A Mania In His Mind

The doors open
and there's a thunder in his eyes
and a splendor in his heart
and a mania in his mind
The world stands in awe...

Don't really remember what inspired this one. I found it on the back of my assignment for a class in ordinary differential equations.  I think it might've been partially inspired by my one friend who was diagnosed with bipolar.  He had to take a semester off, and he came to me to talk to about his problems and ask advice about taking that semester off. 

Developed quite a fascination with bipolar after talking to him.  Feels somewhat similar to my fascination for autism.  I'm fascinated with how the mind is capable of having superhuman abilities, although often at the price of some disbalance. 

My bipolar friend told me that he would often get really sad, sometimes thinking about suicide, and then at other times he would reach some sort of maniacal level where he'd be extremely inspired to do mental and physical tasks.  For example, he ran this ridiculous distance extremely fast.  Can't recall the exact dimensions, but I remember being amazed.

He took a semester off to start taking meds, and keep a rigorous schedule (lots of physical activity, a strict diet, studying ahead) with the aid of his psychologist to help keep him stuck to some routine while adjusting to his meds.  He's now doing great, has stabilized, and is getting better marks than me.  I'm extremely happy about this, but I'm still worried.  His dad also had some sort of mental illness, and is now in some sort of mental hospital.  Hopefully he can maintain the stability he's achieved and not drop off.

I just had a chat with another friend (not bipolar).  She told me about someone she knows who got meningitis, and afterwards, became a violent individual involved in gangs and robberies and whatnot.  This led to talking about how the "distance" between various behaviours is very small.  I guess "distance" here is defined as amount of prodding in the brain.

This discussion, along with the writing of this post also got me thinking about times in the past that I've been sad.  It's very periodic, and oftentimes the jump from being depressed to being motivated was shocking, and seemed somewhat fucked up.  Sometimes I'd be so down, and then I'd just rise up immediately, become very motivated, and happy and work away really hard or be optimistic about the future.  I would then proceed to fall back down again.

This led me to think a number of things. Firstly, I noticed that that periodic happy-sad behaviour with shocking switches seems analogous to extremely mild bipolar.  Then, remembering my discussion with my friend, it made me think that perhaps we all touch on bipolar to some degree when we get affected by depression.

I then remembered my mentor (someone to write about another time as I really enjoy her personality) telling me that social science for the most part is bogus (too many complex factors, I think was her reason), which I'm inclined to agree after having seen a good amount of pseudo-scientific psychology papers, (not to mention appealing to the authority of my mentor [I realize this is one of them catalogued logical fallacies, but it still does add a degree of confidence {I also realize that I love messily organized sentence structures with nested brackets because it makes me think of programming and logical hierarchies}]).

Remembering this discouraged my further thought into the bog that is psychology (this interests me because it reminds me of a conversation with non-bipolar friend about philosophy being a bog [seems like an awfully tangled, interconnected web {which reminds me of non-bipolar friend once talking about how her mind often consists of a web of interconnected questions accompanied with a healthy dose of overanalyzation <which reminds me AGAIN of the bog that is psychology || ad infinitum...WE'VE ACHIEVED A STRANGE LOOP || > } ] ).

So yes, the results of this meandering, sometimes finitely regressing, sometimes infinitely regressing discussion is that:
1. Me thinking about complex topics goes in circles.
2. Strange loops are awesome and everyone should definitely know about them and how they run rampant in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop).  It's incredibly sexy when they appear in mathematics via Godel's Incompleteness theorem.  The proof somewhat involves transporting the phrase "this sentences is false" into its analogical counterpart in number theory.  This strangely looping statement relates to the liar's paradox which I also strongly recommend checking out.  I don't think anything fascinates me and obsesses me more than this stuff.

By the way, speaking of tangled logical hierarchies, and strange loops, I totally realized this stuff makes you feel a bit maniacal when you mentally tumble with it for awhile
which relates back to the title....
which relates back to the poem....
which relates back to the bipolar story...
which relates back to each following sequential piece of the conversation....
which  eventually relates back to THIS (woo! self reference!)
which AGAIN relates back to that word (or even THIS)
ad infinitum...

Do you see what I just did there? I just introduced a plethora of strange loops.  Even more fascinating is that the strange loop I first introduced earlier involving nested brackets is somehow branching off from the strange loop that we just saw.

The mind map is a truly beautiful thing, giving blossom to infinities and infinities of infinities when you go looking, or, if you prefer a less flowery, more gory description (since the brain really is a hunk of meat), an apoplexy of infinities.