Tag: brain science

Computational psychiatry

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Computational psychiatry is a fairly new field that

…seeks to characterize mental dysfunction in terms of aberrant computations over multiple scales….

….Aberrant decision-making is central to the majority of psychiatric conditions and this provides a unique opportunity for progress. It is the computational revolution in cognitive neuroscience that underpins this opportunity and argues strongly for the application of computational approaches to psychiatry. This is the basis of computational psychiatry. (source)

One important computation that I believe is missing from our current understanding of human cognition is the high rate of interpersonal communication error.

Interpersonal communication error is especially significant psychologically because so much of human psychology is based on and grows out of interpersonal communication.

If we are making a lot of mistakes when we communicate with friends, family, spouses, and so forth, it follows that our psychological make-up will be burdened with errors that contribute to mental illness and poor functionality overall.

My considered opinion is that most people make several serious mistakes in speaking or listening every hour.

In normal interpersonal conversation, most people  mishear, misspeak, misinterpret, or misunderstand several times per hour.

These mistakes can be very serious. Often they snowball to produce strong emotional reactions that have no basis in fact.

The day will surely come when we will have technology that measures mistakes in communication. Before then, we have to use special techniques to find and correct communication mistakes.

Firstly, we have to recognize that such mistakes are common. Secondly, we have to understand that even a single small mistake can cause big problems. Thirdly, we need a technique to find and correct our mistakes.

FIML or something very similar to it is the technique we have available today. FIML is based on the idea that communication mistakes are common, serious, and have very significant psychological ramifications.

Over time, FIML practice completely changes the way we view communication, self, and other.

The brain as a guessing machine

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A new approach to the study of mental disorder—called computational psychiatry—uses Bayesian inference to explain where people with problems are going wrong.

Bayesian inference is a method of statistical reasoning used to understand the probability of a hypothesis and how to update it as conditions change.

The idea is that people with schizophrenia, for example, are doing a bad job at inferring the reasonableness of their hypotheses. This happens because schizophrenics seem to be less likely to put enough weight on prior experience (a factor in Bayesian reasoning).

Somewhat similarly, “sensory information takes priority [over previous experience] in people with autism.” (Bayesian reasoning implicated in some mental disorders)

Distorted calculations — and the altered versions of the world they create — may also play a role in depression and anxiety, some researchers think. While suffering from depression, people may hold on to distorted priors — believing that good things are out of reach, for instance. And people with high anxiety can have trouble making good choices in a volatile environment… (Ibid)

The key problem with autism and anxiety is people with these conditions have trouble updating their expectations—a major component of Bayesian reasoning—and thus make many mistakes.

These mistakes, of course, compound and further increase a sense of anxiety or alienation.

Like several of the researches quoted in the linked article, I find this computational approach exciting.

It speaks to me because it confirms a core hypothesis of FIML practice—that all people make many, significant inferential mistakes during virtually all acts of communication.

In this respect, I believe all people are mentally disordered, not just the ones who are suffering the most.

I think a Bayesian thought experiment can all but prove my point:

What are the odds that you will correctly infer the mental state(s) of anyone you speak with? What are the odds that they will correctly infer your mental state(s)?

In a formal setting, both of you will do well enough if the inferring is kept within whatever the formal boundaries are. But that is all you will be able to infer reasonably well.

In the far more important realm of intimate interpersonal communication, the odds that either party is making correct inferences go down significantly.

If we do not know someone’s mental state, we cannot know why they have communicated as they have. If our inferences about them are based on such questionable data, we are bound to make many more mistakes about them.

Reduction of neurosis through immediate feedback

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A recent study has found that persecutory delusions can be reduced by simulating fear-inducing situations in virtual reality.

…patients who fully tested out their fears in virtual reality by lowering their defences showed very substantial reductions in their paranoid delusions. After the virtual reality therapy session, over 50% of these patients no longer had severe paranoia at the end of the testing day. (Oxford study finds virtual reality can help treat severe paranoia)

The crux of what happened is patients faced and “fully tested out their fears.”

The virtual reality environment allowed them to “lower their defenses” enough to see that their initial fears were wrong. That they were mistakes.

Few people suffer full-blown persecutory delusions on the scale of the patients in this experiment, but I would maintain that all people everywhere suffer from “mistaken interpretations” that manifest as neuroses or delusions.

The virtual reality in the Oxford study allows for patients to face their “mistakes” (their exaggerated fears) and this is what reduces their paranoia.

The technique works because patients receive immediate feedback in real-time.

As they perceive in real-time that their delusions are not justified, they are reduced dramatically.

In FIML practice, a similar result is achieved through the FIML query and response with a caring partner.

All people are riddled with “mistaken interpretations” that wrongly define their sense of who they are and what is going on around them.

A basic tenet of FIML is that immediate truthful feedback reduces and eventually extirpates these mistakes.

FIML allows people to “lower their defenses” by focusing on micro-units of communication as they arise in real-time.

The study is here: Virtual reality in the treatment of persecutory delusions: randomised controlled experimental study testing how to reduce delusional conviction.

I believe the findings of this study lend support to the theory of FIML practice:

FIML practice eliminates neuroses because it shows individuals, through real data, that their (neurotic) interpretation(s) of their partner are mistaken.

This is why you need FIML

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FIML not only accesses individual word maps but also the maps of all communicative signs.

Here is the brain model of semantic maps.

And here is the study: Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex.

Here is a brief article about the study: Scans Show ‘Brain Dictionary’ Groups Words By Meaning. From this article:

Gallant says the findings contradict two beliefs nonscientists commonly have about the brain. First, that only the left hemisphere handles language. Second, that the brain has localized regions that handle specific tasks.

Edit: When you frequently access your word maps with the help of your FIML partner, both of you will become much more conscious of how these maps are structured and how they function during acts of communication.

This allows partners to make conscious meta-decisions to change and improve these maps in any way they want.

The meaning held in semantic maps (or semiotic maps) is the very meaning of your life as you understand it.

Not only do your maps form the basis of your communication with others, they also form the basis of how you understand yourself. How you communicate with yourself.

Gaining access to these maps is extremely liberating because it allows a degree of control over your own mind that few of us ever experience.

When we say that FIML has no content, no required beliefs, this can be understood as meaning that FIML gives us access to our own maps and control over them.

What you do with this access is entirely up to you and your partner.

Is consciousness continuous or discrete?

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Is consciousness a continuous flow of awareness without intervals or is it something that emerges continually at discrete points in a cascade of microbits?

The Buddhist answer has always been the latter.

The Buddha’s five skandha explanation of perception and consciousness says that there are four discrete steps that are the basis of consciousness.

The five skandhas are form, sensation, perception, activity, consciousness. A form can arise in the mind or outside of the mind. This form gives rise to a sensation, which gives rise to perception, followed by activity (mental or physical), and lastly consciousness. In the Buddha’s explanation, the five skandhas occur one after the other, very rapidly. They are not a continuous stream but rather a series of discrete or discernible moments. A form arises or appears, then there is a sensation, then perception, then activity, then consciousness. (The five skandhas and modern science)

The first four skandhas are normally unconscious. Buddhist mindfulness and meditation training are importantly designed to help us become conscious of each of the five skandhas as they actually function in real-time.

A study from 2014—Amygdala Responsivity to High-Level Social Information from Unseen Faces—supports the five skandha explanation. From that study:

The findings demonstrate that the amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived, suggesting that the amygdala’s processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously described. (emphasis added)

A few days ago, a new model of how consciousness arises was proposed. This model is being called a “two-stage” model, but it is based on research and conclusions derived from that research that support the Buddha’s five skandha explanation of consciousness.

The study abstract:

We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images. To explain how the temporal resolution of human vision can be fast compared to sluggish conscious perception, we propose a novel conceptual framework in which features of objects, such as their color, are quasi-continuously and unconsciously analyzed with high temporal resolution. Like other features, temporal features, such as duration, are coded as quantitative labels. When unconscious processing is “completed,” all features are simultaneously rendered conscious at discrete moments in time, sometimes even hundreds of milliseconds after stimuli were presented. (Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?) (emphasis added)

I, of course, completely support science going where the evidence leads and am not trying to shoehorn these findings into a Buddhist package. Nonetheless, that does sound a lot like a slimmed-down version of the five skandhas. Considering these and other recent findings in a Buddhist light may help science resolve more clearly what is actually happening in the brain/mind.

As for form-sensation-perception-activity-consciousness, you might suddenly think of your mother, or the history of China, or the spider that just climbed onto your shoulder.

In Buddhist terms, initially, each of those items is a form which leads to a sensation which leads to perception which leads to activity which leads to consciousness.

Obviously, the form of a spider on your shoulder differs from the form of the history of China. Yet both forms can be understood to produce positive, negative, or neutral sensations, after which we begin to perceive the form and then react to it with activity (either mental or physical or both) before becoming fully conscious of it.

In the case of the spider, the first four skandhas may happen so quickly, we will have reacted (activity) to it (the spider) before being conscious of what we are doing. The skandha of activity is deeply physical in this case, though once consciousness of the event arises our sense of what the first four skandhas were and are will change.

If we slapped the spider and think we killed it, our eyes will monitor it for movement. If it moves and we are sensitive in that way, we might shudder again and relive the minor panic that just occurred.

If we are sorry that we reacted without thinking and notice the spider is moving, we might feel relief that it is alive or sadness that it has been wounded.

In all cases, our consciousness of the original event, will constellate around the spider through monitoring it, our own reactions, and whatever else arises. Maybe our sudden movements brought someone else into the room.

The constellation of skandhas and angles of awareness can become very complex, but the skandhas will still operate in unique and/or feedback loops that can often be analyzed.

The word skandha means “aggregate” or “heap” indicating that the linear first-fifth explanation of how they operate is greatly simplified.

The above explanation of the spider can also be applied to the form skandhas of the history of China or your mother when they suddenly arise in your mind, or anything else.

We can also perceive the skandhas when our minds bring in new information from memory or wander. As we read, for example, it is normal for other forms to enter our minds from our memories. Some of these forms will enhance our reading and some of them will cause our minds to wander.

Either way, our consciousness is always slightly jumpy because it emerges continually at discrete points in a cascade of microbits, be they called skandhas or something else.

_________________

See also: How the brain produces consciousness in ‘time slices’

Interview with researcher David Nutt on the effects of LSD

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From the interview:

…Why study the effects of LSD on the brain?

For brain researchers, studying how psychedelic drugs such as LSD alter the ‘normal’ brain state is a way to study the biological phenomenon that is consciousness. (Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness)

The actual study is here: Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging.

Another article on this study can be found here: Brain scans show how LSD mimics mind of a baby.

Current scientific research confirms what many understood in the 1950s and 60s—that LSD used wisely often leads to good outcomes, increasing “creativity,” lessening depression, and removing addictive behaviors.

I know am a bit of a Buddhist heretic when I say that I am pretty sure the Buddha would have approved of or not disapproved of LSD. I say this because the fifth precept does not mention the abuse of any other drug but alcohol. For more on this topic see: Are We Misunderstanding The Fifth Precept?

Repost: Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice

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By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses.

In FIML, a neurotic response is defined as “an emotional response based on a misinterpretation.” The misinterpretation in question can be incipient (just starting) to long-seated (been a habit for years).

The response is disrupted by FIML practice and, thus, tends not to consolidate or reconsolidate, especially after several instances of learning that it is not valid.

A neurotic response is a response based on memory. The following study on fear memories supports the above explanation of FIML practice.

Memories become labile when recalled. In humans and rodents alike, reactivated fear memories can be attenuated by disrupting reconsolidation with extinction training. Using functional brain imaging, we found that, after a conditioned fear memory was formed, reactivation and reconsolidation left a memory trace in the basolateral amygdala that predicted subsequent fear expression and was tightly coupled to activity in the fear circuit of the brain. In contrast, reactivation followed by disrupted reconsolidation suppressed fear, abolished the memory trace, and attenuated fear-circuit connectivity. Thus, as previously demonstrated in rodents, fear memory suppression resulting from behavioral disruption of reconsolidation is amygdala-dependent also in humans, which supports an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism. (Source: Disruption of Reconsolidation Erases a Fear Memory Trace in the Human Amygdala)

FIML practice works by partners consciously and cooperatively disrupting reconsolidation (and initial consolidation) of neurotic memory (and associated behaviors). FIML both extirpates habitual neurotic responses and also prevents the formation of new neurotic responses through conscious disruption of memory consolidation.

FIML probably works as well as it does because humans have “an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism” that favors more truth. Obvious examples of this update mechanism can be seen in many simple mistakes. For instance, if you think the capital of New York State is New York City and someone shows that it is Albany, you will likely correct your mistake immediately with little or no fuss.

Since FIML focuses on small mistakes made between partners, corrections are rarely more difficult than the above example though they may be accompanied by a greater sense of relief. For example, if you thought that maybe your partner was mad at you but then find (through a FIML query) that they are not, your sense of relief may be considerable.

Two studies on instruments reading or affecting brain states

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Science is getting closer to using instruments to accurately determine brain states and/or affect them.

One recent study deals with the cruder outlines of tone of voice— happiness, sadness, or fear—showing that the way we process our own tone of voice is probably the same as the way we process other people’s tones of voice.

From the abstract:

…our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others.  (Covert digital manipulation of vocal emotion alter speakers’ emotional states in a congruent direction)

Additionally, this study shows that we are affected by our own tones of voice without being consciously aware of that. If you want to cheer up, speak more cheerfully and it will affect you as well as others, though obviously this can be taken too far.

The other study, which was conducted on people undergoing neurosurgery, shows that

…continuous auditory representations… could be accurately reconstructed from measured neural signals. (Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex)

Buddhist morality and Human Germline Engineering

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The methods and implications of Human Germline Engineering (HGE) are succinctly outlined in the following:

Four kinds of scientific and technological progress are bringing the revolution on-line. They work in tandem. First, geneticists figure out which genes do what, individually and in combination. Second, neurologists map the human brain and trace its functions. Third, programmers create computer simulations that predict the effects of juggling genes. Fourth, bioengineers create better tools to cut and paste DNA strands.

All four of those disciplines have been racing ahead, especially in recent years. There is no reason to assume that any of them will run up against insurmountable obstacles. Nor is it obvious that prohibitive costs will block HGE development or restrict its availability to tycoons whose superhuman progeny will rule the rest of us. On the contrary, DNA technology shows every sign of being amenable to the same types of forces that catapulted silicon chip development forward so powerfully. Indeed, society and the law may find it hard to regulate hobbyists creating new forms of life in their basements. (Source: Human Germline Engineering: the Game-Changer)

Highly recommend the article.

The moral implications of HGE are interesting. Some fear it will give more power to the already rich and powerful, some claim it violates religious morals or the sanctity of life, some that we will create monsters.

From a Buddhist point of view—as long as no greater harm is caused by HGE—there is no moral reason to oppose it.

Life arises due to conditions. If the conditions that give rise to life change, they are still giving rise to life.

If the conditions giving rise to life change to become more conscious, as with HGE, not only is there no problem with this but it may become morally difficult not to do it.

Cloning, making machines conscious, offloading human awareness into a machine, or doing HGE on the unborn do not violate Buddhist morality unless they are causing greater harm.

The parameters of the harm question can be debated, but the basic idea of humans creating life in their own image does not run counter to Buddhist moral thinking.

Study shows “ego depletion” may not be a thing after all

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This appears to be an important finding, overturning years of research and practice.

Everything Is Crumbling: An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked.

If “ego depletion” goes the way of salt, butter, Freud, BMI, and lobotomies, it will show yet again that widely accepted consensus, even in science, can be profoundly and fundamentally wrong.

How long before the science supporting the benefits of diversity and multiculturalism is honestly confronted by the science that shows opposite effects?

Self-deception

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Self-deception begins within seconds of listening or speaking.

Once committed to an interpretation or tending toward one, the brain builds on it quickly.

Once an interpretation has been built upon, the brain remembers it as what truly happened even if that is false.

This is normal. The human brain has evolved to use self-deception.

This probably happened because truer forms of communication are complex and use a lot of time. They can also be confusing and difficult.

Confusion, difficulty, and complexity interfere with social cohesion and motivation.

Strong self-deception deceives others better than weak self-deception or no self-deception. In this way, it promotes social cohesion and motivation.

Self-deception can be observed and understood if it is caught quickly. The best way to catch it is through a technique like FIML.

Self-deception is a kind of neurosis, delusion, false cognition. Nevertheless, we are so used to it, we can feel lost without it.

If self-deception is discovered many times through FIML practice, it does not present as a philosophy or attitude or whole picture of the mind. Nor does it present as a neurosis, delusion, or false cognition.

Rather it presents as a composite of many pixels—many small instances—of observed and corrected mistakes.

Thus seen as an aggregation of many small instances, self-deception gradually is lessened.

Repost: Semiotic proprioception in dreams and waking

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Proprioception means “one’s own” or “ones’ individual” (Latin proprius) “perception.”

We normally use this word to refer to our physical position in the world—whether we are standing or sitting, how we are moving, and how much energy we are using.

When we dream, our capacity for physical movement, with rare exceptions, is paralyzed. But we still do a sort of proprioception in dreams—a semiotic proprioception, or proprioception within the semiology of the dream.

In dreams, we grope through semiotic associations and respond, gropingly, to them. People and things often look smaller in dreams, or distorted, because we do not have either the need or the capacity to calibrate our physical proprioception as we do in waking life.

Dreams move from one semiotic proprioception to another via our individual four-dimensional (3D plus time) groping/associative function. In one short segment of a dream we are at home, then we go through a door only to find ourselves on a boat in the ocean. Our 4D semiotic proprioception within dreams readily accepts groping, associative shifts like this.

Much of what we perceive when we are awake is memory. We glance at a room we know well and call up our memory of it rather than actually look closely at the room.

I am fairly sure that the memories we call up to aid perception while we are awake are much the same as the groping proprioception we experience in dreams. A major difference is when we are awake we can and do check our waking proprioception with the people and objects around us, while in dreams the associative function has a much freer range.

Notice how dreams move from scene to scene rather slowly. Things can go quickly, but normally dreams grope somewhat slowly along the 4D path of semiotic proprioception.

In waking life, our dreamy use of memory and association to aid perception of the world happens constantly.

When we speak with another person, we use this function to make groping associations concerning what we think they are saying. We grope and respond to them as in a dream while at the same time searching for clues that indicate we are both on the same page.

These clues that two people may sort of “agree on” while speaking are normally standard public semiotics that belong to whatever culture(s) they share. By “agreeing” on them, we form a sort of agreeable camaraderie with whomever we are speaking, and this can be satisfying, but if we only get this, it can also become deeply unsatisfying.

The four dimensional groping/dreamy function of our mind is far richer than any standard collection of public semiotics. In our public lives—professional, commercial, based on organizations, etc.—we have, at present, little recourse but to accept normal public semiotics, to agree with them and manifest agreement.

We can express some deviation from them and sometimes makes jokes about them, but we are generally fairly bound to the semiotics of the culture or organization that generates the context of our speaking. Consider how people in the same church or school are bound by the semiotics of those institutions.

In our intimate relations, however, we do have recourse to investigate and understand how our groping, 4D semiotic proprioception works. This is what FIML does. It allows partners to observe, analyze, and understand the semiotic proprioceptions of their minds as they are actually functioning during interpersonal communication.

If you constantly avoid FIML types of investigations, you will be stuck with a mix of dimly shared public/private semiotics that will tend to become highly ambiguous, even volatile, or very shallow.

The power of words and habit formation

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How we use and hear words becomes a habit.

A recent study on personal space, reported in Personal Space Is a Fear Response, shows that this fear response can be stimulated by words alone.

When placed in an MRI—and told a person was standing over the machine—[people with normal amygdalae] showed heightened activity in their amygdala; when they were told the person was further away from the machine, the activity returned to normal. This shows, says the study’s leader, Ralph Adolphs, that the belief that someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.

You could also say that just hearing the words that “someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.”

I doubt I need to illustrate this idea as most readers are surely aware that all people have many strong emotional responses to words, gestures, facial expressions, as well as personal space encroachments.

Another recent study, unsurprisingly, shows that forming a habit leaves a lasting mark on specific circuits in the brain. In more detail:

In the basal ganglia, two main types of paths carry opposing messages: One carries a ‘go’ signal which spurs an action, the other a ‘stop’ signal.

Experiments by Duke neurobiology graduate student Justin O’Hare found that the stop and go pathways were both more active in the sugar-habit mice. O’Hare said he didn’t expect to see the stop signal equally ramped up in the habit brains, because it has been traditionally viewed as the factor that helps prevent a behavior.

The team also discovered a change in the timing of activation in the two pathways. In mice that had formed a habit, the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway. In non-habit brains, the stop signal preceded the go.

These changes in the brain circuitry were so long-lasting and obvious that it was possible for the group to predict which mice had formed a habit just by looking at isolated pieces of their brains in a petri dish. (same link as just above)

The study on habits is about mice with sugar habits, but I think it is fair to hypothesize that something similar happens with humans in their use of communication cues.

Humans, in my view, habituate to semiotic stimuli in much the same way that mice habituate to sugar.

The Duke study shows that the stop pathway grew as much as the go pathway in the mice, the main difference being that the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway.

Since human language and its uses is more complex than mice habituated to too much sugar, there must be many more stop and go pathways within the language and communication networks of human beings.

Many of these pathways will be similar among people in the same culture, but many of them won’t. Each human being is a repository of a multitude of idiosyncratic emotional and semantic responses and outputs.

So how do you figure out what your pathways are? And how do you correct ones that aren’t working well? And similarly, how do you figure out your partner’s pathways?

FIML practice helps partners to both identify their idiosyncratic communication habits and correct ones that are not working well. FIML finds and corrects pathways through micro-analysis.

It seems very likely to me that a FIML-style analysis corrects mistaken communication pathways by bringing the stop pathway to the fore. When a particular mistaken response is stopped a few times and under analysis seen to be wrong, the go pathways for that response will tend to be extirpated.

By using words to analyze micro units of miscommunication, FIML partners tap into the power of words to change actual pathways of neurons in their brains, thus reorganizing the deep linguistic basis of habitual psychological responses, no matter how idiosyncratic.

Alcoholism

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Here is a photo entitled “one year sober.” Says it all.

Here is a book on alcoholism by James Graham: Vessels of Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism.

I recommend this book for just about anyone because alcoholism affects just about everyone. There is only a small chance that your life has not been significantly impacted by an alcoholic—be it a relative, spouse, friend, teacher, boss, colleague, etc.

In his book, Graham focuses on alcoholic behavior rather than how much the person is drinking or how to stop drinking. This focus provides a needed emphasis on the harm alcoholics do to others.

I am not now and never have been an alcoholic but have relatives and friends who are. A consistent theme with this disease is the non-alcoholics close to alcoholics do not understand what is happening.

They miss hundreds of clues because they do not understand how the disease starts and progresses and what its signs are. Graham’s book does a good job of correcting this.

Most people can identify end-stage alcoholics because they have stopped concealing their drinking and because they look the part. What is needed is being able to identify the early and middle stages of this disease, the symptoms of which include egomania, malice, false accusations, denial, lying, superficial charm, emotional abuse, and sometimes violence.

The wisdom of the Buddha shows in his making the fifth of the five precepts (guidelines for lay Buddhists) “no irresponsible use of alcohol.”

I am fine with calling alcoholism a disease because it harms as surely as a virus and because there is a genetic component to it. Early and middle stage alcoholics generally can drink great quantities of alcohol and not appear drunk. And generally they do not suffer hangovers.

I have two alcoholic friends who say booze affects them like coffee and one who claims he likes hangovers “because you’re still drunk!”

Having only recently woken up to the seriousness and commonness of alcoholism (maybe 7% of US adults, maybe more), I am very sympathetic to people who simply don’t get it.

My experiences with four near-relatives and several friends, whose behaviors included two attempted suicides and numerous bouts of abuse and delirium, at last got me to see how destructive alcoholism is.

I am no moralist and have many flaws of my own and hate sounding preachy. But alcoholism is a real danger to the drinker and to others and the sooner you figure it out, the better. They’re all around you.

If you are an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking completely and never touch that shit again as long as you live.