A Case Study In The Social Contagion of Pseudoscience

This is Hippocampus, the seahorse. I could say a lot about them at this point, and have done at length in ‘Here Be Dragons’, but for now I want to focus on the one in the brain, because this has come up in something in the last couple of days. I resisted the temptation to do the obvious thing and have AI generate an image of hippopotami at university, mainly because AI in its current popular form is distinctly dodgy. Don’t worry: I won’t let this get away from me.

Yesterday I came across the book ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’ by Dr Michael Nehls. I want to be fair. He is a genuine doctor and has authored papers with Nobel Prize nominates. The guy is not just a quack. That said, there are many examples of respected scientists going seriously off the rails. One of the oldest examples I can think of is the renowned Lord Kelvin, who came to insist that Earth was much younger than other, younger scientists claimed, because it didn’t seem to have an internal heat source yet was still molten inside. He estimated it as less than 400 million years old and perhaps as little as 20 million, which wouldn’t seem to give undirected evolution time to produce humans and he was a theistic evolutionist. The crucial missing piece of information was that nobody at the time knew about radioactivity, which is how the inside of this planet stays molten. Three other examples are Fred Hoyle, who denied the Big Bang (and actually, ironically, named it), David Bellamy whom I’ve blogged about who denied climate change, and Nigel Calder, who predicted an ice age in the near future. Just being justifiably renowned as an expert in one’s field does not imply that all one’s ideas will be acceptable or worthwhile, particularly when one comments on something outside one’s field of expertise. So there’s that.

Another problem is that I can’t read the book without making a financial contribution and perhaps boost the algorithms. I can, however, look at what’s available on Amazon for free, which includes the table of contents. That said, the sheer difficulty with engaging with such things just now is that one is forced to reinforce one’s own echo chamber because attention feeds the algorithm and simply looking at stuff from the “Other Side” is likely to draw disproportionately more attention to it. That said, I feel that this book occupies a middle ground, which is often the case with these materials. This can be illustrated with the reptilian conspiracy idea. This touches on an apparent truth about powerful people being uncaring and being led by selfish and perhaps base desires, but isn’t literally so. This happens a lot with such things. A general impression which may well be true either gets misdirected or the metaphor is taken literally.

Enough of this preamble. The basic assertions Nehls makes include the following. Vaccinations against Covid-19 as they were designed reduce neurogenesis in the hippocampus, which makes people more compliant to persuasion. He also, very strangely, claims that lithium should be recognised as a nutrient. There may also be an element of denial of anthropogenic climate change but it isn’t clear from what I’ve read so far that that’s what he’s doing. If that’s there, it places everything he says in doubt because it makes him an unreliable source of information. It does not, however, mean that he’s wrong about everything.

At this point I need to interrupt and describe my apparent about face about vaccination. I was never against vaccinations per se. I had several issues, foremost amongst which was the probability that pathogens transmitted via droplet infection would be best defended against by the increased production of the relevant alpha globulins since it was these which would constitute the first line of defence against them. This objection was addressed when they started to be given by nasal spray, as this would constitute the exact solution to this problem. I had some other objections. For instance, I don’t trust that attenuated viruses are less virulent in the long term than fully-active viruses and am not aware that they’re tested as potential slow viruses. However, the Covid-19 vaccine also resolves this problem as it uses mRNA to induce human body cells to synthesise the spike proteins on the virion, to which the specific immune response then develops antibodies in one case. Another provides the spike protein itself, which is again absolutely fine. The other approach is to modify an adenovirus, that is a cold virus, either affecting chimps or a human one, once again to produce the spike protein. In each of these cases, none of the problems I’ve outlined arise and therefore my objections to anti-viral vaccines in the 1990s CE simply don’t apply any more. There’s more to be said about this, but this is the relevant bit to my apparent change of mind. The vaccines changed, so I did too. It’s like being happier with EVs than with petrol-driven vehicles, which to a certain extent I am, though not so much as I would be with better public transport. There’s also no transcription of RNA into the nuclear genome this way, which is good too.

Turning to Nehls’s claim that neurogenesis in the hippocampus is impaired by the Covid-19 vaccines, the problem with this issue is that good quality research by scientists in the relevant field without a conflict of interest shows the opposite to be so. Here is a link to such a study, which shows that vaccination of animals (unfortunately not humans) against respiratory infections such as influenza actually encourages hippocampal neurogenesis whereas acquiring Covid-19 itself impairs them. This seems to be borne out by the apparent memory impairment which can follow recovery from a Covid-19 infection, as seen here. Incidentally, as a vegan I’m not at all happy with the vivisection these involve, but post-mortem studies in humans show the same effect. So the evidence shown is actually in the opposite direction to Nehls’s claim.

That’s one thing. The other is the issue of lithium. Studies show that the brains of patients who had Alzheimers are lower in lithium post mortem than those of other people. This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s a link, for several reasons, and here I’m open to being proven wrong just as I have been with vaccines. A few decades ago, aluminium was considered to be a factor in causing Alzheimers. The metal was higher in the tap water where the prevalence of Alzheimers was higher and again, post mortem studies showed that aluminium was higher in the brains of Alzheimers patients. My own diet is in fact particularly high in aluminium because I eat a lot of basil although I don’t drink tea, which is another source of dietary aluminium, so I might be expected to have a higher risk of Alzheimers if that’s so. I should point out at this stage that Dr Nehls is primarily an Alzheimers researcher. Although I am experiencing cognitive impairment, I don’t believe this is to do with aluminium excess. It may be due to an excess in tau protein or related to some kind of dietary deficiency, and I’m hoping it’s reversible and am taking steps to do so. Anyway, the explanation for the aluminium excess in Alzheimers is that the blood-brain barrier lets through more aluminium and is already impaired. In the case of lithium, the situation is the reverse. The low levels of lithium in the Alzheimers brain may be due to slower passage of the metal across the blood-brain barrier and the loss of neuronal ability to maintain ion gradients, and the poorer diets of Alzheimers patients may also contribute to lower lithium. As for the rodent studies, and bear in mind that the very fact that they’re in rodents renders them suspect as they’re not humans, the murine body moves lithium around differently than the human one and the relationship between different minerals is often complex, such as the see-saw relationship between zinc and copper levels in the diet. However, lithium is involved in brain function, which is very obvious from the use of lithium compounds in medication for bipolar disorder.

There’s an irony in the insistence that lithium should be considered a nutrient. It has a pharmacological action, but that doesn’t make it a nutrient. In the ’90s, there were attempts to declare fluoride an essential mineral because of its perceived benefit to teeth and bones, something which the fluoridation lobby strongly objected to. Now we have the opposite: a “maverick” scientist advocates for declaring lithium an essential mineral. I wonder how people feel about lithium fluoride! But this is interesting because it’s an effect of the reputation of the person advocating for the change more than being led by evidence.

Nehls has in fact published a book on this too: ‘The Conspiracy Against Lithium: The Suppressed Essential Nutrient and its Benefits for Mental Health’. I haven’t read this either, for the same reason as before, but also note that the blurb implies that autism is a form of developmental pathology or brain damage which doesn’t exactly engender sympathy or put him on the side of the angels. It gets worse: he explicitly states he’s going to use generic “he” in a book published next year! Even Roger Scruton used to have to insist on this in the 1980s. It’s not feasible to access more of this book without paying for it, which I’m obviously not going to do.

Lithium is an odd element. It’s the third in the periodic table and in general, the lighter an atom is, the more common it is. 74% of the atomic matter in the Universe is hydrogen, the first element, followed by 24% for helium, one percent oxygen, 4.6 permille carbon and so forth, and all of these are light. Lithium might therefore be expected to be the third most common (and beryllium the fourth), but this is not so. Only traces of lithium formed in the ostensible early Universe (don’t get me started) and lithium which forms in stars falls into the interiors and is destroyed by fusion and disintegration of that nucleus into two helium nuclei. As far as Earth is concerned, the small amounts of lithium making it up tend not to integrate well in crystal lattices in rocks and are therefore thinly spread. Only rare geological processes concentrate it after that point, which is also why using lithium batteries is less than ideal. Once it comes to being included in biological systems, sodium and potassium, similar but heavier and much more abundant alkali metals, are more available to organisms, so they use those. There are scarce elements in biochemistry, such as iodine in thyroid hormones and cobalt in B12, but lithium doesn’t seem to fulfil a role because if it did, life would be confined to specialised environments rather than occurring all over the planet. This means that reasoning would seem to suggest that lithium lacks an essential role in living organisms and the human diet.

Nonetheless, it is medically useful, as I’ve said, in bipolar disorder. People on it, though, need to be carefully monitored due to side-effects like kidney damage. There is an unexplained negative correlation between lithium levels in drinking water and prevalence of dementia, but we’ve been here before with aluminium and that came to nothing. Here’s one study, for example. However, there’s also this, which was conducted here rather than in “proper” Scandinavia as it were. I’m guessing (not going to look because it’s not 100% germane) that the negative correlation between depression and lithium levels was probably related to the development of the various lithium compounds for bipolar. There are a couple of other tit-bits I really have to stick in here. One is that 7-Up used to have lithium in it, which is why it’s called that, and it was marketed as a hangover cure. The other is that it’s occasionally been advocated that lithium be added to tap water to reduce crime and anxiety. This was in the now-discredited future scenario of extreme population growth and overcrowding. It’s now known that if anything, removing lead from petrol was a better idea and that the real problem is population collapse.

That’s all very well and may seem to have questionable relevance to Dr Nehls’s books but in fact I think it reflects his views’ outmodedness. He’s advocating for an element which was suggested as a possible solution to social problems over half a century ago, insists on generic “he” when everyone else switched to “he or she”, “s/he” and so on around the same time as when they stopped advocating for lithium in tap water, but also opposes vaccination, which is a more timeless position.

All that said, as usual there is an annoying core of truth in some of what he says. It is indeed harder to think independently at the moment for several reasons, including chatbots making comments for astroturfing purposes, AI chatbots eroding the ability to think and social media shortening our attention spans. The trouble is that he’s pushing in the wrong direction. This is a puzzlingly common error today. People often start off saying things with which progressive people can agree, then proceed to advocate for a conservative or fascist position there’s plenty of evidence against. I don’t know why this happens. He does also advocate for things like an active lifestyle and good diet to prevent dementia, which is good but may not actually prevent it in the long term. I just hope we can learn something from this.

Putin And Mental Health

It’s problematic to look at recent events simply in terms of mental health, at least as far as Putin is concerned. There’s a thing out there called the Great Man Theory Of History, which sees historical events as caused by individual agency. I’ve brought this up on here before of course. Freedom in the sense of political leaders being able to do as they will does, in one sense, exist, but historical circumstances lead to them getting into those positions in the first place. Thatcher, for example, may have been able to exercise her power in the sense that her political philosophy dictated the policies she enacted, but Foot would not have been able to do this because the electorate was so much against him, and whereas it’s possible to say that the electorate had been manipulated, the possibility of that manipulation also arose without individuals being important.

So: we say Putin might be mentally ill. There are a couple of issues arising from that claim, so before you turn against me and say, for example, that I’m stigmatising mental illness, please bear with me for a bit. In the Great Man Theory of History, we ostensibly have a leader who is mentally ill and this is what’s caused the war. But maybe it’s closer to the truth to say that Russian history reached the point where there would be a “mad” leader in power by now.

Unlike Sarada, I can’t claim to be an expert on Russian history. She knows a lot more than I do about it, although I’m sure she’d never assert that she was an expert either. She’s not currently following the news because she finds it too depressing, so I can’t benefit from her wisdom here. Being a former Stalinist, however, I have spent some time in my life following Soviet history rather closely, although after the breakup of the Soviet Union I lost interest as it seemed to merge into the general doings of mature capitalism. My chief impression was that the Russian Revolution took place in a substantially agrarian society which wasn’t fully capitalist but more feudal, and therefore that the phase of history where communist revolution was possible had not yet been reached. Consequently, some of the Marxist language used by the Politburo and the like was just rhetoric, but not all. Part of the problem which arose in the 1980s CE was that there were no leaders left who had clear experience of the Soviet Union during or shortly after the Revolution, and consequently they were unable to continue in the same vein. This is a different process than can be easily explained specifically through Marxist theory because it seems to be connected to the rise of “modernisers” in the Politburo leading to перестройка and гласность, obviously primarily Горбачёв. By the time that happened, I was no longer Stalinist and wasn’t as focussed on events in the USSR. I do remember that it was seen as a positive development on the New Left at the time. My perception of what has happened since is that it’s primarily due to the influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the coöption of nationalism and organised religion to manipulate a poorly-educated populace.

Given the limited and biassed information available to me, Putin seems similar in some ways to Robert Mugabe and to a lesser extent Papa Doc. It feels like he has been in a certain elevated position for so long that it has influenced his judgement, and that the ability to get into that position in the first place involves certain personality traits which amount to the seeds of mental illness. A few things have been said about him in this respect, but before I come to them I want to deal with the mammoth in the room here: the stigmatisation of mental illness. If one accepts that mental illness is a manifestation of brain pathology in the same way as heart disease is a manifestation of cardiac pathology, and so forth, and that this is a central issue in mental health paradigms, then Putin’s behaviour can indeed be interpreted, validly or otherwise, as at least a functional disorder. I would equate this with the dysfunctional behaviour of a whole range of leaders found in all sorts of circumstances, and also connect it with the issue of our own monarchy and its potentially harmful influence on our own royal family’s mental health. The problem is, though, that it’s easy to be facile about this and have a monolithic black box we just call “mental health”, end up othering people with mental health problems and seeing them as dangerous in some way. It would be a rather crass take on that to see his behaviour in that way.

A number of claims are being made regarding the Russian leader. One is that he has been influenced by two years of isolation due to the pandemic. He entered self-isolation in September 2021 when people close to him tested positive for the disease. Another is that he is exhibiting a condition common among leaders referred to as “hubris syndrome”. This has been attributed to Thatcher, Blair, George W Bush and others, and clearly this can, if it makes sense as a disease entity, exist outside the context of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. My impression of Bush in particular was that he behaved in a manner one might hope children would have grown out of by the time they were about eight at the latest.

Dr David Owen, of the “Shrinking David Party”, yes, that Dr David Owen, wrote a paper on Hubris Syndrome which is of considerable interest. Before I get into this, it’s worth looking at David Owen himself. He was a medical doctor and psychiatric registrar before he saw success in politics and was of course able to observe Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair first hand, perhaps giving him superior perspective on the alleged syndrome. At the same time, his trajectory from the Labour Party to the SDP suggests that he would tend to focus less on the social context of a syndrome and see it as seated more in the personality and organic tendencies of the individual than on the influences around them. That said, he does set it in a social environment.

It should be noted first of all that there is no such disorder category in any version of the ICD or DSM, the two most significant widely recognised manuals for mental disorders. That said, Owen does come up with a list of criteria, of which at least four need to be satisfied in order to qualify for such a diagnosis:

• Perceiving the world as an arena where one exercises power and seeks glory.
• Taking actions perceived to show oneself in a positive light and enhance one’s image.
• Excessive concern for image and presentation.
• A messianic way of talking.
• Identifying oneself with the state (or organisation – this is not just about political leaders).
• Use of the “Royal ‘We'”.
• Too much confidence in one’s own judgement compared to the judgement of others.
• Excess self-belief.
• Regarding judgement by history or God as more important than that of one’s peers or courts.
• Recklessness and impulsiveness.
• A broad vision, particularly concerning moral rectitude of a proposed course of action which obviates the need to consider practivality, cost and unwanted consequences.
• A particular kind of incompetence, distinct from the usual form, which follows from the above features and involves overconfidence leading to disregard for the detailed practicalities of implementing a decision.

The problem is more likely to occur the longer someone is in power, but of course I have a few questions here. One is about power. I think the way I left it was that one can exercise power if the situation in the world at the time is such that the thing one does was going to happen anyway, perhaps through someone else. If you want to be able to do particular things which are not in accordance with that, you won’t get to do them, either because you’re not in power or because there are other things which are doable that you can do, but not those things. In other words, power is more or less an illusion. A leader capable of becomng hubristic in this way needs to be convinced that they actually can have power rather than just being placed there by luck or an accident of history. Is it possible that any leader who recognises power as an illusion is immune from this syndrome?

I don’t honestly believe things could have gone significantly differently for Russia and the Ukraine. Maybe someone else than Putin could have come to “power”, but if so, I would expect things to go the same way for them. It isn’t the first time this has happened either. Хрущёв was deposed for similar reasons in 1964, so it’s possible that this will happen again. The political system is in some ways very different and in others quite similar. I don’t know enough about how Russian government works nowadays to say whether it’s likely that Putin could be deposed.

There is a condition called Fronto-Temporal dementia which is somewhat similar, and involves loss of moral judgement. There are reports, for example, of people looking on dating websites with a view to hooking up with people, in front of their partners and not realising this was problematic, or making inappropriate jokes, sexually harassing people, and all this turning out to be the start of organic brain deterioration initially involving poor communication between the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. The onset is much earlier than most Alzheimer cases, being between 45 and 65. It’s been suggested that there’s a link between these two conditions, and I can certainly see that a political leader might get further in her career if she had impaired empathy already as a character trait. Moreover, I can see a situation where a leader is not contradicted or resisted by their colleagues or underlings because of having surrounded themselves with sycophants, and therefore lose the ability to judge wisely.

The underlying question here, though, is whether this siting of a mental problem within Putin’s psyche is actually the most sensible way of looking at the situation. It’s certainly informative regarding behaviour in other situations, such as with absolutist monarchies in the historical past, and it probably applies to Tsarist Russia as well as post-Revolutionary, but another way of looking at it is as a pathological condition exacerbated by the political régime, which might have preferred a leader with the roots of this condition in the first place.

And there’s another question: is he evil? I have a strong bias against perceiving someone as intrinsically evil. When I hear about someone mistreating or murdering their own children, for example, I usually see it as fundamentally a psychiatric issue, although certain organic environmental factors might be involved such as head trauma from being abused as a child, lead in petrol in their formative years, perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome and the developmental neurological response to witnessing domestic violence and abuse as a child. The point rarely if ever comes when I conceive of a human being as actually evil, and I also think that evil is a relatively minor factor in causing the world to be a terrible place. Indifference and ignorance seem more important to me than cruelty. I can never decide if this bias is linked to my work and it’s notable that people who work in the probation service and law enforcement often do ascribe responsibility to negative behaviour. If evil is defined as deliberate cruelty, which is how I understand the word, it would suggest that Putin has empathy to a sufficient degree as to recognise when his actions cause harm.

However, I’m not terribly interested in the question as I believe it’s beside the point. Putin is just a symptom of a wider malaise. Portraying him as either some kind of evil mastermind or a “mad” dictator ignores the more general issue of why there are still people in such positions at all and what it is about the world situation which leads them to be able to act in such a way. There are other issues too. There wasn’t really any reason at all to keep NATO going after the end of the Cold War, and if it had been disbanded the provocative act of suggesting that the Ukraine join the organisation couldn’t have happened. Nor could it have happened if Russia had joined NATO. There are plenty of other atrocities going on around the world which don’t involve such a White population. In a way, I shouldn’t even be talking about Putin because that plays into his cult of personality and focusses the problem on him rather than the state of the world.

I probably will be returning to this kind of subject many times in the near future, but for now I’m done, and tomorrow I’ll be talking about Tethys. I don’t think any excuse needs to be made for putting our little blue dot into perspective in these circumstances.

Caring For My Father – A Long Term Lockdown

My father, ten years ago

In keeping with the apparent interest I seem to get in talking about myself, today I’m going to be posting about my current “main thing”, which is that I care for my elderly father.

About five years ago, my father ceased to be able to look after himself on his own, largely due to a fall and mobility issues, so Sarada and I moved back in with him. I don’t know what one needs to do to affiliate oneself officially to some kind of caring organisation or whatever, and I don’t know its financial and legal consequences, so I haven’t done that. I do know that that means I’m not paying National Insurance via that route, which is a slight concern. Anyway, here’s a description of my day:

I get up at 6:30 am, shower and start to get my father’s medication and breakfast ready. He’s now confined to his bedroom. At 8 am during the week and 8:50 on Sundays, I get him up, dress him, change his incontinence pants and serve him breakfast, then wash and shave him. It’s this way round because he’s diabetic and I don’t want to leave him without medication or food for too long. He then watches television until he falls asleep and I put him back to bed. Then I make him lunch, which he has at 12:30 pm. Around 1:30 pm, he goes back to bed until about 3:30, then I get him up again, he watches more TV until I give him tea at 5:30 pm and he then goes back to bed at 7 pm on average. He’s at his most mentally active in the evening. I give him a hot water bottle and a banana at 8 pm and a paracetamol at 9. Averaging once a day, he uses the commode, which is always a struggle. It isn’t arduous but it does tend to tie me to the house.

Although I encourage him constantly to exercise, he’s very unkeen and it’s not clear whether this is because he’s just not capable of doing so or has given up. Psychologically, this is a bit complicated. In recent months I’ve had to try to lift him in and out of bed and have for some reason hurt my elbows in the process of doing so. He sometimes also needs me in the night for various reasons. I am attempting to help him to socialise more, but it isn’t easy because many of his friends have died or are similarly indisposed to himself.

Because I’m a health care professional, I’m able to attend to his needs in a somewhat different way to many other people. For instance, I look at the circulation of his hands and feet, examine his feet, look for bedsores, take his pulses, occasionally do mental state examinations, measure the movement of his joints, inspect his stools and so forth. I will shortly also be regularly testing his blood glucose. I hope that I’m gradually acquiring transferable skills as I do all this but don’t know how they could be assessed or certified. I’m also aware that being in this situation is tending to reduce my social capital, which is rather concerning to me and I don’t know how to address this.

When the lockdown began last year, it made hardly any difference to my life. That was substantially what I’d been doing anyway up until that time for a number of years already. The main difference was that I went shopping less often but bought more stuff. A while before that, he used to leave the house regularly on his mobility scooter to go to a café once a day and have the occasional meal out. One of the issues is that he has an authoritarian parenting style and it’s therefore sometimes difficult to get him to serve his own interests, and because he was in a managerial position for much of his career, he’s used to telling people what to do, which may not work well in current circumstances because of his mental state.

Speaking of which, he is lucid much of the time. Since I consider him a patient, I have to be careful with how much detail to go into with this and other aspects of his health. However, it won’t be a surprise to note that his balance is poor, as is his mobility, hearing and vision, although in some respects his eyesight is still better than mine. He is unable to stand.

Requests to social services and the NHS for extra help have largely resulted in them providing us with equipment. We have a rotunda, which helps him get in and out of bed and onto and off the commode, and a hoist which he paid himself which we cannot for the life of us work out how to use. There’s no sling and it mainly just gets in the way. He doesn’t have the upper body strength to lift himself up on it. Any advice on this would be most welcome. We also have our own draw sheet which makes things more hygienic and also makes it easier to move him in and to and from the bed, and there’s a bed rail.

There are a few reasons why I don’t mention this situation very often. One is that it seems to be an invasion of privacy. However, I think it’s important to recognise what may be going on quietly in homes all over the country where people are reaching the end stage of their life in a rather invisible way. Just as disabled people used to be hidden behind the scenes from an early age, nowadays we tend not to see the elderly very much beyond a certain stage unless we’re close relatives or work with them. It seemed significant that social services were keener to provide mechanical aids such as walking and toilet frames and the other things I’ve mentioned than personal services. On the one hand, this is probably due to wanting to maintain independence to the greatest extent for as long as possible, but it also seems to give out the message that things are more important than people. I imagine this has been looked at quite carefully but I don’t know.

The kind of personal provision available for the elderly appears to fall into two broad categories. Either someone comes in for a short period every day or the client (patient? Don’t know what to call them) goes into a nursing home and possibly loses their estate to pay for it. Neither of these seem at all adequate and it’s tempting to conclude that once someone is no longer considered economically productive, they’re seen as a drain on resources. On the other hand, it’s important to recognise the responsibility relatives and their community may have towards them, which are however often quite hard or impossible to address because of the economic and social pressures on those people. People talk about the “squeezed middle” a lot, referring to the middle class, but there’s also a generational “squeezed middle”, where people have responsibilities towards both parents and children. This is even more the case now that children find it impractical to leave home as young as they used to.

An additional problem in my life is that my parents separated fifteen years ago. This means that I have little opportunity to visit or attend to the needs of my mother, although she is far more able than my father and lives in sheltered accommodation. I often think that the later stages of a life-long marriage are more like a mini-care home where each spouse attends to the needs of the other which they can’t satisfy themselves. This also emphasises something a friend of mine once said about having an older partner: eventually the relationship you have with their body becomes primarily medical. I still think it was necessary for my parents to divorce but it does sometimes occur to me that in an ideal world, where perhaps everybody has a Qualcast Punch, they could’ve stayed together and looked after each other, or rather my mother could’ve looked after my father. She is an ex-nurse. Or is she in fact a nurse? Does it ever leave you?

A major issue for me in the past year is that it’s been difficult to get out to exercise. Although it doesn’t happen that often, my father sometimes does need me during the time I would previously have been running, between 5:30 and 6:30 am. This leaves me in the rather paradoxical position of not being able to exercise due to having to heft an eighty kilogramme weight around on a regular basis, and I’m not sure why that doesn’t help me keep fit. Really I should concentrate on Yoga and dancing, but somehow I don’t. I do not know why this is.

One advantage of taking care of an elderly parent, particularly a family member, is that it’s possible to see the health trends likely to affect oneself and the lifestyle factors which have led to them. For instance, like many people his age, my ninety-two year old father has very poor balance, so I’ve decided to compensate for this by practicing asanas which require balance. He was always quite active when he was younger, which considering his current predicament is a little concerning, particularly considering that that very predicament is currently preventing me from exercising, or is that an excuse? In any case, he has Type II diabetes (mellitus for completeness’s sake), for which I also have an increased risk, but unlike him there is no added sugar at all in my diet.

There are similarities to taking care of babies and small children but as I’ve been told regarding people with a learning disability, one difference is that with most children there’s a prospect of them becoming more capable, but this is a decline, although not a steady one. For instance, at the moment he has a cold, which I unfortunately gave him because I thought I was having a Covid-19 vaccine reaction, which wouldn’t’ve been infectious but turned out just to be a cold, so he’s not hugely capable right now, though probably will become more so again in the near future. However, “use it or lose it” needs to be borne in mind here because it becomes harder to regain capabilities in older people. There’s also a psychological aspect to whether one can gain strength or other capabilities because one may simply prefer not to have to confront the possibility that one may not be able to, or it may simply be too much effort to get it back even if it is technically within one’s capacity, and here the relationship comes into play because I am not assertive, and particularly not assertive with my father, which means that although I do try to encourage him I probably don’t do it as much as I might with other patients. This is one argument for having carers who are not relatives. Another difference with children is that adults are much heavier and harder to dress and change, and let’s just say their digestion is different and move swiftly on.

At some point this will end and I don’t know what things will be like coming out the other side. My main concern is that my mother gets the attention she deserves afterward, as right now I don’t think I can provide that. His life seems very limited and I do want to do what I can to improve it, particularly on the social side, but right now the Covid situation has been making things harder.

The question arises of what would happen in an ideal world, which is where we get back to the Qualcast Punch Problem: ideal for whom? Ideal in which way? Maybe in an ideal world nobody would get old, and at ninety-two my father has had a good go at that, but of course he did eventually do so. Then the question arises of whether that’s because we’re living in ‘Logan’s Run’ or we’re talking about Struldbugs from ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, which would still be an affliction. ‘Εος asked Ζευς to grant her lover Τιθονιος immortality, and her wish was granted, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth as well, with the result that he ended up completely paralysed and babbling to himself sealed in a room forever, so that wasn’t a good outcome. Getting a bit less extreme about this, maybe we just want the oldest generation to maintain the maximum quality of life for as long as possible without too much time seriously impaired, at least insofar as that can’t be remedied either socially or technologically. The question of ageism therefore arises, but we all seem to ascend a pyramid of ever fewer acquaintances as we age. For instance, retirement means the social life aspect of paid work is lost, and not being a member of a religious community (my dad’s non-religious) is another issue for many.

Making things a bit clearer, there seem to be the following factors:

• Ageism, including structural and institutional ageism. Some people recommend that you don’t retire if you can avoid it, for your own sake (personally it might be nice to have something to retire from but of course I’m not normal).
• Medical help for the accumulation of health conditions, and here the question arises of whether pure ageing exists or whether it’s simply the accumulation of health issues, many of which could be avoided if one is forewarned and in the right situation.
• Technological help for the disabled.
• Whether the responsibility for taking care of the elderly falls on the person concerned making their own provisions, society or their friends and relatives (and realistically that means relatives because of the pyramid effect I just mentioned).

I wouldn’t want a relative of mine to become institutionalised just because they were unable to look after themselves. There is an element of institutionalisation in what I’m doing now, in that I may have encouraged my father to become more dependent upon me than he needed to be. Because of past experiences, I’m not good at judging my strengths and weaknesses but I’m aware that a number of patients seemed to end up “needing” me more than they should’ve done, so I may not in fact be the best sort of person to care for the elderly after all. This is not to say that he genuinely doesn’t need me to some extent so much as that managing his decline could have had a shallower gradient. This is again an argument for a non-relative to become a carer. And in fact, given that we have a large number of underoccupied homes and also homeless people, a solution suggests itself there which would apply to at least some of them: some of the homeless people should care for the seniors incapable of caring for themselves. Incidentally, I would also expect this situation to have been exacerbated by the recent increase in “grey divorces”. So does that mean that previously there were people stuck in unhappy marriages and caring instead? It definitely seems that way.

The question of medical help could be answered by health care researchers and professionals crying, in an exasperated manner, “well, we’re trying as hard as we can!”, and of course they are, but they’re doing it in a capitalist society where treating conditions is more profitable than curing or preventing them. Extending life without also doing something about the economic system is just going to increase the inequality between people’s life expectancies according to income and wealth, because wealthier people are more easily going to be able to afford the treatments involved.

Technological help is another aspect. My father can get help for his mobility and is not short of money, and we have external devices which help him such as the commode and rotunda. There could, in theory, be internal devices such as hip and knee replacements, which he hasn’t got, cochlear implants, cataract lenses and a insulin pump. He could also have a self-raising bed. He doesn’t seem to want any of these things, and I wonder if this is to do with not liking change. If that’s common, there’s a psychological barrier to extending quality and quantity of life in that respect.

I’m happy to continue in this rôle for as long as required. I also consider it to be meaningful and useful. But the question also arises of who else out there needs care. Some time ago, a survey of the British public put long term care for the elderly as the top priority, which I actually disagree with because I see preventative medicine as more important. Even so, I can see the argument, and even agree with it to some extent. The obvious option, at least for people who can’t realistically call on family, friends or neighbours to help, would seem to be some kind of publicly-funded care service where there was regular meaningful social contact, and this might sound like it would cost the Earth but there are ways to provide it affordably, and also, the country spent over a trillion (short-scale – sounds more impressive that way) bailing out the banks and hundreds of billions will ultimately be spent on nuclear weapons systems, so perhaps we can use an affordability argument if it ever gets its priorities right. There’s also a demographic issue because boomers and to a lesser extent Gen-Xers are two bumps in the population. Boomers are soon going to hit the age when many of them will need care, and Gen-Xers will do so in the 2040s. The problem isn’t going away. In theory, by doing what I’m doing I’ve removed myself from the wage economy and am not providing the same amount of tax revenue or added value via paid work as I might have been previously. Although because of the way my life has gone, this isn’t actually true of me, it is true of most other people in this situation, and when it isn’t, the usual reason is because they haven’t had as successful an employment career, although they may well have had a successful parenting “career”, or still be having one.

So what do I want?

I want this country to provide a long-term care for the elderly service which is actively offered to all people over a certain age, which will be publicly funded without excuses about being unaffordable, because it isn’t, and provides social contact as well as practical help. Even if this existed though, we wouldn’t be interested in using it, and that should probably be borne in mind because the willingness of family and community to provide proper support will also be there and that will make it a lot cheaper. It’s also likely to be used more by single and divorced people, so there’s a substantial portion of people in long-term relationships who can also be taken out of the equation. I’m not an expert in this by any means, and I probably should look into ideas in this area, so maybe this is being offered by some political parties or being suggested by think tanks, charities and pressure groups, but I don’t know. I would rather go into this naïvely, as I do with many things at first, because I prefer to make up my mind about what I think without insidious coercion from others. That’s not to say that the ideas out there are not perfectly good, but it’s just important to approach this from the right angle.

Anybody know what they actually are?

States Of Consciousness

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

This was almost about near-death experiences (NDEs), and may still go on to include them, but primarily the task I’ve set myself today is to describe states of consciousness and their possible relationship with reality. This has been of interest to me since soon after I started meditating, which must have been over forty years ago, and my thoughts on the matter are not necessarily particularly up to date because I’ve thought about them in a fairly piecemeal manner. This may in fact be the first time I’ve actually expressed myself clearly on the matter.

Okay, so there are maybe about seven clearly separated states of consciousness which may blur into each other. These are: wakefulness, REM sleep, NREM sleep, samadhi (meditation trance), dreaming, hypnosis and Ganzfeld. Of these, hypnosis may not exist, something which I’ll cover later. Ganzfeld probably needs some explanation. The Ganzfeld Effect is what happens when one is deprived of sensory stimulation, as in a floatation tank or with special blindfolds in an anechoic chamber, and involves the projection of hallucinations into one’s subjective space. As such, it seems to resemble Charles Bonnet Syndrome. More on that later. Each of these is characterised by particular brainwave patterns. There are also intermediate states such as sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, false awakening, near-death experiences and dementia with Lewy bodies. My own experience of B12 deficiency suggests that it can be quite similar to the dementia, and schizophrenia and delirium might also belong there. Therefore, a bit like the gender landscape, it might make more sense to think of consciousness as a plain with peaks representing the different states.

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness. I try to avoid prioritising one of these states over the other, because I think that phenomenologically both are equally valid and represent different relationships with reality. I also talk about dreaming in the present tense, although this is substantially because I don’t think English has a tense which can refer to dreaming accurately. Dreams are timeless in the same way as numbers and abstract concepts are, so if there’s a language with a way of expressing verbs timelessly, so that for instance the “is” in “two plus two equals four” is not in the present tense, I’d be using that method. It’s also supposed to make lucid dreaming more likely if one does this. I mentioned yesterday that Dennett has the view that dreams are not experiences but false memories. That is, on awakening one has a particular brain state which the waking mind interprets as consisting of apparent past experiences which occurred after falling asleep. But it’s the waking state that perceives it this way. Because dreaming and waking are equal, this fact, being a product of wakeful consciousness, is no more valid than dreaming experience.

Years on the Halfbakery ideas bank, have convinced me that ideas are discovered rather than invented, and that discovery and invention are the same thing. Hence at some point in the distant past people discovered the wheel. This makes sense, for example, when one thinks of Charles Fort’s idea of “steam engine time”. There is apple blossom or cherry blossom time, when all the trees of a certain species come into blossom at once even if they’re thousands of kilometres apart. Similarly, at least three civilisations have independently developed the steam engine because it was the right season for doing so. The various pieces of the jigsaw fell into place and the shape of the gap remaining became apparent. Likewise people come up with remarkably similar novels without apparent connections, such as possibly ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ and ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ or ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’. Likewise, dreams are “out there” waiting to be had, perhaps only by one particular individual. Hence they don’t happen on a particular night but one wakes up having discovered a dream which was always, and will always be, there, though more strictly outside spacetime, wherever numbers and steam engines dwell before we open a conduit to them and our world. Somewhere sub specie æternitatis, Everyperson is having tea with the Queen. The reason lucid dreaming, conscious control of dreaming, is important is that it amounts to Heaven, whereas nightmares amount to Hell.

I don’t want to make this post entirely about dreaming, although I have more carefully developed ideas about that state than others. That said, there are supposed to be tests for dreaming, one of which I try in a recently remembered dream. I took a shard of mirror and looked at myself through it, and not only was part of my face clearly reflected in it but it moved appropriately when I held the shard at different angles. This detail has caused me to doubt that the tests are reliable, and it also amazes me that my brain is able to produce an image that realistic, although I’ve successfully done that in Ganzfeld.

I will say just one more thing about dreaming and wakefulness. There are mixed states where both are involved. For instance, when I had B12 deficiency I began to enter a psychotic state involving phantosmia and anosmia. I constantly hallucinated the odour of peppermint and sometimes confused dreams and wakefulness when I first woke up in the mornings. Objects and people in my dreams appeared in the room I was sleeping in (which was the living room incidentally, but that’s another story). This is similar to dementia with Lewy bodies, where older people cease to distinguish clearly between dreaming and waking life. Bearing in mind that these people’s lives are approaching their end, it raises questions about near-death experiences. Finally there’s Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where deteriorating vision leads to patterns or even detailed scenery involving people and places. This is similar to the phantom limb phenomenon in my opinion, and also to tinnitus and hearing voices in some ways. All of these are somewhat dreamlike.

They’re also similar to Ganzfeld. This is a state of consciousness which results from uniform sensory stimulation or the lack of stimulation entirely, and is sometimes sought by people in floatation tanks and anechoic chambers, as mentioned above. The brain amplifies neural noise and turns it into complex visual impressions, I would imagine very similar to Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It can also be done using white noise, which I’ve tried myself and found I could hear music in it after about half an hour. It also constitutes a second way into lucid dreaming, so I’m told, because apparently if you lie still in bed in a cold dark room for at least half an hour you will begin to have these impressions. I don’t know how easy other people find lying still, or lying still without falling asleep, and I know that I’m supposed to be genetically predisposed to moving around a lot during sleep and to having restless legs, so it’s unlikely that I will find a way in this way. There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as mun mtshams (I cannot currently write this in Tibetan script but it might be མུནཚམྶ​), involving shutting oneself away in the dark alone as practice for dealing with བར་དོ and realising  འཇའ་ལུས་, thereby, I presume, avoiding reincarnation. This is rather reminiscent of the use of lucid dreaming for a similar end.

And that brings me to samadhi, समाधी. I should point out at this point that my own opinions and experience of समाधी seem to be different from what other people say about it. This is the meditative state of Raja Yoga, and I expect Sarada will have things to say about this. My understanding of how to enter this state is that it tends to be easier in certain asanas, such as Padmasana of course but also others such as Sukhasana, then one practices Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, followed by focussing on a mantra or other object of thought and grasping its essence, then removing that essence entirely, leaving consciousness in a non-intentional state. I’m told that this is not what Samadhi is, and that the Christian understanding that this is in fact the nature of Samadhi is a major reason for seeing Yoga as Satanic. The fact, phenomenologically speaking, that for me it’s a state of consciousness without an object of consciousness has made me sceptical about Brentano’s analysis of mental states, where he insists that they are a number of things I do agree with, including incorrigibility (cannot be doubted) and having a number of other properties including “aboutness”, which is in fact generally considered the most important quality of mental states. This is what’s rather unhelpfully referred to as Intentionality (with a capital I, constrasted with “intentionality”) and may or may not be the same as intensionality with an S, which is to do with meaning and contrasted with extensionality. Presumably Pratyahara could also be used to enter Ganzfeld if one was so inclined. I understand that other people use the word samadhi to refer to a consciousness of unity with the object of meditation or even the Cosmos or God, and I’ve experienced that too but tend to perceive it as pathological, for me anyway. It’s unwelcome and seems unhealthy to me. In Buddhism, this state of consciousness is the last element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I can’t really do justice to all of this here, partly because I’m using words but also due to wanting to describe other states of consciousness. Because I try to balance the value of different states, the idea that this is a higher state is hard to come to terms with, but its role within dharmic spirituality has always been prized. The reason many Christians disapprove of it is that they believe an empty mind, which is how they see this, invites Satan or evil spirits in. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I don’t respond to psilocybin, the only psychedelic I’ve taken, so this may reflect my atttitude towards samadhi.

Hypnosis may or may not be a state of consciousness. My own view is that it’s stateless and a form of role-play, although that has a function as serious as many others in spirituality and other aspects of life. I’m also suspicious of hypnosis being misused because I think many symptoms are there for a reason and removing them outside the context of hypnotherapy would be likely to lead to the underlying cause being manifested in a different and unpredictable way. Interestingly, Sarada thinks exactly the same thing about lucid dreaming. Having said that, I do believe hypnotherapists are usually professional and take pains doesn’t happen. I used to practice hypnosis for fun when I was about twelve, quite successfully, but that was probably reckless and irresponsible, and I’ve also done self-hypnosis. An early non-state definition of hypnosis was offered in 1941 by R. W. White: “Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client”. That said, there are changes in brainwave activity in some hypnotised individuals, and the question of how it causes amnesia occurs to me.

The seventh state, which I have yet to discuss, is NREM sleep, also known as dreamless or orthodox sleep. This is in some ways the odd one out, as it seems to involve the absence of consciousness. There is no paralysis and the parasympathetic (P for Peace) nervous system is dominant during it. The EEG shows theta waves and sleep spindles, which are rapid bursts of electrical activity building to a crescendo and then declining. Theta waves occur at four to eight times a second. Delta waves are prominent. There are also K-complexes, which are the highest voltage physiological spikes of electrical activity in the human brain. I have more of these than most people because they’re associated with restless legs syndrome, but have no idea what their significance is. It doesn’t seem possible to describe NREM sleep phenomenologically because it seems to lack phenomenology entirely, but since I’m panpsychist this is either a challenge to my beliefs or means I must assert that consciousness is there, just as it is everywhere else, but in a similar way to how it would inhere in an organism with nothing analogous to a nervous system. To be honest I don’t know what to do with NREM.

On the subject of brainwaves, it’s probably worthwhile describing this kind of activity with respect to the other states. Dreaming is closer to wakefulness than NREM in this respect, hence its other name, paradoxical sleep. Theta and gamma activity is widepread and the brain stem seems to initiate activity in this state, suggesting to some that dreaming is an attempt by the conscious mind to make sense of vegetative neural processes in the absence of sensory stimulation of other kinds, which makes sense because so many dreams involve frustration and paralysis of some description. In meditation, alpha and theta waves are more active, and with habitual meditation it used to be thought there were permanent changes but recent findings have not shown this to be so. However, habitual meditators’ brains do age more slowly with respect to memory. The possibly related mindfulness is said to have a number of disadvantages, including over-exertion, ignoring intuition, exacerbating anxiety and triggering depersonalisation. It isn’t clear to me how close mindfulness and samadhi are to each other though.

Hypnosis shows more active alpha waves, but these are often used in imaginative states so it may not indicate that it’s a separate state of consciousness.

Another possible approach to consciousness is to see them as phases like those of matter, which can perhaps be shown on a graph. This has been done, for example, with meditation. Denis Postle has attempted to model the different states of consciousness on the butterfly catastrophe graph, which has four axes. Unfortunately I can only remember arousal and relaxation. Catastrophe theory has gone out of fashion nowadays because although it’s valid, there are few situations which can be reduced to only a few significant parameters. Whether that’s true of consciousness I don’t know. Even so, the idea of there being some kind of space or hyperspace with regions corresponding to different states of consciousness seems to be a good one.

There are also other states of consciousness which we may potentially have but don’t experience in everyday life. For instance, there is a case of a hiker who fell off a path in a remote area and was found alive long after he could be expected to have succumbed to exposure, and it’s thought that he may have entered an obscure state of hibernation. There is one known species of primate who does hibernate, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur. It is of course much more common in other mammals, but for humans this state could be useful for long haul space travel, so if we were ever going to do that, and we aren’t of course, it would be worthwhile looking into. Speaking of space travel, the question of out of body experiences as a separate state of consciousness arises. Is astral travel a distinct state or is it more like dreaming or Ganzfeld? Then there are NDEs. Soon after the heart stops, the brain enters a state whose electrical activity resembles that of NREM sleep, followed by a final burst of sudden activity as the neurones cease to be able to compensate for their increasingly hostile environment and lose their polarisation. That could also be a separate state of consciousness in its own right.

To conclude then, I haven’t really done this subject justice in the limited time and attention span available, but one final thought does occur. Is it right for me not to prioritise any state of consciousness over any other? Most people would probably say samadhi is a higher state than the others, but on the other hand Tibetan Buddhism appears to employ Ganzfeld as such a state, and there are also trance-like ecstatic states used in other forms of spirituality which might correspond more to hypnosis, if that is indeed a state. Whatever is the best way to arrange these, it certainly seems worthwhile to consider their relationships with each other and also with reality. I feel I’ve done this quite thoroughly with dreaming and wakefulness, but not the rest, and it definitely seems like a valuable exercise.

What do you think?

Seeing The Grim Reaper

English: Statue in the Cathedral of Trier,
April 2006
Jbuzbee

Terry Pratchett was of course a genius. I almost bought ‘Strata’ as soon as it came out (but didn’t, costing me hundreds of quid) and read every Discworld novel up to ‘Wyrd Sisters’ in 1988. I then suffered a crisis of confidence in his work. It was of very high quality and was being written very fast, and I got worried that he wouldn’t be able to maintain the quality. Because I didn’t want to witness the death of the author in a different sense than usual, I made a conscious decision to stop reading. I’ve read maybe five novels he wrote after that point, there was no decline as far as I could perceive and, well, I was wrong. He is of course now literally dead, and I can’t help but wonder if he kind of burnt his brain out writing so much brilliant stuff for so long, so fast. But my medical side tells me this is very likely impossible and is just welding two unconnected facts together. It’s kind of a supersititious part of my own brain which tells me the contrary.

Pratchett was no stranger to entertaining superstition, and one of his major characters is in fact Death. This is Death the anthropomorphic personification, who always speaks in small capitals and is mistaken intentionally for an undertaker by mere mortals whom he’d prefer not to realise his true identity. Incidentally, I can’t remember if he is gendered as male in the stories – he may be neuter. Death and the Grim Reaper are in a wider context not exactly the same figure. For instance, Death is the presumably symbolic figure in the Book of Revelation – one of the Four Horsemen. The Grim Reaper comes on foot. I’m going to call the personification the Grim Reaper rather than Death because I’m not really talking about the being on horseback.

As you may know, a fortnight or so ago a guy turned up at our front door apparently carrying a scythe about 250 centimetres high. He turned out to be delivering a hoist, was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and had flesh on his bones, so clearly he wasn’t the Grim Reaper. Nonetheless, the presence of an elderly and infirm person in our home, which necessitated the delivery of said hoist, does focus us very much on the possibility of imminent death and although we only playfully made the association, it was nevertheless made. Other people, under greater duress, make the association much more strongly and have, anecdotally, witnessed apparitions of the personification concerned. Now as far as I know there has never been a thoroughgoing scientific study of these experiences, but there are plenty of reports of them, and they aren’t always associated with the expectation that someone is going to die, which would presumably prime their mind for seeing such an entity. That said, there is the question of post hoc confabulation. I’m now going to recount a few stories of the incidents involved. I can’t really do more than that because of the lack of research, but I will go into that issue later.

First of all, the Grim Reaper in these tales is often, but not always, a male figure in a shadowy shapeless cloak with a hood, carrying a long scythe vertically with the blade at the top. Sometimes the skull or a bony hand is visible and usually the figure is identified as male even though there are no anatomical or other cues to that effect. There is some variation.

There are, first of all, some straightforward perceptions which seem to be versions of Near-Death Experiences. For instance, a man called Ralph was hospitalised after a heart attack and saw a “dark, grey, cloaked stranger. He had no face”, standing by his bed. Ralph felt “very cold, below freezing” but knew it wasn’t his time to go yet, and the stranger vanished. This is easy to explain as a NDE, but there are others which are harder. For instance, an apparently healthy woman in her twenties experienced the apparent Grim Reaper on her landing and was shortly after diagnosed with cancer. She then continued to see him intermittently until she died a couple of years later. A similar first-hand account involves an older person who intermittently saw the entity throughout the last year of her life.

This can be put down to a physical process whereby someone becomes subliminally aware that they’re unwell. Not wishing to trespass too far into one of my other blogs, this reminds me of the intimations people sometimes get of their conditions, which I also suspect explains gender incongruence to some extent. There are cases of people with degenerative motor neurone conditions having recurring dreams of turning into a statue before they’ve noticed any symptoms or were aware of being susceptible, and of a schizophrenic who believed he was dissolving and urinating out the substance of his body who turned out to have a parathyroid tumour which was causing his bone calcium to be released into his bloodstream and excreted via his urine. If someone sees the Grim Reaper herself and is soon after diagnosed with cancer, the fact that it’s happening inside her own body where, in a sense, her consciousness is situated, it makes sense that she would have this kind of experience.

There are, however, also vicarious experiences of the apparition. A man sitting on the couch in his living room became aware of the presence and went upstairs to find his wife had tried to kill herself, and was able to save her life. With this again, I suspect there is a link between his existing concern for her and the happening. Another one is harder to explain. A nurse walking past a room in a hospital glimpsed a shadowy figure out of the corner of her eye through the doorway, went back to check and found that the patient in it was accompanied by a man standing by her bed in monk-like robes, a skull for a face, a skeletal hand and red fires inside the eye sockets. Once again, this could be due to fatigue and the intuition or expectation that the patient’s life was approaching its end.

Another experience was the first of many, starting in childhood. A boy at school asked a teacher on a bench outside for permission to go to the toilet and saw a man sitting next to her. He was pale, bald and had heavy bags under his eyes. He then went to the toilet and on coming out, the teacher had had a fatal heart attack and died about half an hour later. It then emerged that nobody else had seen the man. A year later, he was out playing with his friends in a remote area near a waterfall and met a blond mute man. Shortly after, one friend fell down the falls, fractured his skull and stopped breathing. They attempted CPR and fetched the ambulance, and fortunately his friend survived, but the man was with them the whole time, didn’t respond when he pleaded for help, and again nobody else saw him.

All of this is uncorroborated, anecdotal evidence gathered on an ad hoc basis. However, it would be difficult to say something to that effect to a firsthand witness to these phenomena. It may not be necessary to focus on the specifics of the experiences because they resemble others to some extent, such as Lewy body dementia, which involves the mixture of dreaming and waking experience, the more conventional near-death experiences and sleep paralysis. They also bring to mind psychosomatic symptoms, though on a more imaginative, figurative level, and they also tend to differ from what one would expect, as second-hand experiences often seem to presage someone else’s life-threatening event, and he seems more like a helper than a threat, as in someone who saves lives and warns.

It would be interesting, as well, to know what people in other cultures experience in these situations. For instance, Satem cultures such as the Slavs and Hindus have a female personification of death and Mexico has Santa Muerte. Banshees (bean sí) are also female. They’re said only to lament true Gaels, so I’d better watch out for one. Θανατος in Greek mythology is the son of Νυξ and twin of `Υπνος, Night and Sleep respectively, and is depicted as a winged, bearded man. It would be interesting in particular to know how today’s Dodekatheists, Greek traditional religion revivalists, experience the apparition of Death because it might indicate how well-entrenched their faith is in their minds.

To conclude, then, there doesn’t seem to be anything to suggest that the Grim Reaper exists aside from the perception of people who see him, but that doesn’t make him any less real. In a sense, everyone we meet is a mere animated physical body but we instinctively project the fact that they are people onto their forms, and in the same way some of us can’t escape the same kind of phenomenon when we are in some sense close to death. It’s notable that it doesn’t sound like he would be visible in a mirror, because in dreams mirrors are often empty when we face them, and he would have that in common with Satan and vampires. I don’t want to be led to patronisingly saying “well he’s real to you” so much as adopting a different attitude to what happens when we perceive each other. So I’m just going to say, yes, he is real, and we are not just impersonal scientific instruments.

Therefore, yes the Grim Reaper exists.