![]() Mc. Laren Hits House, Mc. Laren Loses. I don’t know if you’ve ever played this simple game called Rock- Paper- Scissors, but one aspect of it—the paper beats rock part—is infinitely confusing and illogical. How does paper beat rock? In the real world, when you have things like House- Mc. Daily paper. Local, state, and wire news and commentary. Photo galleries, business and obituaries.I don’t know if you’ve ever played this simple game called Rock-Paper-Scissors, but one aspect of it—the paper beats rock part—is infinitely confusing and. Wyden is asking ICE to answer the following questions about its Stingray use before June 30: 1. How many times has ICE used stingrays or similar surveillance. Whether you're here to give help or to get it, The Home Depot Community is your place for project collaboration. Fox News, the president’s favorite TV channel, is just asking questions. But not about anything important. Last night, most people were talking about the explosive. A This could be honey fungus, armillaria, which wisteria is particularly vulnerable to. Dig down around the roots and see if there are any root-like fungal strands. BibMe Free Bibliography & Citation Maker - MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. Laren- Fire, it works out much more logically. For instance, if you smash your Mc. Laren 5. 70. S into a brick house in England, the house will win. And if your Mc. Laren happens to catch fire after the smashing into said house, it will burn to a crisp, according to Sky News. Each week, Roads & Kingdoms and Slate publish a new dispatch from around the globe. For more foreign correspondence mixed with food, war, travel, and photography. Remember that viral video from last summer showing a bus breeze by traffic by driving right over it? It was supposed to revolutionize traffic in the notoriously. I don’t think they’re gleefully. The Mc. Laren will lose in every single one of these situations. Luckily, the two passengers were able to escape only with minor injuries by the time the local fire department showed up at around 6: 3. ![]() ![]() It’s unclear if anyone was home during the time of the crash, but as you can tell from the photos, the car seemed to have hit the house decently hard: a bunch of the brickwork fell away. The brickwork around the door also collapsed. Though it’s nothing compared to the disintegration experienced by the Mc. Laren. The fire department said that the car was on fire upon their arrival. They were able to successfully put the fire out. Slate Star Codex. Don’t take any of this seriously until it’s replicated and endorsed by other people.? As the face started to turn away from you, your brain did. It turns out your visual system has really strong views about whether faces should be inside- out or not, and it’s willing to execute a hard override on perception if it doesn’t like what it sees. But not always. Some people get glitchier glitches than others; a few seem almost immune. Studies find schizophrenics and autistic people to be consistently less glitchy than the rest of us. The correlation’s not perfect. But it’s definitely there. Something about these people’s different cognitive processing styles lets them see through the illusion. I wanted to replicate this result myself. So a few months ago, when I surveyed readers of my blog, I included some questions about perceptual illusions (including a static version of the hollow mask). I got five thousand responses, including a few from schizophrenic and autistic readers. Sure enough, the effect was there. Schizophrenic readers were about twice as likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion as non- schizophrenics (2. They were also more likely to have a weak reaction to a similar illusion, the Spinning Dancer (5. Readers with a family history of schizophrenia landed in between schizophrenics and healthy controls (1. Autistic readers were only slightly more likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion than neurotypicals (1. There was no different between autists and neurotypicals on the Spinning Dancer, not even a weak trend (5. Looking deeper, I found a few other anomalies on illusion perception. Most were small and inconsistent. But one stood out: transgender people had an altered response pattern on both illusions, stronger than the alteration for autism and almost as strong as the one for schizophrenia (mask: cis 1. These results are very tentative, and need replication. My mass survey isn’t a very sensitive instrument, and I place low confidence in any of this until other people can confirm. But for now, it sure looks like a signal. Something seems off about transgender people’s perception, something deep enough to alter the lowest- level components of visual processing. If it’s real, what could it be? II. A few days ago, trans blogger Zinnia Jones asked me if there might be any neurochemical reason trans people dissociate so much. Dissociation is a vague psychiatric symptom where you feel like you’re not real, or the world isn’t real, or you’re detached from the world, or something like that. It sounds weird, but if you explain it to someone who’s had it, they’ll say “Oh yeah, that thing!” It’s usually unpleasant, and tends to occur in PTSD, borderline personality, and extreme stress. And in transgender people. The only formal study I can find on this describes it as “greatly prevalent”, and suggests that up to 3. This matches trans people’s self- reports (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Anecdotally (according to Zinnia’s impression of the trans community) and formally (see Costa & Colizzi 2. Intuitively this makes sense. Trans people feel like they’re “trapped in the wrong body”, so of course they feel detached from their bodies / like their bodies aren’t real / like their bodies aren’t theirs. Hormone therapy helps solve the “wrong body” problem, so it also solves the dissociative symptoms. We aim to bridge psychosocial and biological levels of explanation. We can say that someone is stressed out because their boss overworks them, but also because they’re secreting high levels of cortisol. We can say that someone is depressed because they broke up with their boyfriend, but also because they have decreased synaptogenesis in their hippocampus. Causation gets tricky, and this is a philosophical minefield for sure, but overall these two levels should be complementary rather than competitive. So what’s the biological correlate to trans people having dissociation problems? Practically all searches for the biological basis of dissociation end up at the NMDA glutamate receptor, one of the many neurotransmitter systems in the brain. Even though its cousins dopamine and serotonin usually get top billing, glutamate is probably the brain’s most important neurotransmitter, and NMDA glutamate receptors in particular are involved in all sorts of interesting things. Drugs that block NMDA receptors cause dissociation. The most famous dissociative anaesthetic, ketamine, is an NMDA antagonist. So is DXM, a recreational drug that causes dissociation in abusers. Wikipedia’s list of dissociative drugs is basically just fifty- five NMDA antagonists in a row. The only other category they list are kappa opioid agonists, and kappa opioid agonism probably – you guessed it – antagonize NMDA. If we take this result seriously, every substance we know of that causes dissociation is an NMDA antagonist in some way. Does anything improve NMDA function – an effect we might expect to alleviate dissociation? Yes, and among a list of intimidating research chemicals called things like “aminocyclopropanecarboxylic acid” is one familiar name: estrogen. See eg El- Bakri et al, which finds that “estrogen modulates NMDA receptors function in the brain. Mc. Ewen et al: “One of the long- term effects of estradiol . And trans women get better when they take estrogen, a hormone that improves NMDA function. That’s interesting. But what does this have to do with those optical illusions? III. The Hollow Mask illusion and its cousins may depend on NMDA function. To oversimplify: the brain interprets the world through Bayesian calculations. In Corlett et al’s model, it communicates top- down priors (ie assumptions based on previous knowledge about the world) through NMDA receptors and bottom- up new evidence through AMPA receptors. They write: In a hierarchical cortical system in which representations become more abstract with increasing distance from the primary input, higher levels of the hierarchy specify top- down predictions through NMDA receptor signaling and any mismatches between expectancy and experience are conveyed upward through the hierarchy via rapid AMPA and GABA signaling. When you see a hollow mask, the brute facts of how the mask looks are your bottom- up sensory evidence. Your top- down prior is that every other face you’ve seen for your entire life has been normal, not inside- out. Given the strength of the prior, the prior wins, and your brain interprets the mask as a normal face. Unless your brain is bad at applying priors, ie its NMDA receptors aren’t working that well. Then it just sticks with the bottom- up sensory evidence showing that the mask is hollow. Schizophrenia and autism both probably involve decreased NMDA function in different ways. For schizophrenia, see eg Olney, NMDA receptor hypofunction model of schizophrenia, and Coyle, NMDA receptor and schizophrenia: a brief history. Ketamine seems to replicate the symptoms of schizophrenia pretty well and is commonly used as a model for the disorder. For autism, see eg Lee, NMDA receptor dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders and this study where screwing with NMDA receptors in mice seems to turn them autistic. From this we would predict that estrogen would help treat schizophrenia and autism. Schizophrenia is more common and more severe in men than women, with researchers noting that “gonadal steroids may play a role in buffering females against the development of schizophrenia”. Women are known to sometimes get schizophrenia triggered by menopause when their estrogen levels decrease. Estrogen supplementation is an effective schizophrenia treatment, and there’s some interest in developing estrogen receptor modulators that can help schizophrenic men without making them grow breasts. Meanwhile, autism continues to be about four times more common in men than women, autistic women tend to have more “male- typical brains”, and although it’s considered unethical to treat autistic boys with estrogen, it works in mice and fish. Once again, doctors are looking into estrogen analogues that don’t turn people female as possible autism treatments. We might also predict that estrogen would increase glitching on the hollow mask. I can’t study this directly, but on the survey, 1. Since women have more estrogen, that looks good for the theory. Transgender people have higher rates of autism and schizophrenia. The Atlantic actually had a good article about this recently : The Link Between Autism And Trans Identity. They cite one study showing 8% autism rate in trans people (compared to 1- 2% in the general population), and another showing that autistic people were 7. Apparently a lot of trans people have problems getting hormone therapy because their doctors think the gender issues are “just” because of their autism. Some might say that denying people estrogen because they have a condition which studies suggest estrogen can successfully treat is a bit, I don’t know, crazy and evil, but I guess people get really weird around this stuff. My survey broadly confirms these numbers. Autism rates were sky- high in every category – it’s almost as if the sorts of people who like reading blogs about how gender is all just NMDA receptors skew more autistic than average – but there was a remarkable difference across gender identities. The survey also finds that about 4% of non- schizophrenic people were transgender, compared to 2. Other people have noticed the same connection, and I’ve met more schizophrenic transgender people than I would expect by chance given the very low rates of both conditions. If this is right, we end up with this rich set of connections between schizophrenics, autistics, ketamine, dissociative experiences, estrogen, gender identity, and the hollow mask. Anything that decreases NMDA function – schizophrenia, autism, ketamine – will potentially cause dissociative experiences and decreased glitching on the mask illusion. Estrogen will improve NMDA function, treat dissociative experiences, and bring back hollow- mask glitching.
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