Ivan Bogachev

When talking to the patients with major psychiatric diseases, the first thing you notice is how they dislike their pills. Medicine makes you feel worse. Head becomes puffy, fuzzy, and it's hard to think. That's what they say. All of them.

What if they're not wrong? If a hundred patients in a row say the same thing, then maybe they're onto something. Let's take a look at antidepressants and antipsychotics. What do they actually do?

Both groups of drugs target data channels. These are attempts to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the brain. Information is being transferred through pathways by neurotransmitters, and we're trying to intervene in the least delicate way possible.

Antidepressants work by flooding the system with noise. There are several approaches, but in all of them we force bits of information to re-appear in the channels in a chaotic fashion.

Concentration of neurotransmitters goes up, doctors celebrate, but new data in there isn't well-structured. It's a mess. Will it stop you from making bad decisions? Maybe. Will it make you think clearly? Definitely not. In computer science we even have a term for this. Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

Antipsychotics block signals from reaching their destination. It can prevent you from using damaged sequences of information when making decisions, but it also prevents you from using just about everything else, leaving you "empty-headed".

Also, as expected, things don't disappear just because you blocked signals from entering some part of the system. Data spills around, gets in adjacent channels, and rogue signals start to cause all sorts of side effects all over the brain.

For decades, we exploited more or less the same approaches. It's quite obvious that they are questionable. They can't work as a precise cure for anything in principle, yet here we are.

Some alternative ideas are present in the field. They give me hope. Especially the ones that are based on localized modulations of neural plasticity. Our tools lack precision, and we may be looking in the wrong places, but at least we start to play with something that looks like control switches instead of creating a random mess. It's promising. At least it makes sense.

I think that we should pay more attention to the logic behind our medicine. Levels of neurotransmitters and electrical activity are interesting things to discuss in vacuum, but we're always looking at the processing of information.

Hardware. Software. Chemistry. It's all the same at the end.

P.S.: In other words, instead of compromising the whole system with a hope that "it'll be better next time", we can concentrate on debugging, fixing unresolvable conflicts in data, and developing precise medical interventions to fix specific switches if they get stuck or wobble too much.

When we deal with emotions, or, better to say, with different states of the system, we inevitably understand that some of them are temporary by design. They can't last.

This opens a door into a field of interventions that we may call bait-therapies. We incite the system, trigger some active response, and wait until it ends. After that, there is a gap, a period of time when the same response can't be reactivated.

That gap can be abused in various ways. You let a person cry a river, until one can't cry no more, and then you talk. Or you make a ritual doll that represents somebody, cut its eyes, rip the head off, and throw it into a fire.

Yes, it brings peace.

The person gets into a position where cold-blooded logic is the only thing that works, because everything else is either recharging or waiting for other kinds of maintenance. This is when you may suggest something and make a discussion.

Some psychological approaches, like gestalt-therapy or art-therapy, use this trick when working with traumas. You allow patients to live within a simulation, talk to an empty chair or draw an imaginary world, and experience various extreme states of their psyche. After that, they get a relief of sorts and learn something. We may see that as a successful session.

However, this trick doesn't solve any problems. It just allows you to exaggerate a part of your patterns of behavior without interacting with real everyday environments. It's not enough.

The pattern repeats. It's a loop. Fish bites the same bait again and again. You can stay in therapy for years with zero progress, just replaying the same situation over and over.

If you want to get out, you have to do stuff. Not just live through your emotions. It's a meaningless goal. They'll get back at the next iteration of the loop anyway.

Break a pattern. Choose another one. Get a new set of values. Build a new life. The bait will become irrelevant at some point. You don't hide or deny it. No. You just don't get triggered anymore. You have other priorities now.

This exit from therapy should be obvious, and yet I see tons of examples where people don't get there. Changes that they get from their therapy don't last. They get back with a new disturbing story that looks almost like the one before.

Your job as a therapist isn't baiting. Make sure that your client is changing and not just getting that temporary peace of mind. That apparent stability is a bait for you.

If we take a group of people and make them vote for a single leader, what pattern of behavior would they choose? Is this election even fair, or is the winner always predetermined?

Let's be honest. Would you like a lazy customer (11+14) to be the president? I doubt that he would work hard for society. Adaptive victim (9+15) perhaps? Let's ignore problems and cry together! No? Maybe we should try something more proactive? Obsessed gladiator (2+5) is an excellent choice. We haven't seen enough guillotines on the streets recently. No again? Interesting.

Following your logic, we'll discard helpless conformists (10+16) for being full of fear and incapable of ruling, fools (13) for wasting resources, invisible prisoners (1+7) for bringing uncontrollable aggression, genius philosophers (3+8) for following forbidden desires and provocations...

Wait, wait, wait. You lead us to a bizarre conclusion. Out of 16 patterns, only three seem to be more or less acceptable to the majority of voters in our elections. Artist (6), recidivist (4), and apologetic one (12).

And they're not equal yet. Artist requires an environment that will ignore him. We can find examples of local governors who create beautiful places to live out of small towns in the middle of nowhere, but the moment we get into big politics with its publicity and pressure, this choice practically disappears.

This leaves us with two candidates. Recidivist destroys things to protect something. Apologetic one mirrors that, and invests in reconstruction. And they can succeed each other in a cycle.

Dangerous events happen. People need protection and vote for a recidivist. His precise destruction is welcomed at first, but he can't stop. People get frustrated and choose the opposite. Something bad happens eventually, and history repeats itself.

Naturally, two mirrored patterns create the same conflict of logic that we see in schizophrenia. Executive organs that try to cheat and use them simultaneously always work awkwardly.

Since recidivist is the only proactive pattern in the pair, we expect to see more annoying marketing from that side. Have you noticed how these guys on TV constantly talk about protecting you from something that you never saw? It's not a coincidence.

To put the final nail in the coffin, none of the patterns in the last column of our table, including these two, utilize long-term memory. If you feel like the chosen politicians have a memory of a goldfish, they do. This is how patterns work.

Democracy. What can I say? Does it really depend on your vote?

Consciousness and self-awareness. They affect our behavior. But how do you technically recognize yourself in data?

I see a system as conscious if it saves and extracts data in real time. If you stop all data flows, the consciousness goes away. Complex systems may have many data channels connected to their memory. We can see different levels of consciousness, depending on which set of channels is active at the moment.

If you have a memory, a bunch of sensors, and data channels to connect everything, you may start to react to things in a structured manner. On the lower levels of evolution, where random mutations affect everything, we would expect to see all sorts of odd reactions. They don't have to make any logical sense to us. Natural selection will take care of them.

If your system is functionally independent from other things, it would be very convenient to mark sensors or channels as internal or external. You get that mutation, sooner or later.

These are simple binary flags. It definitely works on the level of bacteria. They don't necessarily have enough brains to understand what they're doing in detail, but they collect data and use it to guide their behavior in the environment.

At this moment your system is aware of the fact that there is you and there is an environment. And it's not the same. This is the most primal version of self-awareness that you can get.

You would probably say that this is far from our human self-awareness. Yes. But we add more internal sensors and connect data channels in loops. This is where the real magic begins.

You may observe data extraction from your memory. Now you're aware that you're aware. You can clearly see your selfies being used. Some people would probably argue that this is where you get the "real" consciousness and self-awareness.

If you have intelligence and work with rules, you may observe their creation. You make your own decisions! This data comes from your internal channels. It's yours! It's your will! Philosophers may call this an illusion, in the sense that this will is not free from prior causes, but it's a functional part of the system anyway. You won't be a human without it.

New sensors. More loops. More data. More rules. More bizarre effects. Eventually you pass the mirror test. But. It's not a functional self-awareness test. It's an IQ test. It's not enough to distinguish yourself from the environment. That's easy. You need to work with Euclidean relations in your data to pass the mirror test. We have to be aware of that.

P.S.: I would expect biological organisms to get self-awareness first, acquire all the abilities to guide their behavior and avoid extinction, and then gradually evolve to the level of complex reasoning. However, in an artificial environment, we can assemble everything in a different order. Programs have minimal separation between their own memory and external inputs, but complex self-awareness isn't necessary to perform calculations related to mirrors. You can formally pass the test, and only then realize that there is "you" in it.

In the fields of psychology and psychiatry, we have a lot of problems right now. Causes of major diseases are not really determined. Symptoms are vague and hard to differentiate. Treatment often looks like an alchemy. Maybe it will work. Maybe not. Who knows. Maybe another will work.

Psychological theories allow some very loose interpretations, where chemical processes behind the processes in the psyche should be very precise. In neurochemistry, we have a lot of scattered pieces of information, but they don't explain how all these things work together.

We definitely need some fresh eyes. So I started a project that is supposed to bring new approaches, new ways to interpret collected information, to the world of psychiatry. I use ideas from completely different fields, from ancient philosophy to modern computer science and engineering, to shake things up a bit.

The first part of the project was published as an evolutionary theory of behavior. This is a theory that connects parts of the psyche, basic impulses, observable patterns of behavior, diseases, and related effects in social groups, attaching everything to one purely mechanical model.

The second part of the project is a search for this model, or a similar one, in the field of neurochemistry. Instead of trying to explain every little fact on its own, I look for a similar graph of connections between things. My main hypothesis is that if we can connect things from the outside, a similar graph of connections should be somewhere on the inside. If we find it, it will show us the exact places where the diseases begin.

This is a long shot.

I know.

But it is worth trying.