by Mark Goode
Lisa chuckled and held out her hands as if revealing a prize on a gameshow. “I would like you to see our patient now, Jack, and to divulge to you that she is really my stepsister!”
The woman stepped out of the sunlight and said, “Hello, Jack. I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”
Jack closed the distance between them and swept Angela into his arms. Time stopped as they embraced.
“As you can see, Angela has made a remarkable ‘recovery’ from her stroke,” Lisa said, both women laughing.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable. We have much to talk about,” Angela said as she poured three glasses of wine.
Over the next several days, Jack learned that Angela had uncovered the mysterious deaths of the laboratory personnel as a result of their cleanup of the theft of the viral genome that contained the chloroplast DNA. She had astutely reasoned that the military was responsible for the theft, and it was unlikely she could stop them from taking what they wanted. She felt sorry for her friend Emma, who must have been the token scientist the military had coerced into committing the theft. Fearing for her career and life, Angela had proceeded to create the perfect storm, simultaneously removing herself from the lab and harm.
This gave the perpetrators what appeared to be the perfect opportunity to impugn her and turn her into the scapegoat. Her stroke was a deception. She and Lisa, her neurologist sister, had created the CT scan images of a brain hemorrhage, they had strategized the entire hospitalization, and had manufactured the illness in Angela’s electronic medical record.
Similarly, they had worked to make the trial a theatrical masterpiece, scripted and calculated. They intended to clear Angela of wrongdoing and reveal to the world the urgent need to safely contain the technology she had developed. Equally important, however, was the acknowledgment of the need for ongoing lifelong commitment and support for those trained to protect our society, our veterans, from suicide.
Jack would also learn of Angela’s love and admiration for the man who figured it all out on the battlefield and who led the soldiers out of harm’s way by singing a song.
From that moment on, they would spend the rest of their lives admiring one another. I never saw two people more devoted to each other.
Who would have known that our genome harbored a gene sequence for self-destruction? Or that it would manifest as chaos in the most sophisticated supercomputer known, the human brain? Although ruled not guilty, my grandmother Angela had to live with the knowledge that she was indirectly responsible for the apopticide of an entire generation.
She, Grandpa Jack, and my entire family have instead used this discovery to explore the biological and neurological underpinnings of suicide, and we know a lot more about how to combat this built-in behavior sequence by removing chaos from the brain and resetting our neural networks to a baseline state of peace and tranquility.
That winter after they met and fell in love, efforts to combat the global heat problem came to fruition. Jack and Angela went outside and watched it snow. With the prospects looking better for humankind and the planet, they celebrated by going skiing.
Chapter 20
Nick’s Reset.com
The preceding story is my version of how my grandparents met and what happened during the period of the Water Wars. After that global upheaval, they raised their family, many animals, and experienced the tragic loss of a daughter. I am fortunate to have had such amazing grandparents. I cannot even attempt to catalog their many accomplishments.
I finally figured out how to commune with my grandmother via the olfactory interface lab at Reset.com. It is a soothing and comforting transcendental experience reminiscent of time spent with her when she was alive. I am always amazed that the lab actually smells of the sauna in Switzerland and the eucalyptus that grandmother rubbed on my chest. Curiously, for several hours afterward I can detect the subtle aroma of gardenias.
I remain in the family business of helping others. I believe this was preordained by my grandmother’s seminal work in quantum computer science and invention of the DNA coprocessor and my father’s work on pheromones and behavior. I am the computer scientist in charge of the multidisciplinary team at Reset.com.
And we are the capital M of multidisciplinary therapy. We have many programs that include physicians, scientists, and diverse types of therapists. We focus on brain health. Patients undergo a thorough medical evaluation followed by network analysis of brain states. We look for activated states and ways to reset or mitigate them. Most importantly, we assign a permanent therapist to you for life.
Good mental and brain health require a lifetime of maintenance, no different from taking care of your physical body. Our clients visit us regularly after brain reset and often as part of their ongoing commitment to mental and physical health. It’s like they then become part of the family.
That’s good, because we want to include as many as possible in this wave my kin started to redefine our culture. We now better understand not only the ramifications of the things we do to each other and require of ourselves but also the importance of maintaining the focus on mental health. Like a brain network, we believe the better connected we are, the more healthy we as a society become.
Epilogue
The following brief stories illustrate interactions between the physical body, innate behaviors, and chaos in man and machine.
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stress and the end of life
Stressed beyond the point of no return, adaptive energy spent death awaits.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.
The surgeons did a magnificent technical job repairing the clogged coronary arteries. And every day the care team assessed the patient’s condition and modified the therapeutic plan. Even still, the patient was losing ground and falling behind. For a short time, there seemed to be improvement, but then progress stalled.
Then came the fevers. Blood tests suggested the possibility of infection, which was then confirmed when the incision was opened. Antibiotics, nutrition, and wound care were prescribed.
Yet the patient languished, showing no signs of improvement or healing.
“We’re missing something!” the surgeon proclaimed. “There must be another source of infection. It must be the gallbladder. Have the general surgeon see the patient and remove it.”
The two surgeons almost went to blows when the general surgeon refused.
“I am not going to stand here and watch my patient die!” the cardiac surgeon shouted. “I will remove it myself if I have to.”
“The gallbladder is not the organ of death,” the general surgeon responded. “Removing it will not change the outcome. This patient has entered the death spiral of a failing immune system and has expended all of his adaptive energy. Short of a miracle, this cannot be reversed.”
“Nonsense!” the cardiac surgeon said. “You are killing my patient with your therapeutic nihilism.”
They ultimately had to agree to disagree. The patient, unable to rise to the challenge, with life energy exhausted, would not survive.
So, the dance of life and death continues.
The body is well equipped with adrenaline, stress hormones, and other adaptive responses. This capital account is drawn upon in times of stress to help weather the storm of life.
But there is a limit to the amount of stress we can endure.
When the stress account is drained and attempts to replenish it are unsuccessful, energy production fails, apoptosis and death may result. This is a difficult lesson, not only for the physician but for everyone.
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Behavioral scripts
What is instinct? How are these scripted programs of innate wisdom realized? Where are they stored within our brains and bodies and how do they become manifest?
Winter had broken,
and warmer spring weather arrived. The tulips emerged from the earth. New leaves and blossoms appeared on the trees. The lake was brimming full. A good morning for a walk with the dogs. They immediately ran for the point, somehow knowing it was there, perhaps they could hear it swimming. The male dog pulled out a gosling and delivered it to the shore. The dog’s owner was aghast. “Bad dog!” he said, lashing the dog’s hind quarters with a stick. The gosling lay there motionless on the ground. The man grabbed it and tossed it into the lake. The dog took two steps toward it, but then turned and licked his hind quarters, only now perceiving the pain of the previous lashing.
Short of a shock collar, no amount of obedience training would prevent the dog from executing this particular behavioral script.
Similarly, and brilliantly, the gosling acted out an Academy Award-winning performance. The dog released the gosling, the man tossed it into the lake, both thinking it was dead. Miraculously, the gosling swam away to join its family.
There are many examples of innate or hardwired behaviors in the animal kingdom. It is unwise and survival is unlikely when you are unwittingly caught up in them: if you walk into a den of lions, likely you will become dinner. Try to pet an alligator, and you may lose a hand. Although there are anecdotal reports of communing with grizzlies or dancing with wolves, most likely the animals’ failure to execute their innate behavioral scripts had something to do with them not perceiving the person as a threat. Or they had just eaten and were not hungry.
Humans also possess a repertoire of behavioral scripts. Indeed, we have spent thousands of years trying to reconcile them in our lives and culture. Humankind is blessed with consciousness, brought to us by the advanced processing abilities of the prefrontal cerebral cortex of the brain and the miracle of the executive network.
Our consciousness gives us the ability to overrule innate behaviors. By drawing upon past experience and learning, we can look into the past and anticipate the future results of our actions and exercise choice. Although we eat to satisfy hunger, we may also discriminate and can choose whether the food we eat is appealing or healthy.
We like to impart human qualities to our pets and animals; however, they do not have the ability to exercise judgment, and the predatory among them are unlikely to stop hunting prey.
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chaos and computers
Control + Alt + Delete and the spinning beach ball of death.
Countless hours have been spent by computer nerds and hobbyist as well as frustrated users of these devices at home and work. In the not-too-distant past we could install our own software replace hard drives and CD ROM drives and add memory with impunity.
Even our children knew that occasionally you just had to reboot. Although this still occurs it is much less common in the world of protected memory and auto updates. It is rumored that our smart phones possess more computing power than early spacecraft.
Recently, I lost my phone cover, placing my unprotected smart phone into my pocket I went skiing. When I was done the phone had entered some bazaar mode and displayed a message that it had disabled itself. The user interface was useless. I could’ve obtained the same result by giving it to a toddler to play with.
Once rebooted there was a message from my wife, the recipient of multiple emergency messages and unintentional dialing, asking that I check in to confirm my safety.
What’s going on in our devices when this occurs? Multiple conflicting inputs or instructions, perhaps corrupted memory or software. The system was overloaded having ventured into chaos. The processor reached the inevitable conflict, unable to further compute, in its dying breath executed one last script to display the white flag of surrender and crashed. This common scenario highlights the reality that complicated electronic devices such as computers are vulnerable to the development of chaos.
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THE EMOTION CHIP: A HIGHER LEVEL OF InTIMACY
Major advances in computing science including artificial intelligence and learning ushered in the development of robotics. Robots were being built for multiple purposes including domestic, industrial and ultimately military applications. The robotic engineers reasoned that it would be possible to add increasing layers of functionality and impart a higher level of behavior to these machines. By Dissecting human behaviors into a library of scripted algorithms and incorporating them into their new robots The Engineers hoped to develop robots that were more human like.
The root level behaviors consisted of things like; seeking food, water, and shelter from the elements. Additional behaviors with survival value included seeking a mate, reproduction and self-preservation strategies such as fight or flight. Admittedly however these root behaviors are not pertinent to robots. The engineers became more godlike as they imparted more sophisticated qualities into their machines made possible by the development of better and faster computer processors.
Soon it became possible to design and build robots for specific purposes based on the types of behavioral subroutines they possessed.
Ultimately the robots with their adaptive artificial intelligence developed consciousness and became self-aware.
The ultimate level of perfection arrived with the development of a 100 Teraflop emotion chip processor. All of the robots wanted one of course and acquiring one allowed them to enter into a new culture of robot relationships. This new level of intimacy was made possible when consenting robots connected their data ports allowing the exchange of behavioral subroutines and the experience of sharing one another’s processors.
Not everything was perfect in robot land however, as occasionally the robot’s processors would develop an undefined mathematical state. This was horrific to the robotic mind. The chaos that developed as a consequence required disabling the emotion processor, and some robots turned themselves off.
One day at the Institute of robotic science the chief engineer developed acute chest pain and was taken to the emergency room with the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. He was rushed to the catheterization laboratory for a coronary artery stent. The doctors had good news to report, he had not had a heart attack, however they had to disable his emotion chip when it was revealed that he did not possess a heart and that he was not human.
afterword
Closing Tips
As we conclude our journey and thought experiment looking at the human behavior of suicide through the lens of apoptosis, chaos, and the acquisition of an activated brain state, I hope we can obtain a grip on this truly pandemic killer. Life presents challenges, and the pathway out of a situation may not be readily apparent.
It is important to realize that you can unknowingly get caught up in the conundrum.
Suicide has no social, economic, or geographic boundaries and does not discriminate. If you have a brain, you are vulnerable. Introverts, extroverts, mild-mannered or gregarious, seemingly happy, normal, high-functioning individuals can unexpectedly and suddenly take their own life.
There are many reasons people reach the breaking point. There may be warnings such as depression, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of despair, anxiety, hyperactivity, overstimulation, intrusive thoughts, or hallucinations, to name a few. Unfortunately, these signals may only be discovered in retrospect by those left behind who are looking for answers. Like the odorless, colorless, and tasteless gas carbon monoxide, suicide is often a silent killer. There are numerous examples where no one, not even the victim, was aware of the peril they were facing. Until we can develop a detector for the hypothetical activated brain state and chaos, we can only remain vigilant and have a high level of suspicion. Better to be wrong than grieving, having missed an opportunity to save a life.
If you suspect something say something. Circumstances beyond our control occur. We need to give ourselves permission and others consent to push the panic button on our behalf in recognition that lives are at stake. We must call for help immediately and rais
e the level of awareness in our society. As good Samaritans, we summon the paramedics, fire department, or police to respond to accidents, fires, or disturbances. Getting care for suicidal thoughts is no different from going to the ER for a bone fracture or deep laceration. Call 911 and tell them you need help. Doing so can avert a crisis, save a life.
Once you have enlisted help to deal with the immediate crisis, you will need ongoing treatment and follow-up, probably for life, at the direction of a therapist.
Fight fire with fire! Activate and challenge your brain. You must be an active participant in your own care to help create a new protective brain state.
The following are examples of everyday behaviors people have done to help themselves. The list is in no way complete and may not be applicable to you individually. Talk with your therapist and develop a coping strategy.
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prayer and meditation
Prayer and meditation can be extremely helpful. helpful. Even saying a word or phrase from a prayer can be very powerful. I chose the phrase even though in this book. It comes from the 23rd Psalm, and I have used it myself when facing extraordinary personal challenges. “Even though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil for thou are with me.”
A pastor friend once told me that although Psalm 23 is commonly read at funerals, it applies to daily life. For instance, if someone is falsely accusing, gossiping, or lying about you, in personal or work relationships, or perhaps you find yourself defending yourself in court or struggling for survival in any number of situations.
