Glenn Beck's article reeks of a promotional piece and I am somewhat skeptical of the reporting of his medical symptoms. It's like 'telephone' where a lot is lost in transmitting the information, because it doesn't sound reasonable to me that a physician would say any of the things he said. For example, you always hear the whole, "You've got x number of years to live," but in reality almost no physician I've ever worked with would say something like that. They will give you data in cancer survival for example, but someone with an undefined illness as he describes could not be given a prognosis! And then the moment he refrences this 'healing center' that performs 'miracles' my alarms were going off. I think you need to also consider that a lot of the symptoms he was supposedly showing are commonly seen in facticious or somatization disorder.
Open up his medical record to scrutiny by other physicians and let me see the data, otherwise I am very doubtful of his 'facts.'
The chiropractic practice of functional neurology is at the heart of our practice here at Carrick Brain Centers. Pioneered beginning 35 years ago by our namesake, Dr. Ted Carrick DC, PhD, functional neurology leverages the rapidly expanding knowledge of the brain and central nervous system to build diagnostics and individually targeted therapies that stimulate brain plasticity, the restorative power of the brain to build new neural connections in response to stimulation.
This isn't meant to be flippant at all, but I wonder if Arrington has had his Vitamin D levels checked recently.
VitD plays an important role in memory, and people with extremely low levels often report brain fog. Working all the time indoors over the span of many years, tends to deprive people of proper access to the sun (or peak sun, when you'd normally get the bulk of your VitD). And it's impossible to keep your VitD levels up at ~40 or 50 where they should be, with diet alone.
The sustained lack of Vitamin D has also been increasingly linked to neurological disorders.
Do you have any more resources to read up more on these effects? After working in a windowless office I've started to notice some psychological issues with the lack of sunlight, especially during the winter, and with what you're saying I'm starting to wonder if the problems are worse than I'm even realizing.
I got a blood test back that registered a 5 on my Vitamin D levels (30 being the desired floor, and 40 or 50 being closer to ideal). Everything else was perfect except for that VitD level. I was shocked, but after reading up on Vitamin D it made sense: I've had maybe two tans in 15 years, I don't get anywhere near enough sun exposure, and diet hardly makes a dent in the amount of VitD it takes to bring your blood levels up to a 40 or 50 range. I also felt fortunate after reading up on what very low levels of VitD can cause. I spent a few weeks reading just about everything I could get my hands on relating to VitD and what it does.
I don't have all of my sources handy now, but I can run through some of what I came to understand.
It has a role to play regarding depression, and or a general sense of malaise, having to do with serotonin levels. There are Vitamin D receptors in the areas of the brain linked to controlling depression. You'll find people often feel a significant pick-me-up when they correct low Vitamin D levels - often right from the first week of taking D3 supplements (whether that's a placebo effect or not, it seems to be very common).
VitD is now believed to be an important regulator when it comes to neurological diseases / conditions such as multiple sclerosis and alzheimers. They've found a direct link to low levels of VitD in children and M.S. - which you can see in the rate of M.S. in people in countries far north of the equator.
"A new study finds that vitamin D-deficient individuals are twice as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as people who have sufficient levels of the vitamin."
People with cancer and heart disease frequently have particularly low levels of Vitamin D. This is a bit tricky though, because that can just as easily tie into lifestyle; but it's interesting non-the-less.
Common fatigue and bone pain often ties into very low levels of Vitamin D. As is well understood now, it has an important role to play in working with calcium and magnesium.
VitD is very important to the immune system:
"Deficiency in vitamin D is associated with increased autoimmunity as well as an increased susceptibility to infection."
There has been a variety of interesting discussion around whether Vitamin D has a role to play in type 2 diabetes. It's often found that type 2 patients suffer from especially low levels of VitD, but the counter arguments are that those low VitD levels have more to do with lack of physical activity:
Are you sure the blood sample was handled correctly? Vitamin D tests are cheap to do nowadays but most doctors have no idea that they have to immediately enclose the sample in darkness or it will be tainted. Vitamin D decomposes(?) in sunlight.
I was tested deficient by one ignorant doctor, then another tested again and everything was fine. The second one told me about it. It is a pain to google so I cannot find proper sources in English.
It's a fair question. It was done by a hospital's lab by a dedicated lab worker, as a comprehensive, and then sent off to Labcorp (versus being done in a doctor's office by a nurse etc). So hopefully they knew what they were doing.
Given the amount of Vitamin D you need to to get your levels up to a 30+ marker, and given most of the US population is Vitamin D deficient (and I get far less sun exposure than your average person) - it's probably a safe bet my D levels are very low.
A 5 was a bit surprising, but it's no exaggeration that presently I'm probably as close as you can get to being a vampire without actually being one, sun exposure wise. My primary curiosity is whether my VitD levels have been single digits for ... a decade at this point. I think I'm fortunate that I was very active outside growing up, and that I got plenty of sun - as apparently having Vitamin D levels as a child akin to what I just tested at, is particularly dangerous.
I was feeling depressed and experiencing brain fog for around a year before I asked a doctor what was going on. He suggested I try taking vitamin D and sure enough within a few days of taking the 2000IU tablet each day, I was feeling like a hundred bucks. I swear by the vitamin D.
I actually have similar symptoms on a smaller scale - I never remember my dreams, and I generally can't tell you if an event happened in the last month or the last year.
I get plenty of sleep, though, so I'm just going to chalk that up to having a bad memory.
Obstructive sleep apnea can cause lack of REM sleep and, as a result, no dreaming. Symptoms may be such that you have a long sleep period but are prevented from deep sleep by micro-arousals. Being overweight (as Mr. Arrington mentions in a linked piece) can cause or worsen apnea.
It was my understanding (and maybe this is incorrect) that someone only remembers their dreams if they wake up during them. Therefore, not remembering them could just be a sign you've had a good, uninterrupted night's sleep. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case for me–I remember my dreams if I'm woken up e.g. by a car alarm but never if I wake up normally.
I've always been told that you have to practice remembering dreams in order to get better at it. And the often-cited way of practicing that is by keeping a dream-diary that you're suppose to write in whenever you wake up.
Likewise, I've never heard of the whole "you only remember a dream if you wake up during it". Sometimes I go through a few dreams, wake up naturally, and remember some of the previous ones (and not the last one).
I too thought this was the case. I very rarely remember what I dreamt last night, it may happen once in five months if I'm lucky. But I always thought that was perfectly normal.
Interesting, I never considered my reliance on meta-data to place events in time to be a symptom of anything. I thought that was just how memory works.
You mean to say people normally remember approximately how long ago something happened? Like, not just from "Ok so event X happened, and it couldn't have happened before event Y, and Y relates to Z that I know for a fact happened in so and so year, so I think X happened D months/years ago"
Similarly, I have never been able to remember a name, but I can always remember a face for forever. To the point that I will see random people in the street and wont' be able to tell if I only saw them once randomly in the street or I went to high school with them.
Remembering conversations, hah, funny. People actually remember those more than just the two or three key takeaways?
Funnily I can almost always remember my dreams to the point that I usually can't tell the difference between dream memories and real memories.
I have poor short term memory (I'll often forget what I'm supposed to be doing at work), but I can usually remember when conversations happened within a rough range (a few days, a week, 2 weeks, months...) without relying on metadata, though I sometimes use metadata when I really can't remember. I haven't remembered a dream I've had in a few years, with maybe like ~10 exceptions.
Memory can be weird. I think recall of dreams is generally unrelated to memory though, and is more about sleep patterns (though poor sleep will worsen your overall memory).
I like that description, meta-data placement of events in time.
I suffer from memory fatigue. I remember most of life past my third birthday (though informational processing is hard--I can remember thoughts I had while the trig teacher in high school spoke, but not necessarily what the teacher discussed). About age 20 I stopped being able to intuit the "how long" something happened and switched to what you're describing.
Stress and anxiety can cause all sorts of horrible cognitive side effects. Memory issues, cognitive impairment, dizziness, "brain fog" etc. are all hugely prevalent in today's society and people rarely think to attribute them to plain-old anxiety.
Last year, I read the autobiography of Isaac Asimov (the first two books, not the later memoirs) and he wrote that he was terrible at remembering names of the people he met.
I thought this was very odd, because he was famous for remembering millions of little facts about history and science. Maybe he experienced a similar phenomenon?
I am experiencing exactly this, and I have been reflecting over how it got worse recently. Can't say I process an insane amount of information, though. Could it be a warning sign that one might expect Alzheimer's later in life at this rate?
Probably not, but there are plenty of potential neurological illnesses, so if you feel that you're having memory problems you should definitely take time to see a doctor. They'd likely start with blood tests and some cognitive tests, and if they agree there are problematic results, they'd probably order an MRI, CT, or PET scan, or a combination of them.
When it comes to Alzheimer's specifically, less than 10% of cases are early-onset (where it is diagnosed before 65), and it's very rare for it to be diagnosed under the age of 50. My mother was diagnosed with it at 53, and there weren't really any symptoms until she hit 50. She was 52 when she had to stop working, and even then her doctors weren't willing to conclusively diagnose Alzheimer's until the next year. She passed away this year, about a week after her 62nd birthday.
You could apply that subjective value judgement to any number of jobs that are stressful and not world-critical important.
There's absolutely zero evidence that your brain determines its own health based on the importance of your task to the greater world.
Why hasn't Jerry Seinfeld melted down? How did Joan Rivers last so long? How is Howard Stern still functioning? Jay Leno? David Letterman? Sean Hannity? Jon Stewart? How about the thousands of tabloid writers across the nation? How about sports writers / journalists?
There's zero evidence for a link to what you're suggesting, in terms of value of the job being performed according to some external person's subjective determination.
Your value judgement doesn't dictate the self-worth or mental health of someone else, such that they're going to suffer a mental collapse because you think what they do is of low importance.
My subjective value judgement can still be better than yours, and its degree of truth will be seen in the years to come.
The only concept you need to understand to get the truth of my statement is _order_.
A "meaningful and important" job is an opportunity to impose your own kind of order on the outside world. You will instinctively know this, as a human being, when you are in this state.
On the other hand, you will just as instinctively know when your job is to actually generate disorder for the rest of us, dragging everyone else down with you so you can get some small scraps from self-absorbed "important people", because you've given up on aiming for anything more significant.
All the people you talk about have chosen their nation's culture as their canvas, shaping the thought of wide swathes of the population of the United States.
In contrast, everything TechCrunch is known for is a gossip rag that is only read by desperate or clueless startup types whose content is generated by inner circles of bullshit work generators whose claim to fame is simply creating a vanishingly small fraction more noise on Ethernet, fiber optic, the 2-5GHz spectrum, and a few VC bank account numbers.
You tell me what kind of influence you'd rather have.
FYI: Not everyone sees downvote buttons on HN. You have to have a certain amount of positive karma - some quick googling suggests it's 500 or more. Onewaystreet has about 290.
That implies that (gossipy/social) information is processed in a single way, that doesn't have dependencies on other functionality of the brain (that which we measure for IQ, or the link between successful startup founders and such).
You can analyze it and try to improve the situation, or you can learn to manipulate some of humanities more 'built in' functionality of socializing and survival. Then factor in that everyone around you has this abstract layer of social processing, and it's back to probability / guessing whether people around you will manipulate it, use it for good, for evil, or for neutral.
Explaining things mathematically, logically, and reasonably can be just as useless. It really depends on what you like to talk about. If you don't like gossiping, there is surely some outlet you have that increases happiness and is nonproductive. If not, find one. It might turn out to be an essential part of success for reasons you can't (and I can't) even begin to pretend to understand.
99% of people (if not more) do nothing of significant value for the human race. The wealth they create, the value of the product they produce, and the experience they gain all dissipate or become meaningless in the medium to long term. Value for the human race is not a very good criterion to decide whether what you do is bullshit. If you need a purpose in life, get children.
They are painting the murals that brighten the entrances to workplaces across the world, or researching incremental improvements to human knowledge that collectively form the foundation of the next generation of science.
Lying awake worrying about whether or not you're adding value to the human race leads to shit like this. What I'm trying to say is: people should just do what they're good at. As long as you make a decent living, you're contributing to society. What is, let's say, a cleaning lady or bus driver supposed to think of your "value for the human race" criterion?
We need a name for the "bullshit job provides food on your plate" fallacy. The productivity enhancement from the division of labor and technological advancements provides food on our table, the "bullshit job" is just there because we haven't figure out how to destroy it without hurting people.
No, read again what I wrote. The food you get is coming from people who do bullshit jobs, since Farming is probably bullshit in the eyes of the poster I referred to.
If you want to start destroying bullshit jobs, reducing the amount of administration and civil servants is a good place to start, because it's a whole additional layer of friction for everything else in society.
I believe he is using the term "bullshit jobs" to mean jobs that are pointless, produce no producivity and are mainly created for the sake of appearances. In other words, the administration and civil servant jobs that you refer to. Jobs such as farm laborer jobs may be boring and tedious, but since they are very clearly productive, are not "bullshit jobs".
This term comes from the anthoropologist David Graeber in his essay 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).
Ok, you are literally equating food production, which includes agriculture which led to humans being able to support groups bigger than a circus troupe, with "bullshit job." Got it.
I think you misread the comment. Agriculture is not a "bullshit job" (well, except in the literal manure = fertilizer sense) because it produces something people actually need. Something like, say, social marketing (my job) is a bullshit job, because it's just made up to encourage people to consume more to keep the economy humming along.
Yeah, the job description of food production fits nicely with the post about bullshits jobs from a couple of days ago. I am assuming you are using the same definition here.
EDIT: on top of that, you could argue that Agriculture is bullshit since most of the food we produce is thrown away?
Nice assumptions dude. I guess this is the internet for ya; post something that is not even very controversial, and your own caricatured projection is jumped on.
On your other note, it is not bullshit as long as it is sustainable and people are being fed. If it was, you bet it'd be fixed, one way or the other, up to, including, and beyond cannibalism to genetic re-engineering not to need food.
On the other hand, there is your typical TechCrunch startup lol.
Don't even bother replying. It seems we are so different in how in touch we are, I could be locked in an internetless and lightless room with no outside communication for the rest of my life, and still be able to do non bullshit work, which I'd scratch into the walls with my fingernails, so when I die and they open the box to take me out they (at least the in-touch ones) will be awed and the world will be a better place, while you could be handed the US presidency, or the leadership of a multi-national corporation, and still cock it up by starving the population and workers to death by removing "bullshit jobs" lol.
PT Barnum would love to give you some health advice, I'm sure.
(The "miracle health centre" Beck is pumping in the linked piece reeks of scam. The phrase "Chiropractic Neurology" ought to send you running for the hills.)
A big, scary part of HN is just pain crazy/not high in IQ. Really not sure how to block that out.
They are now taking medical advice from a quote of a quote from Glenn Beck from his doctor.
WTF (What the Fuck) does “TIME COLLAPSE” in science (AKA not magic) even mean?
[Edit] But this line at least was very funny
> Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.
Doctors do have to be historians; any diagnosis they make (unless it's a disease that's never been seen before) will be in terms of other diseases. I was diagnosed with a fairly rare disease, and my specialist knew a bit about the history of the disease.
Knowing the history of a set of symptoms is exactly what helps doctors figure things out. If it so happens that a famous person once had the disease, well, that's an interesting fact and I'd probably tend to remember that/bring it up too.
I mean, I think he's probably discussing a real thing, and is mostly on-target regarding the cause. But, he could have picked a better example - how was Beck processing a lot of information, unless we're just talking about batshit-insane conspiracy theories and what gibberish to scribble on the blackboard that night?
And comparing himself to Churchill is just more of the self-aggrandizement Beck is famous for (or self-deprecation, I guess, depending on your opinion of Churchill - but Beck certainly intends it as aggrandizement).
Pause for a moment, replace "Beck" in your comment with the name of any famous person you have even a little respect for, and then reread what you wrote as though it was written by someone that dislikes that person.
All the same thoughts occurred to me too. Then I realized I was being dumb, and fortunately one of the few graces of getting older is that I don't say what I'm thinking as often as I used to.
So, should we not discuss the merits of a person who has a public life? Glenn Beck is a public and controversial figure, and controversial for good reason - in fact I don't think he would object to the supposition that he goes out of his way to be controversial. So, if someone brings him up in conversation or in a blog post, I shouldn't respond in kind because I might offend someone?
I mean, keep in mind, I didn't bring up Glenn Beck. He's a central part of the article, for crying out loud, and Arrington references his book multiple times, compares himself to him (and Churchill by proxy), and on and on. It is not unreasonable that discussion of this article would include Glenn Beck, since he's such an integral part of it, and it is not reasonable to ask that people keep their personal opinions of Beck out of that discussion.
Your comment is seemingly pretty benign, but I will tell you that I take a great deal of offense to it. You are thought-policing - simple as that. I don't know where you think you derive the authority to tell me what topics are and are not off limits - especially when those topics are referenced directly in the article at hand. And, for the record, I often do start to write a comment and then think better of it. This time I didn't. Perhaps you should have.
Open up his medical record to scrutiny by other physicians and let me see the data, otherwise I am very doubtful of his 'facts.'