Avoiding the singularity

The name I'm giving this experience I am about to describe is "singularity".  The word popped into my mind, giving me a fright and then it just stuck there and repeated. This will be an odd blog entry and you may think I am losing my marbles.

I've experienced the full-on singularity experience just two times in my life and I don't want there to be a third.  I have coping techniques and can also sometimes get whiffs of it coming and therefore avoid full-onset.  But if it hits me square in the brain, I know I'm in for some really stressed out pacing and obsessing.  Giving it a name is even somewhat scary because I do not want to risk accidentally calling it forth.  It is best hidden from me.

Intrigued?  Before I reveal my new observations, let me try to describe the symptoms:  It is a creeping sense that I will soon be unable to think, except maybe obsessively about one thing only, ultimately ending in a state where I am pacing around, trying to get my brain to jump out of the rut.  The two times it happened were both pretty scary.  I thought I had lost my mind and had no idea where to turn.

At least one of those experiences came at the end of a long road trip.  Coffee was involved as was pushing fatigue to the limit.  The paranoia and confusion set in just before the fear.  It took finding a television, of all things, to talk me down.  I just needed to surrender to a force, unrelenting in its capacity to place willing ideas directly into my head.

I mention "singularity" now because I've been sensing it in the room for the last couple of weeks and then last night I had a short term engagement.  I've sensed that it has been my new drug, Marinol that has brought it up close.  I take this medicine every 8 hours to help with nausea and stimulate appetite.  I notice that it has an anesthetizing affect on the center of my gut (probably its anti-nausea characteristics)  but an unwanted side affect is the "buzz".  It's a sleepy buzz and one that makes it harder to concentrate.  I feel like I'm in a battle to stay alert all the time.  I prefer to feel energized, not incapacitated.

Last night about 1:30a.m. singularity briefly jumped from a slightly paranoid feeling into a full-on head resident.  My head became a single cell.  I kept feeling my skull with my hands to make sure it was not larger than the room.  I was aware of a single, non-moving point in the middle of my brain.  I seemed to have lost the ability to oscillate between brain hemispheres.  Making a decision would be impossible.  The word "singularity" just kept rolling around in my mind.  This is singularity.  Rather than get up and pace or watch TV, I began to feel objects around me.  I squeezed my head; my feet; the cat; the pillow.  I established that they were external. I somehow managed to focus on the notion of being sleepy and eventually I drifted off with my head at the foot of the bed.

My epiphany from this experience is the whole idea of oscillation of the brain.  Our two hemispheres serve as counterpoints and allow us to think.  We require the pulse back and forth to be functional thinkers.  Even basic logic requires a minimum binary code, ones and zeros, yeses and nos.  By being either on or off, a binary code can store all the data in the world.  Why would logical thinking be different?  Poles seem logical to me.

Anyway, probably other thinkers have thunk this but it came honestly to me in a state where I became aware of non-oscillation.  And that's why I am writing about it.  I'm fine now, really.

I meet with Dr. Scott today and I'm going to suggest getting off the Marinol.