Epilepsy memory issues

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Epilepsy is something separate from autism. But how can we understand it in the framework of the two-fluid model?

Epilepsy consists in the buildup of neural energy that is subsequently discharged synchronously, like an avalanche. This discharge could either be localized (frequent spikes in EEG), or systemic (seizure). Borrowing the phonon-photon analogy, then we can immediately identify epilepsy as "phononic laser", or "phaser" (see: https://phys.org/news/2010-09-scientists-possibility-phonon-laser-phaser.html). So, this gives a direction into a deeper understanding and exploration of epilepsy mechanism inside the brain. That's a whole area of research.

But I want to talk about something narrower here. One of the impediments of epilepsy is a deficiency in short-term memory. That is totally understandable. Short-term memory seems to be implemented as ideons inside the visual cortex. And ideons are extremely sensitive to phonons. So, the constant discharge of "phasers" inside the brain of course will severely impact the short-term memory.

Is there a way out, short of using drugs?

As people may know, I've been using the calendar date problem as a guinea pig for lab experiment. I've come to realize that the method of loci ("mind palace") actually helps to better retain intermediate calculation results, than using my verbal memory. Basically, instead of retaining the results by sound, or by the shapes of their digits, I have replaced them with objects. For instance, zero could be a donut, three could be a cloth hanger. Not only that, these objects have locations, and they vibrate, stretch, rotate, or move. And you have a sense of your physical body moving through the mind palace. Some people go as far as including smell into the objects in their mind palace, or sound (e.g. bee buzzing, explosion, etc.), or touch sensation.

What's going on?

I don't think I can ever achieve building vortons easily. I am a pro-picture person, after all. BUT, I think what's going on is I build pseudo-mini-vortons, via combining short fragments of conceptons, eddions and ideons. And these pseudo-mini-vortons work better than plain ideons, for short-term memory retention. Scavenge whatever little tiny conceptons you can find inside the brain, establish linkages. Because, conceptons are immune from phonon attacks. The more a concepton can link (say, to motion, vibration, body movement, smell, sound memory, touch memory, etc.), the more resistant it is to phonon attacks. (I don't have epilepsy, by the way.)

What's the point? The point is that, we need to modify our way of teaching children with epilepsy that have short-term memory issues. Particularly in math. It needs to be taught graphically, in movie-like fashion, with things like eggs sitting inside egg fillers/containers/cartons. Things like that. There needs to be a shift away from verbal memory into visual memory. These children need to be taught very differently. They do have a large reservoir of untapped memory power, but unfortunately we are not raising them the right way.

Hi Jason, I like your research! The suggestion that children with epilepsy, due to short-term memory loss issues, respond better to modified teaching methods, I’m all for. My eldest son had a history of infantile seizures, though thankfully grew out of them. Do you remember when the Dostoevsky mice were cured of epilepsy?
Dostoevsky mice cured of epilepsy
Autism & Seizures: a brief overview...
Autism & Seizures: a brief overview
Autism& Seizures(a piece I wrote):
Autism & Seizures(my research)

Two more tidbits:

(1) Epilepsy in autistic people linked to lower IQ:

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/risk-of-epilepsy-in-autism-tied-to-age-intelligence/
"... The study also found that low intelligence — defined as having an intelligence quotient (IQ) below 70 — is associated with a cluster of symptoms seen in people who have both epilepsy and autism. The symptoms include difficulty with daily living, poor motor skills and language ability, regression and social impairment."

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/scientists-probe-puzzling-overlap-of-epilepsy-and-autism/
"... Similarly, about one-quarter of children with epilepsy have intellectual disability. The cognitive impairments could be the result of seizures that derail brain development, experts say."

What this means is a significant fraction of low-functioning autistic people's problem comes from epilepsy, not autism. Epilepsy significantly affects the working or short-term memory.

(2) Focal epilepsy

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/epilepsy/focal-epilepsy
"... Seizures beginning in the occipital lobe are rare."

Most focal epilepsy comes from the frontal, parietal and the temporal lobes, in areas related to consciousness, executive functions, and language. The interesting thing is the visual cortex (occipital lobe) in comparison is relatively less likely to develop focal seizure. So, there is merit to explore visual short-term memory instead of the verbal short-term memory.

In short, my take is that autism is mostly a visual cortex phenomenon. Whereas epilepsy seems to be exactly the opposite, and mostly likely coming from frontal, parietal and temporal lobes. If that is indeed the case, this points to the need of developing autistic children with epilepsy from a visual angle, including training them to replace their verbal short-term memory with visual short-term memory. Autistic children, after all, for sure have the superfluid phase, meaning they are likely to have conceptons, which are immune to the phonon attacks from "phasers" (epilepsy).

My working assumption is, if epilepsy and autism have been there together, generation after generation, then Mother Nature made it that way for a reason. Epilepsy is but just one type of physical weakness that exempted autistic people from regular hard labor (or defense duties) in the historical past. The point is, Mother Nature has been telling autistic people: use your brain, not your body. And that is the whole point of autism. I still believe that seizures are not an impediment to brain power. If it has been there for thousands of years, it's because it's meant by Mother Nature. We just need to listen to her message more carefully.

Love this! Thanks so much for sharing! Fascinating! I’ll enjoy going over those links in more depth tomorrow.

Things are really coming together under the two-fluid model. See, I have been saying for years that autism is nothing but a renormalization phenomenon inside human brain (more precisely, inside the visual cortex). See for instance:

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-explain-renormalization-in-physics-in-simple-words/answer/Jason-Lu-179

Due to topological considerations, there are two types of neural circuits inside the visual cortex. The open-loop ones are ideons, the closed-loop ones are eddions. Upon renormalization, when ideons hold hands with each other, they form conceptons. Similary, when eddions hold hands, they form vortons. ("Holding hands" is what in physics is known as "renormalization.")

Following the same logic, what happens when phonons hold hands? Ha. They become phasers. Phonons are the messengers between the visual cortex and the frontal lobe, between our computing power and our executive functions / consciousness. Here is a diagram summarizing the situation:



That explains why autism and epilepsy often coexist, because they correspond to similar phenomena but that happen in different parts of the brain, via different neural processes.

(By the way, I never liked the way people explain how laser works. They just say atoms are excited and then when they drop down to a lower energy state, a photon is emitted. They don't explain why the emitted photon wouldn't just excite another atom and knock that atom back into the excited state. See, the crucial things is, photons are bosons, and bosons at short distances attract each other. Of course that is a heresy to say in Quantum Mechanics in the context of identical particles. But from classical point of view, à la effective potential, that is what normal folks can relate to. Photons like to hold hands. That's the point. That is what explains why laser beams are so narrow and don't disperse. The way how photons hold hands is no different from the case of superfluid/superconductivity, no different from the case of BEC Bose-Einstein Condensate. See, the problem of physics is, most people don't develop a true understanding. Most people are just parrots. They think physics is all about math. That's the sad state of affair about physics. So most people would just say: oh, superfluidity, that's a quantum phenomenon, and they make it sound like it's something mysterious that common folks cannot understand. Math is not physics. Math is just a tool. Physics is all about analogy: understanding our world via analogous situations that we already understand. That is what physics is truly about.)

Thanks so much ... I find all of this fascinating. I have a dear friend(someone in Australia), whose son is autistic with intellectual deficit, and who has seizures. Should probably point out that I myself, do not have seizures, but as with all things related to the autism spectrum, I’ve long found myself researching it to the hilt, in order to better understand and help others on various forums, and in life, generally. I’m certainly no physicist, though members of my family are, and also have maths degrees. Still, I find your research very interesting. Feel free to share any and all research and information related to autism and seizures, anytime.

It is now very clear to me how to develop autistic children with epilepsy. The key is to use an approach like "Mind Palace", also known as the method of Loci, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci. However, that's easier said than done. You have to understand that in the real world out there, people that know anything about "Mind Palace" are but one tiny fraction of the general population. People that can truly apply it are even fewer. And if you want to ask how many people have experience using it on autistic-epileptic children, the answer would probably be zero. It'll take a lifetime to explain all this, to any regular teacher, ABA therapist, or psychologist.

Mind Palace technique is what's used by "memory athletes." Including those that can memorize pi to more than 70,000 digits See: http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/index.php?page=lists&category=pi. So, it's not science fiction. It's real stuff.

What needs to be done is to adapt this technique to autistic-epileptic children from young age. People will have to re-write all academic educational materials, for things like math and English, e.g. reading comprehension, all into the Mind-Palace paradigm. That's a draconian effort. All that is more complex than the route I took to develop my son via animation video clips. See, even today, I am still so far the only one parent on the entire planet that has successfully developed a child via customized animation video clips. So, I don't see how anyone on this planet has the slightest chance of raising a child early on using the Mind Palace approach. Sorry to say this: there are just no people out there with enough brain power to really implement it.

And that's the sad thing. These children can be developed. But the intellectual disability and behavioral problems are on the other side: in our society's adults. To fix these children, we need to fix our society's adults first. And that's the problem. These children in the historical past might have had a better chance of development. But now with standardized school curriculum, their chance of development is actually lower.

Because the child is autistic, it's not about pushing knowledge to the child. That wouldn't work and will cause a plethora of problems including escapism. Instead, it's about following the child's interests, and pulling him into new knowledge areas from there. See: http://www.eikonabridge.com/pull_not_push_english_handout.pdf

Last edited by eikonabridge on 09 Sep 2019, 12:15 am, edited 7 times in total.

For the calendar date problem, I use the Mind Palace technique to remember the following offset table:

1 January mapped to 0, a donut
2 February mapped to 3, a cloth hanger on the stairway
3 March mapped to 3, another cloth hanger on the stairway
4 April mapped to 6, 6 eggs in a egg filler
5 May mapped to 1, toilet flush lever
6 June mapped to 4, a photo picture frame on a wall
7 July mapped to 6, another 6 eggs
8 August mapped to 2, a pair of chopsticks
9 September mapped to 5, a star-shaped metallic flower
10 October mapped to 0, a necktie hanging from shower head
11 November mapped to 3, a piece of underwear
12 December: 5, a star shooting up the sky

All those objects come with location, 3D body movement sensation, some motion (vibration, shaking), and some come with sounds. The donut comes with smell, too.

And for arithmetic operations in modulus-seven space, I use eggs and empty egg filler spaces to carry out addition/subtraction operations more quickly.

By the way, regarding open-loop circuits (ideons/conceptons) and closed-loop circuits (eddions/vortons), another way of better explaining them to people is this: open-loop circuits correspond to the laminar-flow regime of fluids, whereas closed-loop circuits happen in the turbulent-flow regime of fluids, where vortices are observed.

It's kind of spooky, but these three things (conceptons, vortons and phasers) map very well to three mythological creatures in Jewish legend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behemoth


Concepton maps to Behemoth. Vorton maps to Leviathan, and Phaser maps to Ziz. See the loop in Leviathan? Also, Ziz flies in the air, which is analogous to the role of phonons/phasers in carrying long-distance signals (say, between the frontal lobe and the visual cortex). All these coincidences are a little bit too eery to me, but somehow carry through... I have zero familiarity with Jewish legendary creatures... but somehow there has been a mysterious force guiding me down this path...

Don’t I know it ... had to home educate for 10 years, which I can’t recommend highly enough. The outcome was truly worth it, in our case. Thanks so much, once again.

Our current approach to seizures is suppression via medication.

But, if we interpret seizures as "phasers," as coherent emission of phonons, as something parallel to autistic "conceptons" and "vortons," then we need to think again on whether we are doing the right thing.

I mean, there are plenty of ways to suppress the generation of an optical laser. One could suppress the "energy pump," one could eliminate the reflecting mirrors in the optical cavity, etc. But, those changes are systemic. In terms of epilepsy, we really don't know what else is affected by controlling the generation of seizures.

In the case of repulsive vortons, we have learned that it's quite hopeless trying to get rid of them directly. Instead, the right way of handing repulsive vortons is to hook them up to attractive vortons.

Could something similar happen with epilepsy? I mean, if epilepsy is something meant by Mother Nature (in the autistic population), then perhaps there should be a more "organic" solution. Perhaps the solution is not to suppress seizures, but rather how to channel and route their emitted energy.

So, I searched a bit. And indeed found an article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15694562
https://www.seizure-journal.com/article/S1059-1311(04)00206-7/pdf

... The most frequently applied methods were intense concentration and activities to distract attention. About 80% of these patients reported that their self-inhibition methods were effective in stopping their seizures, with 12 patients reporting that their self-developed techniques were ‘very effective’...

...The most frequently applied methods were concentrating hard on something, clenching the fists, relaxation, physical stimulation, deep breathing, and activities to distract attention...

I mean, let's take the case of repulsive vortons first, and look at the failure of our society. The solution to repulsive vortons is not hard: you just need to link them to attractive vortons. However, such a simple solution actually has eluded all psychologists, in these 76 years of autism research, starting from Leo Kanner. You ask how this is possible, and it is because all those psychologists pathologize autism. They view it as abnormal. So, their attention is exclusively focused on eliminating the repulsive vortons when they happen. They never thought about developing autistic children from their attractive vortons.

Could the same thing happen with seizures/epilepsy? What if the key is not in elimination of seizures, but in how to connect the wirings inside the brain, like the case of connecting repulsive vortons to attractive vortons? I mean, if thousands of medical doctors and psychologists can miss the right solution to autism in these 76 years, I don't see why they won't miss the right solution to epilepsy, either.

Vortons (and conceptons) are superfluid "thoughtons," and as such, they are resilient to phaser attacks from seizures. Vortons would correspond what some patients in the above paper describe as intense concentration and activities. So, what those patients are saying actually does make a lot of sense. As long as the energy from seizures is directed towards the superfluid phase inside the autistic brain, then, things should be OK.

I mean, when you connect phasers to vortons and conceptons, you are basically building a super-powerful brain. Nothing could be as powerful. They become the "superbrain" version of the neurotypical brain made from phonons, eddions and ideons.

There is some controversy as to whether Leonardo Da Vinci really had seizures. I haven't dug into this question. But, if he indeed had epilepsy, then it would make a lot of sense.

I wait for the day when someone carries out detailed studies of mental control over seizures, in the autistic population. At least from the point of view of the Two-Fluid Model, it seems the right way to go. It'll be nice to meet a re-incarnation of Leonardo Da Vinci.