally been posted to the web site, and instead of posting the text there, they have made available a 20 megabyte PDF file for download, which is enough to put off most people on normal internet connections in Australia. 19 pages could easily be saved as HTML and made available in a fast downloading format.

The only new information in thereport is that the USA imports its nuclear medicines from Canada, pushing any risks, real or imaginary, on to them. Thats it.

The Greens are such consistent liars and peddlars of misinformation on the issue of nuclear research in Australia, that I can’t vote for them anymore.

Ciguatera follow-up

In April, Ian Woolf reported how the fish we eat in Australia can be contaminated with Ciguatera poison, one of the poisons used in Haiti along with puffer fish and toad poison to make real Zombies. In a Discovery follow-up, Ian asks what is being done to protect us from Ciguatera.

left click to play the six minute stream, or right click and select “save as” to save the 800 kilobyte file to your hard disk to play later

Nuclear FOE and the Devil

With all the concern about the decision to replace the old research reactor at the nuclear science facility at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney, there hasn’t been much in the way of informed debate. The bad guys were too arrogant to defend their position, and the good guys weren’t asked any questions. Ian Woolf decided to play Devil’s Advocate and sought out Len Kennear from Friends of the Earth, and asked him some hard questions.

left click to play the six minute stream, or right click and select “save as” to save the 1 megabyte file to your hard disk to play later

Short-circuited by Ciguatera

“The body electric” by Diane Martindale was published in New Scientist on 15th May 2004. She explained the latest research into the human body’s use of electric fields. In a really interesting feature, what rang a personal bell, was her explation of how body cells sense and respond to electric fields.

Kenneth Robinson of Purdue University thinks it is calcium channels embedded in the cell membrane. These are the same calcium channels that are jammed open by the Ciguatera poison in my system. Since the calcium channels are normally opened by changes in volatge across the cell, the flow of calcium through the channels might convert electric fields into a signalling cascade. The electric field may normally cause the channels to open and allow a rush of calcium into the cell.

The idea is that the calcium activates a second messenger molecule, and so on down the signalling chain, and so a strong signal is registered by the nervous system. If calcium channel blocker drugs are administered, then the cells no longer respond to electric fields.

The question that isn’t addressed in the feature is the opposite case which is caused by Ciguatera poisoning: the channels are jammed open and the calcium is allowed to frow freely and activate the signalling cascade. To me this sounds like the Ciguatera is causing false signals to be registered. Lots of random noise, as if there were strong electrical fields being amplified. Sensory overload. Just as experienced.

The other possibility is that when the Ciguatera poison is in lesser concentrations, instead of always jamming the calcium channels open and starting a signalling cascade, it makes the calcium channels more likely to open in the presence of electric fields. Overamplification of the initial signal.

This may be a mechanism for the hyperacuity symptoms. Signals normally filtered out because they are too small, instead get amplified and registered.

Sudden changes in the presence of the Ciguatera toxin would cause a voltage surge, causing a short-circuit.

FPP - Fantasy Prone Personality

I went to an Australian Skeptics dinner tonight where Lynne Kelly performed a magic act and speech where she challenged the audience to consider the emotional as well as the intellectual reasons for people’s supernatural beliefs.

Lynne went on to explain about her experience of Night Terrors, a kind of vivid hallucination that some people experience just before falling asleep or just after waking. Its a very real experience, and not anything at all like a dream. She explained that she had experienced large spiders jumping onto the bed, and she has taken that frightening experience and embraced it by studying spiders and using spider decorations and jewelery.

She explained that people who experience Night Terrors are labelled in psychology as a “fantasy prone personality” - FPP and make up about 5% of the population. She asked everyone who had ever experienced the Night Terror halluncinations to stand up, and I was one of them.

Apparently Lynne expected a number of us to stand up, but I’m the first person she has met who has also seen the big spider and knows exactly how real the experience feels.

I looked “fantasy prone personality” up in google, and found some interesting stuff. Some of it applies to me, some I merely wish applied to me.

The Hypnosis FAQ at PsychWeb has the following:

“Called the ‘fantasy prone personality,’ (FPP) these correlates do not seem to form a unitary personality type, but represent a diverse group of naturally imaginative and visionary individuals.

Josephine Hilgard and other researchers have also found similar results, that some people have particularly rich inner fantasy lives and cultivate a lifetime of vivid imagery experience corresponding to an openness to unusual experience, extraordinary memory in many cases, capacity for intense concentration, sharp sensory acuity, and unusually strong somatic responses to mental imagery (such as response to placebos). “

Thats me. I discovered at an early age that I could hypnotise myself and others fairly easily.

I use mental imagery to provoke somatic responses all the time to deal with all the symptoms my illness have thrown up at me. I have a limited ability to affect pain and itching and other unpleasant symptoms, using mental imagery as a kind of “graphic user interface” of the autonomic user system. I’ve been able to help other people’s pains to improve by sharing my imagery and a form of strong hypnotic suggestion when pain-relieving drugs weren’t to hand.

I also use mental imagery to help me remember things by imagining a glow around something hot, or dangerous, or dirty. I don’t hallucinate and see things as real as a Night Terror, but I can see enough of my “tag”, to always be reminded.

On “Big Brother” recently, one of the men in the house chopped some chilli peppers, and then later touched his genitals without remembering to wash his hands first. He was punished with a strong burning sensation from the remains of the chilli juice on his hands. I was surprized that he would forget. I would have visualized a “tag” of a red glow to remind me, and even if I suffered his absent-minded moment and forgot, when I next went to use my hands, the pretend “red glow” would have reminded me.

This kind of delibertae mental imagery gives the gift of easy rehearsal. This gives me an uncanny “beginner’s luck” because I have already rehearsed and internalised a new skill before I try it.

I caught the end of a documentary once that suggested that shaman’s and story-teller’s from the earliest times of human pre-history were “fantasy-prone personalities” who were able to hypnotise themselves to induce a trance in themselves. With the skill of entrancing oneself comes the ability to entrance others. The documentary showed a shaman in Africa who the anthropologist speculated was performing closest to the shamans of our ancestors. They pointed out that ancient cave painting from around the world accord with the dot and grid pattern of “tiny sparks in everything” that the shamans describe. This pattern also matches the physical structure, they suggested of the visual cortex itself. The shamans were experiencing their visual cortexes more directly than most humans. The documentary ended within 5 minutes, and I was ill that weekend and didn’t have a TV guide, so I do not know what the documentary was called or who the anthropologist was or what his theories were titled.

I need to spend more time on google and the libraries to find out more about this.

Fran Stalling at http://www.healingstory.org/articles/web_of_silence/fran_stallings.htm
says:
“Both hypnosis and storytelling require a setting which fosters good concentration. People must be comfortable enough to relax, and there should be a minimum of distractions. However, even when the audience sits on creaky bleachers in the hot sun and jackhammers pound across the street, as happened at one ill-starred outdoor festival, certain powerful stories can still conjure a wall of silence within which the magic happens.”

Neuro-linguistic programming” is a story telling and visualisation rich method of hypnosis, that for some reason attracts the ire of professional skeptics. I’ll have to look deeper to find out what they don’t like. I’ve been harranged by such a professional skeptic in the past about NLP. To me, the idea that you could apply light suggestions in a light trance by capturing and leading the imagination fully met with my experience of the world. However my friend was adamamant that it was total rubbish and in the same class as fortune telling. His argument was that it didn’t work. Perhaps he was in the 5% class of people that are resistant to the trance state and are not able to learn to be hypnotised easily.

Enough for now, many points about this gift worth more study. Night Terrors deserve a whole seperate study of their own.

My way of coping with their occasional intrusion, is to immediately switch on a bedside light, as this breaks the trance, and restores you to normal waking consciousness. The hallucinations usually vanish. Pointing your finger at them and making a shooting gesture, can also dispell the illusory demons, in my experience.

Mild Aphasia

My brain’s speech processing centres were attacked by the ciguatera poisoned fish I ate on December 1st 2002, and it took me six months to be able to get together the concentration to write a radio script explaining my condition, and to read it on air at 2SER FM.
You can listen to it here , if it doesn’t start playing, then right-click your mouse and choose “save target as” to save the file to play in the media player of your choice.

Robowars Australia!

Last weekend I visited Maryong in Western Sydney to visit the backyard Sydney Robowars stadium! These are “featherweight” radio-controlled robots of under twelve kilograms that fight each other in a metal garage converted into a stadium, complete with bullet-proof plastic viewing wall and video cameras.

The robots can be viewed at http://robowars.org/robots.html

There were teams from Queensland, and Victoria as well as the locals. They were a very friendly, open and interesting bunch of enthusiasts, with many family teams.

I’ll post some photos up when the film comes back.

They meet every six weeks, and have a lot of fun.

Grapefruit got me pregnant

AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT AND DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE
WHILE BEING TREATED WITH THIS MEDICINE (click for audio stream)

There was a big splash for a day in the news recently about this label, so it seems a good time to set the record straight.

Hyperacuity references

I’ve decided to write an article on hyperacuity, after a comment posted by one of my readers about the lack of information about the subject.

Here’s some links and quotes about hyperacuity in the mean time:

Zebra References: The Tell-Tale Heart
“The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them…”
“Differential Diagnosis: adrenal cortical insufficiency”

“The senses are rendered morbidly acute [in rabies], the surface of the body irritatable and readily acted upon by the slightest gust of air, even the feeling of the pulse, inducing an accession of the convulsive paroxysm.”
- The Nature and Treatment of Rabies or Hydrophobia. 2nd ed.
Dolan TM. London: Ballière, Tindall, and Cox, 1879: 136.

” Contains sections the menstrual cycle and other endocrine influences on olfactory sensitivity. Notes that epileptic individuals are reported to exhibit greater olfactory sensitivity than nonepileptic individuals.”
-
SOCIAL LEARNING
“One report illustrates the “wisdom” of the body regarding specific hungers: a child (later diagnosed after death as suffering from adrenal cortical insufficiency) who had exhibited a profound preference for salt from the time of weaning. The child was hopitalised but the hospital diet did not provide enough salt and he died after a week due to an inability to maintain electrolyte balance.”

A Natural History of Extraordinary Human Functioning

“All living creatures have vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Each of these has all sorts of supernormal expressions. What I have discovered in my research is that there is a whole bunch of this stuff, particularly in sport and high adventure, that is kind of in-between—you don’t know whether it’s a hyperacuity of the senses or clairvoyance. Another set is kinesthesis—the ability to read our own insides. There’s an immense lore of supernormal kinesthesis in the yogic traditions.”

I saw kinesthesis as something I developed because I went through cycles of being sick and well so many times a year every year of my life. Also because I’ve consciously tried to develop it, to monitor my health and choose the best way to help myself.

The fact that I was able to self-diagnose my bronchitis infection before the symptoms were manifest to the doctors was just practice. When I could feel all the seperate little hairs and dander in the house in my throat it was making use of the extra information from my toxin-induced hyperacuity. I was ready for the extra information.

THE MIND’S EYE, What the blind see

“Alvaro Pascual-Leone and his colleagues in Boston have recently shown that, even in adult sighted volunteers, as little as five days of being blindfolded produces marked shifts to nonvisual forms of behavior and cognition, and they have demonstrated the physiological changes in the brain that go along with this. And only last month, Italian researchers published a study showing that sighted volunteers kept in the dark for as little as ninety minutes may show a striking enhancement of tactile-spatial sensitivity.”

Superheroes can tune hyper-senses in and out at will, sufferers of hyperacuity have no such luck.
More later.

Ciguatera and high altitude

Ciguatera has the same effect on the lungs as high altitude!

In the 29th May 2004 issue of New Scientist, there is a story called “Why your lungs might not cope with high altitudes”, which describes High Altitude Pulmonary Oedema (HAPE), where the lungs fill with fluid at high altitudes in susceptible people. Researchers at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne have shown that the illness is connected with the efficiency of the sodium pumps in the cells lining lung alveoli air sacs. These rid the lungs of excess fluid by pumping sodium ions out, which draws water outside the lungs by osmosis.

The Swiss team showed that the asthma drug salmeterol boosts the sodium pumps activity and halves the risk of HAPE.

Ciguatera blocks sodium channels receptors and forces open calcium channels. This looks like the mechanism of pulmonary problems with Ciguatera poisoning and the failure of asthma drugs to help with breathing are tied to the way they act on the ion channel pumps.

Chronic Fatigue Group - University of Glasgow
Neurology of Ciguatera - Professor Pearn, University of Queensland

So my lungs are filling with fluid when I have trouble breathing, but the asthma drugs can’t get the sodium pumps to clear them, because the sodium ion receptor is blocked by the ciguatera toxin.

Against my gastroenterologists’ wishes, my GP has me back on antibiotics to fight the chest infection and fevers, after a month of non-treatment. The fact that I feel able to make a blog entry after two months of having trouble even reading the screen for more than ten minutes shows what a good move that was!

The reading has slowed way down while I deal with the fevers. However I’m still working my way through Tuning The Brain , and my pile of New Scientist as they arrive each week.

Cigatera update

I wanted to find out about the risk of Ciguatera poisoning from skipjack tuna oil used to supplement Omega-3 DHA bread and other flour products, so I contacted George Weston Foods.

George Weston Foods are one of Australia’s largest food manufacturers, responsible for popular brands in bread and baked goods, dairy, meat, cereals and animal feed. They are wholly owned by Associated British Foods, who operate in New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Thailand.

I was assured “Fish effected by Ciguatera Poisoning are usually fish that feed in warm ocean
waters such as a reef. The tuna used in our product is caught using large fishing trawlers in the deep ocean and therefore poses a minimal risk of carrying the toxin.” However, their tuna suppliers test for Ciguatera every three months. I figure this is to account for the fact that fish swim. Predatory fish swim over large distances.

Testing once every three months obviously isn’t safe enough, or I wouldn’t have been poisoned. Ciguatera is very under-reported, in fact it took 18 months for me to be diagnosed. Many other people may be affected and not know what hit them.

What are the regulations for testing? I’m waiting on a reply from Food Standards Australia to find out whether there are any regulations for Ciguatera toxin testing in place.

Ciguatera Zombie Poison

In Haiti, Voudon sorcerers mix up Zombie making powder that works largely because of two nerve poisons found in the puffer fish used in the recipie. Ciguatoxin, which blocks the calcium electrochemical channels in nerve cells, and tetradotoxin which blocks the sodium channels.

Ciguatoxin is a water and fat soluble protein that isn’t restricted to puffer fish, its also made by dinoflagellate protozoa - micro-organisms that attach themselves to algae that grow on dead, damaged or dying pacfic coral reefs. Small fish eat the toxin-salted algae, and are eaten by larger and larger predator fish. The poison is concentrated in each step up the food chain. By the time you get to big fish like the skipjack tuna used in fish oil supplements, or barramundi, coral trout, sea perch, mullet, cod, red snapper, and mackeral, (to name a few) that you may choose for your dinner table; there’s enough poison not to make you a zombie, but to make you suddenly and dramatically ill.

I should know, it happened to me just over a year ago.

I ate some omega3-enhanced food supplemented with fish oil or some contaminated fish, I don’t remember. Cooking and freezing have no effect on the poison, and kits to detect the poison in fish have only become available in the last two years. The first symptoms last only a few days , with damage to the nervous system lasting from months to decades. A study released by Professor Hoegh-Guldberg at the Queensland University’s Centre for Marine Studies reports that the frequency and severity of outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning in Australia are increasing as the coral reefs are dying.

Traditionally zombie slaves can be spotted by their strange lurching walk, their glazed eyes, and their odd voices. The changed voice is attributed to the voodoo god Baron Samedi, Lord of the burial grounds. These are all among the symptoms of ciguatera fish poisoning, and are caused by subtle brain malfunctioning. The changed voice is from damage to the speech centres such as happens in aphasia and aphragia, the glazed eyes are from being zonked out and mentally exhausted, and the lurching walk comes from dizziness, muscle weakness and nervous system overload.

Your body recognizes the poison and tries to eliminate it, but because its fat and water soluble, it just gets absorbed again, and again.

Ciguatoxin causes nervous impulses to trigger more quickly, but it slows the transfer of information, and then slows the cells readiness to be triggered again. You can also be exposed to the toxin and have a small reaction the first time, which sensitises you. If you eat poisoned fish again, your next time may be a much more severe reaction.

The key diagnostic flag for this poison is body temperature problems. Hot things seem hotter, cold things seem colder, and sometimes they get reversed. This can be a very strange sensation in the shower!

The CSIRO invented a technique by which tuna oil can be made into a tasteless and odourless powder that can be added to foods such as bread, baby formula, and breakfast cereal to give consumers the healthy omega-three fatty acids that they want in their food. Omega-3 oils in food have been shown to be good for the brain and the heart, and the products have become very successful in the marketplace. I’m still waiting for an answer to my query about whether there is any testing in place to reduce the risk of ciguatera contaminated oil reaching the supermarket. Even chicken fed with fishmeal has been reported to have caused ciguatera poisoning.

In the USA there is a hundred-dollar-US monoclonal-antibody blood test available, and fish testing kits are available in Australia for around $2 per fish. In the Carribean Islands, the locals test their fish by leaving a small chunk near an anthill. If the ants eat the fish, so do the people. Dr. Hokama who invented the blood test, believes that ciguatoxin is the agent that causes Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and in clinical trials, ninety-six percent of suffers had ciguatoxins in their bloodstream. Dr Hokama suspects that his American patients haven’t all had trips to the Pacific, instead they may have their own mico-organisms zombiefying them - from the inside.

A few years ago, a study of fish sold at the Sydney Fish Markets showed that some had never even been described by scientists, let alone named. There is no information on how these animals live, how long they take to breed, or how many might be left, yet they are being caught and sold with no knowledge of their biology. - Abbie Thomas

I lost seventeen kilograms, my voice changed from baritone to tenor, and often fades completely. My eyes saccade when I focus on near objects, I have clumsy attacks, and I get dizzy, weak and exhausted if I’m upright for more than a few minutes. I sometimes have to use a walking stick or lean on furniture. My hands shake, and without medication, I have small seizures that shake the bed while I sleep. I have a kind of hiccup-belch that starts being occasional in the afternoon, but becomes more frequent as it gets later at night, sometimes keeping me awake. I suffer from episodes of mild aphasia where I have trouble speaking clearly, and trouble understanding spoken or written words. I have trouble doing simple arithmetic, and get a bad headache if I force myself to work on calculations or speech or reading. Medication can help with a few symptoms.

It isn’t certain whether I’ve been affected by a one-off poisoning in November 2002, or whether I’m infected with some organism that produces the same toxin continuously. Its possible that eating bad fish just triggered a prior sensitivity. This may be the mechanism of CFS laid bare because it became severe after fish poisoning, or it may be a poisoning that made my existing CFS harder to deal with. So I’m now on a regime of seven drugs to counteract some of the symptoms.

Resources:
Ciguatoxins and Ciguatera
FDA Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook
CSIRO; Fishes n’ Loaves
Neurotoxin Discovered in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Holistic Health Topics - Ciguatera Fish Poisoning
CIGUATERA: Fish Poisoning - MIAMI MEDICINE / AUGUST 1992
Ciguatera Fish Poisoning , NIEHS Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center
emedicine Ciguatera Toxicity
SEA SICKNESS July 11, 1999 The New York Times Magazine p. 18 by ANDY NEWMAN
FISH SICKNESS
Barrier Reef just 50 years from death
Successful Treatment of Ciguatera Fish Poisoning With Intravenous Mannitol
The Ciguatera Epitope: So What Do We Really Know Thus Far?
Ciguatera - Chronic Debility: One cause of the CFS
REAL ZOMBIES by Ian Woolf
Witch doctoring
Ciguatera management
neurotoxins: Diagnosis and Treatment Information for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and other Mystery Illnesses
Ciguatera Fish Poisoning - a review in a risk-assessment framework
Neurology of ciguatera
Fish Poison Problems
The Science Show - Ciguatera
Ciguatera blood testing
Tip-Top Bread UP Omega 3 DHA
Ciguatera fish tests
Thanks for all the fish

Longevity of Man - How long can we live?

Longevity ego blogged across the decades! In 1985 I wrote an essay on longevity and anti-ageing science for my first year biology course. In 1994 I updated it with new telomere information and posted it on my website and had it published in “The Sydney Futurian”, the newsletter of the Sydney Futurian Science Fiction Society

Today I did an RSS search on anti-ageing medicine and found Anti-Aging Medicine & Science Blog , and lo and behold, they have my article on longevity linked from the Futurian mirror site as one of their references!

“The Plausible Futures Newsletter focus on large scale social change and the implications of emerging technologies on the world system.” Their lens looks to the Futurian mirror of my article, too.

This is almost enough to persuade me that I should be paid to write.

The least I can do is blog this.

Longevity of Man - How long can we live?

by Ian Woolf

“Man will never be contented until he conquers death.”
- Dr Bernard Strehler, 1977

According to Dr Walton of the CSIRO, an organism’s life generally
falls into the three phases:


1 growth
2 maintenance, and
3 aging.

It has been the desire to remain or return to phase 2 that has kept
Humanity on our millenia-long qquest for immortality. Scientists now
have some understanding of aging and are actively seeking for ways to
prevent or even reverse the process; some of the quite successfully,
and all of them optimistically.

Life-expectancy in Will Shakespeare’s day was only about thirty years.
In England in the 1880’s, just over a century ago, it was less than
forty years of life for the working class majority. In Australia in
1900, it was fifty-one. In Australia now, it is seventy-five for men,
and eighty-one for women,; a rise of three years in the last decade. In
the 1970’s demographers realized that for older people life expectancy
is rising. In 1975 a sixty-five year old man could expect another 13.1
years, in 1983 a man of 65 averaged 14.2 more years, and in 1993 he can
expect 17.2 more years. Researchers think this is probably due to
better education, nutrition and attention to personal health, as well
as availability of medical treatment for fatal conditions. Yet
individuals now in their seventies and eighties were born early this
century and suffered poorer nutrition and living conditions than today.
This implies that given modern high living standards, children growing
mow should survive well into their nineties.

Free radicals are unstable molecules that cause aging according to Dr
Denham Harman. They disrupt cells by robbing electrons from passing
molecules and triggering destructive reactions. They are created by
oxygen processing in the body, or by contact with smoke and smog. Older
cells are packed with them. Anti-oxidants combat free radicals by
making them more stable, and thus preventing them causing damage.
Vitamins C and E, carotene, and lecithin are all anti-oxidants. Dr
Harman says that anti-oxidants increase life expectancy by twenty
percent or more.

Cross-linkage of vital proteins and nuclei acids in and around body
cells causes aging according to Dr Johann Bjorksten. Gradually, with
the assistance of lead, cadmium, aluminium and free radicals, the
proteins are bound into large aggregates which are irreversibly
immobilized, and clog the cells, ultimately destroying them. In 1970 Dr
Bjorksten isolated microenzymes from soil bacteria which penetrate and
breakdown the aggregates allowing them to be excreted safely. A
proposed “youth pill” would contain the microenzymes plus chelating
agents to remove the metals, and antioxidants to prevent further
cross-linkage. Dr Bjorksten predicts 800 year life spans, soon!

A “death-hormone” is triggered at a genetically programmed time says Dr
Denckla. The hormone is secreted by the pituitary gland after
adolescence. The output increases with age, and progressively blocks
the action of a thyroid hormone, vital to metabolism. Dr Denckla has
delayed aging in rats by removing the pituitary and dosing them with
other hormones. A death-hormone neutralizing drug says Dr Denckla,
could add 30 years to human life expectancy. Dr Denckla left research
in 1980 after his funding was cut.

The thymus gland shrinks with age says Dr Goldstein. Thus thymosin,
which it secretes, is reduced in supply, until at eighty years of age,
the gland has vanished altogether and its supply is zero. Thymosin
maintains the immunological system. As thymosin level falls,
susceptibility to disease and cancer mounts rapidly. Thymosin
injections would allow one to age gracefully, disease-free, although it
is uncertain how much life would be extended.

Metabolic toxins accumulate in our blood and slowly poison us according
to Alexis Carrel. Dr Klebanhoff at the Lackland Airforce Medical Centre
has a “total body washout” machine, which siphons off all blood and
replaces it with an oxygen-carrying solution, then drains this and
gives a complete transfusion. Replacement blood would preferably be
from healthy young donors, or have been cleaned of toxins and
infections.

Abusive living wears out organs. Heart and lungs age due to diets high
in fat and insufficient exercise. The same goes for other body organs.
Organs can be replaced either by transplants or by artificial organs.
There are rejection problems to be overcome with transplants, but heart
and cornea transplants are now commonplace. Prosthetic replacement for
organs have developed slowly, but should benefit from the advances in
the new biotechnology revolution.

The Hayflick limit, until recently, put an absolute upper bound on how
long we could live. Every living cell possesses a biological fuse that
“burns down” a little every time the cell divides; in normal cell, each
division brings death closer. The fuse runs out, and there is no more
cell replacement in the body. The average cell can divide 60 or 100
times before this happens. The fuse on cancer cells never runs down,
they are immortal. In 1993 Calvin Harley’s team at Geron, a Californian
biotechnology company have linked the biochemical changes that give
cancer cells immortality to one that regulates ageing. They have
already discovered a compund that makes cancer cells mortal in a test
tube. They have found that cancer cells manufacture an enzyme called
telomerase that rebuilds the cancer cell’s fuse, so that the cell never
gets the instruction to suicide. They have successfully made cancer
cells mortal by inhibiting telomerase. This will lead to control of
hayflick limit in healthy cells, allowing us to control their longevity
without killing the organism with runaway cancerous replication.

If, pessimistically, we can raise the human lifespan by only fifty
percent in this generation, then that still means that you will
probably live at least thirty years past the projected seventy-five
years the insurance companies expect.

With even a thirty year bonus, the leap into hundreds of years is
likely to occur. If you are now 20 years old, you expect to die around
2045 AD. Add thirty years to that, and you live to 2075 AD. How many
years will medical science be able to give you then? In 2075 AD, an
increase of one hundred years would be conservative. So you can live on
to 2175 AD. And where will life-extension sciences be by then? Likely
any population problems will also have been solved.

Even if this table is over-optimistic, you will probably live a lot
longer than you expect. Possibly long enough for the next
life-extension breakthrough.

“Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their
descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”
- Woody Allen, ‘Immortalist’ magazine

A good reason to be confident something will come of this research in a
maximum ten years, is that there are so many scientists researching
longevity from many different directions.

“People now living - the more determined ones - may never die at all”
- Robert Anton Wilson, ‘The Illuminati Papers’

References:

New Scientist 1993-1994
Discover (Dec 1984) “Aging, can we slow the inevitable?” by Gina Morris
Sydney Morning Herald (9/3/85) “The Age of Youth” by M. harris and A. Levinson
‘Future Facts’ by Stephen Rosen (pub Heinmann, 1976)
‘Science Fact’ by Frank George (pub Angus & Robertson, 1977)
‘Your next Fifty Years’ by Robert Prehoda (pub Ace, 1979)
‘Can you live to be 100?’ by Dr Woodruff (pun Chatham Square Press, 1977)
‘The Illuminati Papers’ by Robert Anton Wilson (pub Sphere, 1980)
‘A Step Farther Out’ By Dr Jerry Pournelle (Pub Ace, 1980)

The Science of Semen part 1

In this era of empowered women, HIV, and cloning, it may seem as if women will soon have no use for men at all, perhaps even downgrade them to semen providers. Ian Woolf looks online to find out what semen is good for.
Listen to the full story
(right click and choose “save as” if it doesn’t start playing in your browser)

Resources:

http://www3.cosmiverse.com/news/science/science06200204.html

http://www.psc.uc.edu/HS/Semen%20Antidepressant.htm

http://www.biopsychiatry.com/semen.htm

http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/pheromones5/function.html

http://www.cum-so-sweet.com

http://www.semenex.com

http://www.themodernreligion.com/misc/sex/sex_good.htm

http://www.actionlove.com/cases/case10364.htm

Cocktail that made CFS improve

My severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) symptoms improved dramatically this year and neither I, nor my doctor know why. Now they’re getting worse, and again I have hypotheses, but I don’t really know. So, as a scientist who may be soon gaining or losing quite a few abilities, I thought I should summarize what I took over the time my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome symptoms, particularly my energy, concentration, memory, arithmetic, and speech improved.

I’m not doing as well as I was. I don’t know if thats because I tried a holiday from Symbicort to see if Seritide or Ventolin alone would help me, or because I finished the antibiotic course, or if it would have happened anyway.

It all started with two puffs of Ventolin, which caused an immediate and dramatic cognitive improvement that night., particularly in my mild aphasia and confusion.

This was followed by a one week course of 400 mg antibiotic telethromycin, and one puff twice a day of Symbicort 200. Bigger improvements in concentration and talkativeness

Another week of just Symbicort 200 one puff twice per day. Brain fog clearing away, and I also felt a sense of well-being, as if some vague long-term pain had stopped.

Symbicort 200 increased to two puffs, twice per day - double the dose. Prescribed 500mg levofloxacin antibiotic for one week course. I feel energised and happy. My technical skills come back, and I am able to go for long walks with a delayed payment of exhasution and pain instead of an immediate one. My “Faustian bargain” of enjoy now and pay later, is available again. My minor acne clears up including some I’d forgotten about.

A week later, I fiinish the levofloxacin. I develop a painful yeast infection in my throat and mouth, and lose my voice. My doctor takes me off Symbicort, and asks me to try using just Ventolin alone, two puffs, twice per day. The infection goes away and my voice comes back better than its been for a year. I have some energy, but I start to lose all the other benefits. I spend a day doing radio interviews, editing them and packaging them for our community radio science show Discovery. I get the inevitable “crash” of exhaustion and pain from the activity.

I can’t stand the total regression to mild aphasia and pain and weakness, so I take Symbicort again. I feel better but develop the yeast infection and lose my voice again. My GP tells me to take yoghurt to fight the yeast. He takes me off the Symbicort again to try Seritide, which has Fluticasone and salmeterol, which are supposed to help asthma in the same way as the combination of budesonide and formoterol in Symbicort. I struggle through two weeks, and try adding ventolin to the mix, but Seritide does not help my cognitive symptoms the way Symbicort does.

I’ve been back on Symbicort for 4 days with a spacer and lots of drinking yoghurt. The yoghurt seems to help supress the yeast infection. The spacer I use with Symbicort was trapping lots of big particles of powder, which are apparently the footholds of the yeast infection. I exhausted the old inhaler and started a new one today, and the new one leaves no visible residue at all in the spacer. Perhaps I was victim of a bad clumpy batch of Symbicort powder that left me more open to yeast infection.

I thought if only I could take Symbicorts drug combination that help in a non-powder form, I would get my voice back. I searched google and found a 1998 patent for an “Aerosol Symbicort equivalent”, this sounded exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, when I contacted AstraZeneca, they informed me that “this presentation is not yet available in Australia and it is hard to say when exactly it will be available.” Google had nothing else for me, so I emailed one of the inventors, Professor Frank Blondino, and I’m still waiting on a reply. Surely in six years the patent has gone to manufacture? AstraZeneca’s Medical Affairs Associate emailed to tell me that she had “conducted a search of the medical literature as well as the AstraZeneca in-house database, but was unable to locate any reports of Symbicort being used for the treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”

Of course, for all I know, I need to be back on the antobiotics as well, Symbicort on its own may not be enough. The acne came back this week.

Something unknown knocked me down and gave me strange neurological symptoms and constant gastroentrological bubbling. Some unknown effect of the medical cocktails I’ve been subjected to in the last two months has helped the neurological symptoms slowly improve after a dramatic improvement in clarity from the first Ventolin dose.

Unfortunately, with me as both scientist and my own guinea pig, its Mad Science, and I haven’t managed to isolate what works and get rid of all the side effects.

New book by Jay Goldstein released

Dr Jay Goldstein of the Chronic Fatigue Sydrome Institute has finally released his new book on how to treat the illness.

The online extract has a very bleak, but accurate view of CFS treatment available in Australia:

“My patients from Australia described the medical environment for
CFS as a “vast wasteland,” although some progress was being made in
educating individual physicians.”

“The situation in Australia is tragic. Many patients with CFS are derided
by their physicians, unlike in the United States, where they are treated by at
least a few establishment physicians with benign condescension. Because in
Australia fewtreatments are known, feware offered. Offices that provide vitamins,
colonics, and other holistic therapies are swamped as a result.”

His description of his model of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome treatment is tantalizingly fascinating, because it seems to be an accurate description of my experience of “immediate neural reintegration” with Ventolin in January 2004.

“In CFS and related disorders the brain does not handle information properly. As a result, a
patient experiences sensations and cognitions that are not appropriate to his
or her stimulus environment. If the input is incorrect, so is the output (“garbage
in, garbage out”), and physiology regulated above the level of the
brainstem may be dysfunctional.

The corollary to this theorem, which is not as self-evident, is that the brain can be tuned to enhance the signal (salient information) and eliminate the noise (irrelevant stimuli), much like tuning a radio to hear the music and not the static. This process can often occur immediately
—some researchers use the word instantaneously, but I have been advised not to (yet)—with the proper intervention. A few papers in scientific journals are beginning to address this common phenomenon, such as
Marder E (1997), Computational dynamics in rhythmic neural circuits.
The Neuroscientist 3(5):295-302.
Nicolelis MAL (1997), Dynamic and distributed somatosensory representations
as the substrate for cortical and subcortical plasticity.
Seminars in Neuroscience 9:24-33.
Glanz J (1997), Mastering the nonlinear brain. Science 277:1758-
1760.”

I’m very keen to review a copy, ASAP. My experiences with Ventolin and Symbicort lead me to believe that he’s the researcher thats on to the solutions I need. The web page for the Institute is dead, so they’re a little hard to contact. I’ve heard Dr Goldstein is no longer in clinical practice so I can’t go and get help from him directly. The one Canadian doctor we were able to find will not take new patients, but is happy to advise other doctors.

I just need to find a specialist that will help me follow the treatment protocols. Time to rejoin the CFS support comminity.