Ivan Bogachev

One of the things that can happen in the graph of memories is cognitive dissonance. Memories just don't match each other or some data that comes from the inputs of the system.

It's not necessarily a bad thing. It happens all the time in every system that interacts with its environment. It changes. Data has to be updated. It takes some time. Meanwhile, some types of bugs can appear in the system. In human terms, you'll feel a bit confused.

The brain should be able to update the memory graph and remove the conflicts. In dissociative disorders we get lots of wrong connections simultaneously, and the process of recovery becomes tricky, even impossible in some cases, but if you're healthy, then you have nothing to worry about. This dissonance is a temporary inconvenience.

During traumatic events, you can get a serious dissonance. If you had a person who've been with you for your whole life, that person should be connected to a lot of things in the memory graph. If you lose him, it would take a lot of time to fix the connections. To make them match the world outside. It can become annoying at some point. Usually people start to notice the dissonances only in these harsh circumstances.

Technically, humor is a way to create small dissonances in controllable conditions. There are fifty shades of humor. The black one is the closest to the things that psychologists may perceive as traumas. But the joke is tiny. It doesn't hit any deep connections in the graph. The brain quickly adapts to the dissonance. It's not disturbing.

In some sense, black humor is like a vaccine. You get a minor feeling of dissonance in the context of traumatic events. You get comfortable with it. When the time comes, you don't feel too confused. It's not about positive emotions and laughing, but about your ability to sit tight while your brain is working hard to fix the outdated connections in the memory.

It seems like this is not a very popular opinion in psychological circles, but maybe we should be less serious. And this relates to the academic community as well. Professionals often stick to old theories. It's hard to make a discussion. It's hard to bring new approaches. They feel too confused. Too anxious. Lost. It becomes much easier if you draw the horns on the portrait of grandpa Freud on that wall and ask some silly questions from time to time.

Make a cup of humor every morning. Make it black. Enjoy it. Open the window. Let the sweet smell of exhaust gases with a fresh note of garbage accompany the beautiful melody of your neighbour's drill. The world can wait.

To eat, or not to eat? That is the question. Or not. Not really, isn't it? The law of conservation of energy suggests that you cannot get energy from nothing, which means that every organism has to include an energy conversion subsystem in it. Every human has to eat. Every mammal. Every living thing. Every alien. Every robot. Every zombie. Everybody. The ways of converting energy can be different, but the process itself has to be there.

In the context of behavior, we have lots of subsystems and actions to keep in mind. It's overwhelming. However, most of them are universal. They're everywhere. Sometimes they're absolutely necessary for every system in our field. Sometimes they're specific for different species, but every individual in the species does the same thing. We can subtract them from every part of the equation. It allows us to concentrate on the things that actually make the difference.

This is the reason why I don't include some systems and actions in my work. They're not specific enough. Right now I'm mapping the data from my theory to the human brain, and it looks like the reward system is everywhere. It works in the same way in every pattern of behavior. It cannot explain any choices. It seems to not be connected to any disease in my list. It's just there. Like a universal artifact of human biology. Should we exclude it from the equations? I'm not sure. Probably.

I would argue that even such an important phenomenon as qualia can be completely irrelevant to the psychology of behavior, because it's all about choices, and the qualia, as we understand it, is a universal artifact.

It would be interesting to notice that all these things are not really under our subjective control. We don't control our hunger and digestion. We cannot choose to not have qualia.

In some cases we can disrupt these universal subsystems and processes. This leads to the diseases that we normally treat as non-psychiatric. They can make you less efficient in whatever you do, or completely prevent you from doing things, but you'll not end up in a nuthouse.

This leads me to thinking that in order to speed things up in the field of psychiatry, we can not only pay more attention to the inevitable, but we can cut. We can cut everything that seems to be everywhere. Mercilessly. Cut. Cut. Cut. There are many things in our brains, but only a small amount of them have something to do with choices and psychiatric diseases. Most of them are just there. It's hard to put away something that you have invested in, but maybe it's time.

I did that. Then I did that. Then I don't remember. The I found myself on the other side of the city. I heard this story many times from the patients with schizo-spectrum disorders in private conversations. Minutes. Hours. Durations can be different, but the story is the same. The main timeline in the memory is broken.

According to the patients' observations, this problem correlates with bad sleep. It looks like a negative symptom of schizophrenia, but technically seems to be more like a version of the dissociative disorder, added on top of it.

Previously, I described how we design memory from an engineering perspective. Why do we need sleep? What happens during memory maintenance? How do we get the dissociations? The broken timelines look exactly as we expect the data to look after the malfunctions of this kind. It's one of the possible scenarios. If it's the case, the memories are split, scattered, but not deleted. We can try to recover them.

We don't save data in one-dimensional data structures that are easy to break into halves, like lists or stacks. They're more like graphs. Many connections are all over the place. If you break the graph during the mentioned memory malfunction, some connections will be lost, but some have all the chances to be preserved. Yes, it depends on the actual storing algorithm. We don't know all the details yet. But it's likely that one minor glitch will not break all the connections at once.

This is the time to remember the old, trusty, much criticized psychoanalysis. And free associations. We need to find the alternative connections between the events in the accessible parts of the timeline and the events in the lost parts. This way we reconnect and reinforce the graph of memories.

In most cases we can use logic and find the evidence of what was going on during the blackout. These events can be good starting points in our investigations.

I tried to do this analysis/reconnection a few times, and it worked. Seemingly lost memories were coming back. The timings were mixed up, but most logical connections between the events were there. The results are not perfect, but this is something. And something is better than nothing.

We will definitely need proper research here. More patients. Standardized conditions. Focus on different types of associations. These thoughts and interpretations are a little bit premature at this point. We have to understand that. But maybe they'll help somebody find something new.

P.S.: Failed defragmentation of the memory graph can lead to several kinds of long-term impairments. Not every one of them is technically reversible. The most dangerous problem is the accidental creation of new connections between things. Some would probably use the term "delusions" for them. Memory may look intact and be completely messed up at the same time. When working with memory, we should always validate data. Always. If something doesn't fit, we have to use logic and external evidence to fix it.

How do you know that you're not dreaming? Philosophers have asked this question for centuries. Everything got mixed up. Dreams. Illusions. Hallucinations. Simulated realities. Everything in one basket.

Technically, memory hallucinations, including dreams and effects like deja vu or jamais vu, are the results of data readouts during a hot memory maintenance. Defragmentation is the key process there. We expect to see a loss of continuity. Things will suddenly disappear or appear out of nowhere. Pay attention. Make notes. Compare notes. If something is off, you'll notice that.

Also, physics will be broken. Hallucinating brains will not be able to build the reflection that matches any random object. It's just a reading process that happens in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not a computation. Combinations of pieces of data can be complex and convincing, yes, but the objects have to be saved in advance. Usually we don't see things upside down, and they're not saved in our memory like that. Therefore, horizontal reflections of them cannot be hallucinated. Actually, it's a funny problem with AI image generators. Most of them have real troubles with rendering arbitrary objects upside down. For this exact reason. Oh, and vampires and other unholy otherworldly creatures don't reflect in rivers. It's the same thing.

However, you have to remember that you need to test things. If you don't remember that, you will get the "butterfly dream", that leads to all sorts of speculations about alternative realities. Once you do the tests and see the issues, it will become clear that your memory is hallucinating.

Being inside a simulated reality is different. It's like being inside a virtual machine. Everything will look normal, consistent. When the machine is under maintenance, everything stops. Looking from the inside, you'll not notice that. You'll be stopped yourself. The time will not exist for you.

Usually, when we create malware, we want it to know that it's not inside some virtual machine under investigation. How? We collect information about the system. We know what to expect in the real machine, and we look for something out of place. Virtual machines don't simulate every aspect of real ones. It requires a lot of resources and is unnecessary for standard applications. They may simulate hardware that was never produced by any manufacturer. Sometimes we expect to see some user activity and it's not there. We can use all these things as clues.

The problem with the offline world is that we don't know what is supposed to be here. Without that knowledge, all these comparisons are useless.

What if the machine itself is glitching? It's a good question. 99% of our code is utter garbage. Why would we even think that the programmers of the matrix are better in that department? We can look for bugs. Great. How do we know that something is a bug and not a feature? We compare the system's behavior with its specification. Where is our specification for the universe? Oh, wait. We got a problem.

Even if we imagine a program that somehow understands that it is running inside a virtual machine, even if it finds a way to break out, it's still a program, just running on real hardware. There is no way out of here.

Usually, when psychologists talk about the internet and social networks, they ask questions about the changes in our lives. How do all these technologies affect our relationships? How do they affect our IQ? Mental health? Whatever. There are many questions to ask, lots of things to worry about. But there is another side of this coin that seems to be underrepresented in discussions:

How do social networks change the science itself?

Psychologists are whining about a crisis in the field for decades now. No good theories. No good models. Old ones fall apart. We'll never understand the mind. It's way too complex. But. What do you need to make a good model of something? You need data. Good quality data. With all sorts of edge cases, rare cases, exceptions, etc. You need to know what can happen. Even if it happens once in a billion. You don't need statistics. You need proof of existence.

A century ago people were spending their whole lives looking for those rare cases. It's hard work. Most old theories were based on very limited datasets. They just don't cover the whole variety of possible behaviors. But these days, with all our technologies, we can collect everything we need to build good models. We just need our computers and a stable internet connection. People all around the world have smartphones with cameras. They film everything for us. Especially if something looks unusual, we can be sure that somebody will film it and post it online to get likes and subscribers.

Do you know that a dog and a goose can be friends? Monkeys use plants as medicine? Ants farm other insects? There are videos out there, waiting to be studied.

And people... Oh. They do all sorts of things as well. Beautiful. Odd. Terrifying. You can see everything now. If you're not afraid to gaze into the abyss, of course.

We have videos of all sorts of behaviors of humans and animals in their natural habitats. Pure. Raw. No rules. No limits. We have uncensored materials with the people from the darkest criminal corners of society. We have bloggers in the war zones. We have diaries of patients with various psychiatric diseases, who share their first-hand experiences. We have interviews with chiefs of the remote tribes who still live in the Stone Age. All sorts of cultures, religions, professions. Everything. All this data just waits for us there. Social networks became the literal heaven for psychologists.

It's time to stop whining. Go create something.

Schizophrenia is the disease of mirrored patterns. If you're out of context here, please read about this project first, particularly about the theoretically possible diseases.

For most practical applications, it will be convenient to split the pairs of mirrored patterns of behavior into four clusters: "traumatized" (1+9) and (7+15), "paranoid" (2+10) and (8+16), "creative" (3+11) and (6+14), "destructive" (4+12) and (5+13).

It is important to notice that these four clusters are not the types of schizophrenia. There is only one disease. The broken switch. One. This division is just a way to highlight the most distinct versions of observable behavior. To see the extremes. It helps to work with the patterns. Nothing more.

The reason I decided to talk about these clusters now, and to not wait for the second part of the project to be finished, is because the creative cluster starts to look like a safe place to be. According to the data I have now, the patterns here don't include anything that can theoretically lead to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. They're concentrated around the traumatized and paranoid clusters. And you don't want to go down that road, trust me. Also, there is no basis for the dangerous antisocial behavior in the creative cluster.

Some researchers suggest that art therapy helps to deal with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Further investigations are required, but so far it looks like that kind of therapy pushes the patients exactly into this cluster of patterns. They just do it intuitively, without the system we have.

In some circumstances this creative behavior can be classified not even as schizophrenia, but as the schizotypal personality disorder, or some other "not as serious" disease, to reduce the stigma around the patients. This messes up the data in the field. It may look like there are several diseases here. But no. It's the same core problem. Just the different pairs of patterns.

We can try to build the roadmaps for cognitive behavioral therapy around this information. By pushing the patients to the creative cluster, we can help them avoid some troubles that disease prepared for them in other clusters. And then we can use the standard technique, blocking half of the table, that I described in the main theory, to get some energy back. This two-step therapy is not a cure. It can't be. But it looks like a promising direction to look at, if we want to help the patients feel better.