#finding out that I have this one in million fatal sleep disorder or winning an actual lottery and that if second scenario happens it'll

[iwonderwh0]

Apart from buying some lottery tickets (never did that before) and making some other unwise financial decisions and compulsively blocking people I find slightly annoying, I'm not really doing anything weird (as far as I can tell) but yeah...

Sleep deprivation made me so fucking dumb I would probably fail any reading comprehension test if I were given any now. If you see me saying something batshit stupid, please let me know if I stop making sense

[itsswimmingtragedycollection]

Netflix’s ‘You’ or ‘Why (young) people need to read more books’

First of all. the obsessed stalker plot is overdone. I mean Misery, Sleeping with the enemy, Fatal attraction, Secret window, The vanishing?? They’re suing. And despite this unimaginative plot, You is being sold as some kind of groundbreaking, fresh, modern take on the Stalker ™, so I guess it’s no wonder only teenagers can buy into that load of bs. Don’t get me wrong, a boring outline, doesn’t necessarily mean a boring story. Consider heist movies for a second. They are all the same, a group of people use their unique skills to pull off a never-been-done-before job, and get away with it. Regardless of whether it’s your cup of tea or not, different approaches, fresh perspective, suspense build up, comedy, action, character development can make this trope interesting over and over again. Unfortunately, You seems to have missed this memo since all of its characters, situations and outcomes have been done, in the same manner, a million times before. This is probably because the entertainment industry is big on recycling. As soon as a new generation of people, who are too young to have seen the classics of the past, matures enough to actually enjoy them, we are flooded with remakes  of this and that. Easy money. But, you know what? Being boring and unimaginative isn’t a crime nor does it do any real damage. The actual problem with You is the message it sends. Or better yet, doesn’t send. Not only do we see Joe humanized to the point where he might just be in the right, the show failed to condemn his actions at any single point. And if we take into account that their main audience are young people,it becomes worse. By a lot. As much as the term ‘young and impressionable’ is a cliche, it’s true. If you showed Joe Goldberg to a thirty year old, aka someone with a clear sense of self, firmly set values and moral compass, they wouldn’t face the dilemma of ‘Shit! Maybe he has a point!’ and ‘Damn lock him up and throw away the key!’. Like, for example, an eighteen year old would. At the same time, the vast majority of events that unfold in the season are presented through Joe’s eyes. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume we don’t get an objective perspective on anything. Or anyone. Which is a fairly weird choice if the aim is to show how easy it is to sympathize with a psycho given the fact that we don’t usually experience those type of people through the inner workings of their minds, but through their actions. But, that alone didn’t have to be a deal-breaker, if we had something to compare his impressions to, for good measure. Contrast is a powerful tool and its proper usage is what accentuates the main message in a movie/tv show. But who tf is Joe’s contrast. Peach? She’s about the same as he is, except for the fact that her idea of ‘helping’ Beck is using her wealth and influence in hopes she will stay by her side forever, and Joe’s is to essentially bend her to his will. Beck? I don’t think so. The only striking difference between them is how she doesn’t fit in anywhere, not her first job, not her second job, not with her friends, not with her family, not in her apartment, while Joe seems to fit in anywhere you throw him. Probably stems from the fact that Beck feels like a fraud while Joe feels everyone but him is a fraud (also part of the reason why we found the characters boring or fake, since he described them to us). His past? If anything it justifies his present actions. Paco? Joe’s mini-me? His purpose is basically to paint a picture of how an abused child grows up, so we’d find it even harder to dislike Joe. Even more so since Joe tries so hard to make life easier for him and eventually kills Paco’s abuser, which, in retrospect, justifies what he did to Mr. Mooney. Ethan? The most annoying mash up of every hipster stereotype you can think of? Barely even worth a mention. Honestly it would have been quite interesting to see the differences between how he experiences the world vs how it really is. Or maybe point out some red flags that nice-guy-by-day-murderer-by-night archetype displays, so we can spot them out. And it would also help get the point the show claims to make across. Instead, what happened was, people liked him and hated everyone else, and the show producers, writers and actors acted as if they pulled some grand prank.  ‘HaHaHa joke’s on you, even though we made him completely relatable,good-intended, smart, understandable and likable and all those other people stupid, shallow, boring and mean, he’s the shithead and you all fell for it!’ Kinda like when a three year old covers his eyes and thinks no one can see him.   I mean, the only time his portrait of Beck is questioned is when she pours her heart out to Dr Nicky and we get a glimpse of what is actually going on with her. But by that time, there’s no escaping this diluted, fantasy, basic white girl with daddy issues, attention thirsty, cheating whore, promiscuous fraud Joe’s been showing down our throats. Not only that, but up to that point, his conclusions were, one way or the other, confirmed. He didn’t like Benji, Benji turned out to be a prick. He had doubts about Peach, Peach turned out to be obsessed with Beck. He said Beck craves attention, what do you know, she has no curtains in a first floor New York apartment she can’t even afford. He says he knows what’s best for her, she becomes happier and more fulfilled when he takes over her life, until he kills, that is. The viewers don’t side with him because they really, really, actively want to, they side with him because it’s in the structure of the story. Which is reflected in the ‘Ozma of Oz’ by the way. That’s the first book of the series where Dorothy doesn’t crave Kansas anymore and Oz becomes what she wants. Much like the whole world of You is Joe’s fiction, and we are invited to abandon this world, where psychos are not desirable. Similarly, Peach and Joe both have a thing for the Oz books, specifically ‘Ozma of Oz’,they even get into a bit of a conflict over it, meaning they both want their ‘Oz’ to win. Also, another detail I consider important to the plot, is that Peach is a Salinger. Obviously not a coincidence. Salinger is known for his ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and controversial life. But mostly ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ That book is crowned *the* coming of age book, emphasizing how societies high expectations of young people and no consideration of each person as an individual put too much pressure on them that eventually leads to mental disorders. Basically, how the world ruins innocence. But on the other hand, and more interestingly, the most famous criticism calls it ‘a fictional hall or mirrors in which his own self was replicated and congratulated for its brilliance, charm and integrity over and over again.’ Doesn’t that sound familial? Isn’t every character in You just a version of Joe? Paco is a young Joe, Peach is a rich, female Joe with pedigree, Benji is a brute, rich, stupid Joe, Mr. Mooney is what Joe could have become, Dr Nicky pries into people’s lives and abuses his power (sleeping with a patient), same as Joe. Even Beck. She’s your average Joe, not taken to the extreme. And on top of that, he is congratulated for his charm, brilliance and integrity throughout the season, hence why the audiences like him over everyone else. As interesting as that may be, You asks the questions no one needs asked. And gives the wrong answer. Under which circumstances are psychos likable? How easy is it to identify with one? Can sick obsession look desirable? You says yes to all of that. And it says it to teens and preteens who are already being told that boys hit girls when they like them, so why tf not sell them on hot and sexy murderous stalkers as something to lust over? And them blame them for giving in and not their poor storytelling. Encourage your local teenagers to be better than that. See, shows like You, only thrive because they are well accepted. If young people read more books, watched more old and older movies, took more interest in understanding things in depth instead of taking them at face value, we wouldn’t have to even have the conversation ‘Why being attracted to Joe Goldberg is wrong.’ If more young people knew how may bigger, better things exist, a watered down, bland story like this wouldn’t stand a chance. And most certainly couldn’t get away with calling itself fresh, new, brilliant and provocative. My lit professor used to say ‘Every story has been already told.’ We change the names, the places, adapt it to our time, but in essence, all the love stories, the tragedies and everything else in between, have been written. Basically, everything ‘new’ draws its inspiration from somewhere, it doesn’t come from thin air. With that in mind, the more you see, read and hear, the wider your grasp on things becomes, and the easier it is to smell the bs. Which Netflix in general is full of.

[booksbroadwaybbc]

These Four “Legs” Will Provide You with a Meaningful Life via /r/selfimprovement

These Four “Legs” Will Provide You with a Meaningful Life

How Many Legs Does Your Chair Have? When I was young, we would visit my grandmother in a small rural town. Occasionally I would help gather eggs in the morning from the chicken coop, but I was too young to help with milking the cow. I did watch my older brother milk the cow once or twice. My recollection is that he would use a one-legged stool to sit on while milking the cow.

If you want to have stability, a one-legged stool should not be your first choice of a seating arrangement. Even in that scenario, my brothers two legs formed the necessary second and third legs to stabilize himself while extracting the warm fresh milk.

For the chair of your life, how many legs do you sit on? How many should you sit on?

Jim Rohn taught about five major pieces to the life puzzle. One could interpret this to mean that his chair had five legs. He outlined them as, Philosophy, Attitude, Activity, Results and Lifestyle.

While you technically have stability with three legs, four provides a more solid foundation. If you were going to name the four legs of stability for your life, what would you determine to be the four items needed for most stability?

Here are four legs I suggest will give you not only a stable life, but a solid foundation for personal success and life-long fulfillment.

Leg #1: Financial Stability and Security

If a person is starving, they don’t care about anything besides getting food. For most of us today that equates to having adequate financial resources to meet our basic needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological needs (air, water, food, sleep, clothing, shelter ) are the most basic needs listed, and precede all other needs.

Financial stability and security can provide almost all of those needs, so long as we have sufficient financial resources. Gratefully, we don’t need money for air, but pretty much everything else in this category requires financial resources. Getting yourself to a point of financial stability, and ultimately security should therefore be a primary focus of our efforts for a stable life.

Leg #2: Health and Wellness

To quote Tyrone in the Princess Bride, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.” For whatever reason, it seems that there are many of my friends, neighbors and coworkers who are struggling with significant health challenges. There are currently eleven different people that I know of who are working through cancer treatments and other serious illnesses. Two others have passed away in the last month. In some cases, there may be little we can do to prevent that, but in most cases there is a lot we can do.

Here are the foundational principles for good health:

Achieve and maintain your ideal body weight. There are so many health issues associated with being overweight that it is almost akin to smoking in terms of dumb things you can do to try and die early. There are a lot of reasons that being overweight and obesity are at epidemic proportions, but most everyone that struggles with that is guilty of doing it to themselves. No one force feeds anyone else against their will.

It is true that others can be a significant influence over us, particularly in the areas of nutrition and eating. However, you don’t gain weight by the actions of others. You gain weight by your own actions (or inaction). What and how much you put in your mouth and whether you choose to be physically active or sedentary are within the power of all non-dependent adults.

As part of achieving and maintaining your ideal body weight, regular physical exercise should be part of your ongoing activities each week.

Get adequate rest each day

Tony Schwartz, award winning author and CEO of The Energy Project has spoken much about the value and need of sleep. He refers to sleep as a competitive advantage.

In my past employment we would be copied on the staff meeting notes of the senior leaders of our organization. On more than one occasion a line was included about not falling asleep in meetings, indicating the challenge this can be for employees and leaders in the corporate world.

For the corporate “athlete” trying to accomplish as much as possible in every 24 hour period, sleep is often sacrificed in attempts to get more done. As counter intuitive as it seems, you will get more done if you let your body get the 7 1/2 - 8 hours of sleep it needs each night. Even a short nap in the middle of the day will have a tremendous rejuvenating effect for the remainder of the day.

The American Sleep Association has published some disturbing statistics related to sleep disorders. Among them are:

50–70 million US adults have a sleep disorder. (~18 % of the US population) 4.7% reported falling asleep while driving at least once in the preceding month. Drowsy driving causes 1,550 fatalities and 40,000 nonfatal injuries annually in the US Dr. Mehmet Oz lists the following benefits, among many others, for getting a good night’s sleep

Sleep helps boost your immune system Sleep wards off anxiety and depression Sleep is linked to longevity Leg #3: Set & Achieve Your Big Goals

With the stability of personal finances and health in place, the next leg on my chair of life’s stability is setting and achieving goals.

Viktor Frankl said, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” In other words, rather than trying from the outside looking in to determine what the purpose of our life is, we need to look from the inside out. Discovering or determining your purpose in life, and then fulfilling that purpose is key to your personal fulfillment. This can best be achieved by having a system for setting, tracking and achieving goals.

I have used Darren Hardy’s “Living Your Best Year Ever” system of goal tracking and achievement for going on four years now. I heartily recommend it as a means of consistently working towards your long term goals and breaking them down into short term, including weekly and daily activities.

Leg #4: Continuous Personal Development

Someone has said, “Nothing fails, like success.” One byproduct of success can be complacency. Unfortunately, I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I see it in many other adults. We get to a level of comfort, and we stop progressing. We stop growing. When we have a job with sufficient income to pay our bills, we tend to fill our time with busy work, or more often now, time wasters, and coast through the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately this is a waste of your greatest natural resource: you.

If the last time you’ve read a book was when you were in school, then you need to start reading again. If the only books you read are for entertainment, then you need to add something to keep developing your mind and your skills. This is probably not the case for those of you reading this post, but for much of the population it is true.

If you listen to news or talk radio when you commute, replace it with educational or instructional CDs or audio programs. Learn a new skill. Learn a second (or third) language. Start a side business and grow it into a significant source of income.

Step out of your comfort zone socially. Introduce yourself to people whom you admire and who will be a positive influence on your trajectory to a higher plane.

Find a mentor to help you with a personal skill and engage them in a regular periodic coaching session.

Any of these suggestions, and many others will help you to continue to grow personally.

Next time you sit on a four-legged chair, think about what those legs represent to you. The four legs outlined above have proven to me to be a solid foundation not only for stability but for continuing growth and development.

Submitted June 10, 2018 at 12:31AM by jpstep via reddit https://ift.tt/2HzggSw

[somekindamushroom]

AMANITA DERIVATIVES: A NEW TREATMENT FOR DEMENTIA? - PART II

If Carlsberg is 'probably the best lager in the world', then the multi award-winning University of Copenhagen professor Povl Krugsgaard-Larsen is probably the best medicinal chemist in the world. Unless you drink Carlsberg, and even then, you've probably never heard of him. He is a member of various academies and has honorary doctor degrees from Strasbourg, Uppsala, and Milan universities. He wrote the 'Textbook of Drug Design and Development' and was European editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry from 1998 to 2013. He has authored or co-authored some 450 scientific papers. In 2002, he founded the Drug Research Academy for industry. He was chairman of Carlsberg and The Carlsberg Foundation until 2012 and is currently chairman of The Lundbeck Foundation and the The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Prize Foundation (The Brain Prize) which  gives an annual award of one million Euros for outstanding contributions in nueroscience, the biggest award of its kind.

In 1970, Krugsgaard-Larsen achieved his PhD in natural product chemistry before launching a research programme to find new drugs from naturally occurring psychoactive substances. The key structures of his programme were the Amanita muscaria constituents, muscimol and ibotenic acid (which interact nonselectively with GABA and glutamate receptors, respectively) along with the Areca nut's nicotinic acid-based alkaloid, arecoline (which interacts nonselectively with the brain's muscarinic receptors). Muscimol is a natural analogue of gamma-Aminobutyric acid or GABA for short, the neurotransmitter that stops our nerves from getting overexcited and is responsible for muscle tone. A number of different routes for the chemical synthesis of muscimol were published in 1965, 1966, 1968 and 1971 before Povl Krugsgaard-Larsen and Søren Brøgger Christensen submitted a much-simplified method in December 1975 (Christensen himself is a fine biochemist with over 200 papers to his name and has recently done great work with the muscle calcium inhibitor thapsigargin).

Once a relatively easy though tedious synthesis was established, Krugsgaard-Larsen spent the next few years 'redesigning' muscimol to produce a number of intriguing compounds that were either specific GABA agonists (such as gaboxadol and isoguvacine) or antagonists (such as nipecotic acid and guvacine); but the one that seemed most promising was gaboxadol, also known as THIP. Like Albert Hofmann and many other great scientists before him, Krugsgaard-Larsen decided to test the drug initially on himself: beginning with a microdose and working his way up while a colleague took intravenous blood samples. At a 10 milligram dose he didn't feel any pain from the needle and described the feeling “as if I had taken two or three beers. It was a very comfortable feeling.” Gaboxadol was less toxic than its parent muscimol. Moreover, unlike other GABAergic drugs such as alcohol, barbiturates, valium and sleeping pills, all of which influence endogenous GABA already circulating in the brain, both muscimol and gaboxadol work a different way by actually replacing GABA on the neuron. Krugsgaard-Larsen was struck by this unique property and it convinced him of gaboxadol's potential to treat brain disorders such as Huntington's Disease. He quickly patented the drug before passing it to the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck along with his recommendations.

However, whereas nipecotic acid would eventually go on to yield the approved anti-epileptic drug tiagabine, gaboxadol suffered a series of setbacks in both human and non-human trials under a bewildering array of depositor/developmental code names including, but not limited to, MK-0928, AC1LIFYK, Spectrum-001484, LU 2030, UNII-K1M5RVL18S, Lopac-T101, Tocris-0807, Prestwick-13B03, EINECS 264-963-0, and 64603-91-4.

As is common practice in the industry, the first human testing was done on the mentally ill, people like schizophrenics who had developed an involuntary, jerky, repetitive body movement syndrome called tardive dyskinesia (TD) due to the antipsychotic drugs they were prescribed. They were given awfully high doses of gaboxadol, up to 120 milligrams a day, and seen as the drug is derived from a potent entheogenic mushroom, the side-effects should not have been surprising. Gaboxadol failed the TD test and was suggested as a possible anxiety inhibitor.

The next human test involved intramuscular injections on the terminally ill, in this case cancer patients with a few months to live. Gaboxadol succeeded in reducing cancer pain, making the drug a possible substitute for morphine which sometimes results in cancer patient fatalities, but it failed on side-effects. Similar failures would result in later tests on people with mixed anxiety disorders, Huntington's Disease, epilepsy, spasticity, and other neurological afflictions. A final test in the mid-80s was done on Alzheimer's patients who were given an exceedingly high dose of 160 milligrams a day. By then, a cluster of particularly common side-effects had crystallized, and I can put them in descending order: euphoria (a“very comfortable feeling”), confusion, dizziness, sedation, and loss of consciousness altogether. At the higher doses there was reports of colour distortion, the odd hallucination, or of feeling detached from reality in some way (one patient reported “dream-like illusions”) and this may be expected since the Fly Agaric is an hallucinogenic-of-sorts; but the most striking thing to come out of all of this early research was that gaboxadol makes people fall into a deep, deep sleep.

So what exactly has Povl Krugsgaard-Larsen extracted from muscimol? It looks to me like he simply isolated a certain substance found in the chemical make-up of the Fly Agaric mushroom which is responsible for one of its most common and notorious effects, an effect that has been reported for 1000's of years - it makes you pass out. There is certainly something in muscimol that causes the “death-like” sleep state commonly associated with Fly Agaric intoxication. As Clark Heinrich in his book 'Strange Fruit' points out, this state is 'not at all voluntary. This unconscious state can mimic death to the extent that people have been thought dead when discovered by others.' Even breathing slows to a virtual standstill, though this is only a precursor for a different, conscious state. Heinrich calls it a 'dying-that-is-not-dying' and likens the sequel to the meditative trance-like state of Samadhi which yoga practitioners and Buddhists may spend decades trying to harness without success. The Fly Agaric can induce a Samadhi-like state as a matter of course, but depending on your mental state the experience may be terrifying.

As for the detachment and hallucinatory-type effects described above, they were generally at high doses and show that the molecule Krugsgaard-Larsen 'designed' and patented, gaboxadol, still carries traits inherited from its parent, muscimol. Muscimol is a complex conglomeration of molecules designed by natural synthesis (biosynthesis). Chemical synthesis (semisynthesis) of organic molecules in the laboratory is clearly not an exact science.

Nevertheless, gaboxadol was too good a find to throw away. After the Alzheimer's study, the drug sat on Lundbeck's shelves of failed substances for over a decade, except for occasional requests for samples used in experiments with rodents and monkeys. Then, on 1 March 1996, a young somnologist named Marike Lancel who was working in Munich, filed a U.S. patent for a 'Method for treating sleep disorders' (USPTO patent no. 5929065: 'The invention relates to a method of treating sleep disorders in a patient in need thereof comprising the administration of a hypnotically effective amount of a non-allosteric GABA sub.A agonist'). Lancel had been on the lookout for a new sleep drug and realized that although gaboxadol's success in treating the target disorders in human trials was modest at best, it remained a powerful hypnotic. An experiment on rats convinced her of gaboxadol's efficacy as an effective sleep inducer. She was granted her patent on 27 July 1999.

Whatever else gaboxadol may turn out to be (a new treatment for dementia?), it remains a sleep drug/hypnotic par-excellence and should have gone to market. As Marike Lancel et. al. showed in a paper published in the September 2001 edition of the journal Psychopharmacology, gaboxadol 'tended to shorten sleep latency, significantly decreased intermittent wakefulness, increased total sleep time and SWS and enhanced delta and theta activity in the non-REM EEG. Furthermore, gaboxadol increased subjective sleep quality [and] in addition to promoting deep sleep and sleep maintenance, gaboxadol is able to facilitate sleep initiation'. In other words, whereas traditional GABAergic benzodiazepine blockbusters like the much-abused Valium (diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam), as well as the insomnia drug Ambien (zolpidem), all suppress REM sleep and slow-wave sleep (SWS), gaboxadol actually preserves sleep's 'natural architecture'.  It facilitates REM sleep and lengthens the duration of all-important slow-wave sleep, that deep, dreamless state of sleep which is linked to memory consolidation and most of us don't get enough of, especially the elderly.

Good sleep and a healthy brain go hand-in-hand. Slow-wave sleep is the time when our busy neurotransmitters take a nap and the brain clears out the molecular trash accumulated over the course of a hectic day. Since the length of slow-wave sleep gradually shortens as we get older, and since slow-wave sleep is considered essential for memory consolidation and normal cognitive function in general, it seems reasonable to assume that any substance which lengthens the duration of slow-wave sleep in the elderly might have an application in the treatment of dementia. With this in mind, I came across a research paper by neurologist Prof. David M. Holtzman et al. published in the August 2017 edition of the journal 'Brain' entitled 'Slow wave sleep disruption increases cerebrospinal fluid amyloid-β levels'. This is the calcium-linked, beta-amyloid plaque build-up spoken of earlier (see part one) which causes atrophy and the degeneration of brain cells. By analysis of cerebrospinal fluid following spinal tap, Holtzman and his team found that disrupting just one night of slow-wave sleep in healthy, middle-aged adults caused a 10% increase in beta-amyloid production. Moreover, six consecutive nights of sleep deprivation increased the level of tau, another brain protein linked to the brain damage (inflammation) found in Alzheimer's and dementia patients as well as various other nuerological disorders.