Why Sapolsky’s Take on Schizotypal Personality Disorder and Religion is Problematic

Dear CF,
BoingBoing posted one of Robert Sapolsky’s (Stanford neurobiologist and author of Monkeyluv, The Trouble with Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers) lectures on schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder today. It’s an hour long, but makes for pretty interesting listening if you have the time to give it. In this installment he starts off [...]

Read Full Post »

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Dearest Carla Fran,
That was Doris Lessing! I read The Fifth Child standing up in a aisle of Tower Books in downtown Sacramento a bunch of years ago. Two interior decorating details are still with me: one was a long, long wooden dining table the couple had bought, the other is a strong impression of scary [...]

Read Full Post »

Juxta

Dear Millicent,
I just woke up feeling rattled from having a dream where I was at a party and suffered the same minute embarrassments I do at real parties.  In the dream I talked too much about my work, flirted poorly with an esteemed professor of my youth, and then my mom got mad at me [...]

Read Full Post »

Schizophrenia, Hyper-Mentalism, and the Happy Puppet

Couldn’t stop thinking about it.
What to make of the Firecracker’s attraction to schizophrenia as a word and lifestyle, and why did it become the writer-singer-songwriter’s passport into a different kind of world? Schizophrenia, after all, goes beyond the mere desire for altered states of mind. Yeah, Coleridge loved opium, but this exceeds drugs, hallucinations, trumps [...]

Read Full Post »

Madwomen in the Attic, Madmen in the Garage

Dearest Carla Fran,
I can’t help wondering if the “sensual pleasures” the ladies received as a result of their chocolate and eggs are the subject of the “grateful confidences” that gratify the Professor’s ears. It puts me in mind of the “traditional” cures for female hysteria in the 19th century, and the peculiar forms therapy [...]

Read Full Post »