The Odds: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of April 28th to May 4th
This week was unexpectedly transformative as I decided I finally felt ready to make some big changes in my study, as well as start “nesting” a little more for the project to finish. This thing has honestly felt like being pregnant, or at least how I imagine it. Soon, I’ll be giving life to something that will change how I spend my days and I want everything ready for my baby to thrive. My feminine scientist relationship to it :)
I’ve been a little bit nervous recently to touch my project again because instead of dealing with my past, it feels like I’m starting to deal with my future. And success makes me extremely nervous. I personally think that subconsciously more people are afraid of success than they are of failure. Failure means nothing changes. Success means everything changes.
So I decided to take some weekly time to set up some future “personal project” infrastructure. I was meant to be doing an adulting session on Tuesdays and in my overwhelm, I’ve been avoiding it. These reflections have been a good accountability partner and stress reducer as I finish the biggest thing I’ve ever done so I’ll start to mention at the beginning of my reflection what I’ve done for my adulting sessions.
The first and most urgent thing was calling my doctor’s office and setting up an appointment to talk about getting on anxiety medication again. I have avoided that for a long time because I was nervous that getting on anxiety meds before I was ready would make things come up from under the surface that I didn’t have the setup to make space for. But now is a good time to take on a little more processing and I want to feel mentally prepared for things like showing my work at academic conferences. I also hope it’ll help with my slowly diminishing overstimulation so I can get back on my exercise routine again.
I’ve also decided to start reading a chapter a week of Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” which is meant to be a 6 week program. Not everything will probably be fully applicable to me yet. For example, the first chapter is about paying off credit card debt. I’m 24 but I’ve waited to get a credit card because I have too many friends my age with growing credit card debt and I’ve wanted to get things around me settled first. It’s one of my next big financial goals right now. But I think it’s good to get educated on money before you get there so you’re already comfortable.
I used to work a few times a week at a hostel when I first moved to London. I didn’t even have my own apartment until 4 months in and I was on two low-ish salaries. I would spend my morning shifts making beds and doing laundry. It was a bit of an ego hit to my recent Ivy League graduated self, so I’d devote my time to imagining my future life alongside it. I started listening to Tori Dunlap’s “Financial Feminist” first, which taught me about things like High Yield Savings Accounts that I’d never heard of. Filling that was my first financial move, though it’s been shaky. It took me 2 years with a lot of restarts. I listened to her audiobook next (I’ve been wanting to buy a physical copy to refer back to), which was around the time I started listening to “Money for Couples” by Ramit Sethi, who I learned about on Financial Feminist, as well as “Friends Who Invest”. All three podcasts are very beginner friendly and extremely fun. I learned about everything from why a couple might make a 6 figure salary while still being broke to what on Earth a “trust” is. These are issues I probably won’t encounter for a very long time but the knowledge gives me security and direction. I highly recommend all of these podcasts as someone who grew up not wealthy nor financially educated. We don’t talk enough about how financial literacy is also a form of generational wealth not all of us receive!
I’m very lucky that my only debt right now will be my student loan (which today’s reading said was not bad debt to have). But I’ve been avoidant about actually looking to remind myself when those loan payments would start and how much I could expect them to cost so I took a little time for that and it showed me I was doing fine across multiple fronts which was a weight off.
One of my biggest money blockages is fear. I’m always afraid I’m not making enough and because of that, I try not to look. That’s another primary habit I’m trying to work through. No use getting a credit card yet when I won’t even look at my bank account sometimes.
What I’ve really enjoyed about these particular authors especially is that they are focused on your underlying mentality versus how to cut corners in your budgeting sheet. As a believer in manifestation, I do think that you can do all the fine tuning you want, but if you’re scared of money, you’ll never feel abundant anyways. I’ve been trying to start imagining my “rich life”, which is Ramit Sethi’s big theme. One of my big things I want is a beach house. I don’t care to be mega-rich but I would really like a beach house. I want to shop at the farmer’s market and buy all my things from small and sustainable brands. I’m a pretty slow shopper anyways. I never shop Shein and only once in a blue moon do I even touch Amazon if necessary, but farmers market has been a touch outside of my budget thus far. I want memberships to things like the ballet and art museums. I want a membership to New Scientist and Smithsonian Magazine (magazines were childhood luxuries that I craved more than anything). And I want an art collection! These are my big “rich life” visions.
The last few years have often had me reflecting on the story of the tortoise and the hare. My life has not seemed particularly exciting or flashy. I don’t have any big dramas to share. I don’t party much. Every day, I tend to my life like a garden. It makes me feel a bit boring right now, but over time I’ve seen a big cumulative growth that no one really notices but me. Every little bit I read, every little bit of effort I’ve put into my project has compounded. It’s gotten to a point that I’m starting to feel excited and shocked at myself, even thought the excitement hasn’t really hit anyone else yet at all. It makes me trust that my life will grow over time and I probably will have lots of excitement to share in the long run. That made me tend with even more “fertiliser” and dedication. I started writing reflections. I’ve started reading more books like this one. I’ve poured more time in.
There was a lot of pressure being in my early 20s to ignore the long term and focus on right now. First of all, with my nervous system being quite shot from PTSD, I knew I needed a softer and more stable future. That gave me more incentive to tend to my garden first. But secondly, particularly as women (the Financial Feminist voice popping out here), we’re pretty much taught that we’ll be withered away by our 30s, so why care how comfortable they’ll be? By then we’ll be hideous mothers slaving away over a stovetop and hating our lives. Better invest in a life partner, your last bit of 20s fun, and your looks and forget the rest. Well, despite what the patriarchy says, I will still be alive in my 30s (shocker) and hopefully by then I’ll be hotter than ever, as most women I know are. So the investment in my stability was worth every bit of effort I put into it.
To finish out my adulting session, I spent some time closing my one million tabs and updating my GCal before jumping back into my project.
I mentioned last week that I was having a bit of a freakout because my troubleshooting seemed to be resulting in failure. In this session. I took a closer look and found that my results were actually a little bit more subtle and complex than I thought initially, as I reflected on last week, but still shared enough similarities for me to feel relatively confident that there were intricacies of trauma to discuss rather than just a system failure.
I’m really hoping so, at least! This week, the goal was to get my models combined before my meeting with my supervisor on Friday and then jump back into reading to see if I can back the model’s quirks with papers before I solidify my numbers.
Reading “IWT” this week has had me thinking about my future some more. I mentioned a few reflections ago that survivors need career and networking opportunities because we often lose our financial structures and career options because of trauma. I said I would love one day to put together a grant for survivor-led projects and future-oriented aspirations, such as rebuilding a business that was left behind because of PTSD or running a restorative justice initiative in your community. I’m obviously nowhere near there yet but it’s a long-term goal.
I was thinking about what I said about networking, because surviving sexual violence derails lives and the result can be quite isolating. I wrote about how it took all my effort to do the bare minimum at university because of my PTSD and I left feeling like my CV didn’t look as impressive as some of my peers whose energies were focused on thriving versus surviving.
I’ve been trying to brainstorm a good networking system that could still be private and sensitive. It’s had me envisioning a mentorship program where people could apply to receive guidance and be pointed to opportunities by other survivors who feel established and like they are already a good piece of the way through their healing journey. Sometimes my biggest career questions were not “where do I go next” but “how do I thrive in my academic career while also processing this insane experience alongside of it”? I think other survivors could have had answers to that question. I could tell you now that I’d probably say to decenter perfection and see the messiness as a sign of growth and healing. I’d probably say to think in the long-term, not in the immediate, and focus on what you’re building around you first and foremost.
In college, someone who is where I am now might have told me to build on my personal experience earlier, start writing earlier, or submit some essays to be published earlier, instead of focusing on the types of fellowships and programs around me I didn’t really have energy for. I dropped my only club, a magazine where I was working on a podcast and had just started getting more writing assignments, when my PTSD picked up. Maybe they would’ve encouraged me to jump back on. Or they could have pointed me out to some programs that would have been great with my experience so I didn’t have to spend pointless hours applying to things that didn’t make sense for me. That’s the type of wisdom I would want from a mentorship program.
One person I know is trying to start a business while having fled a domestic abuse situation a few years prior. I’ve been thinking about their situation in this context. How great would it be to set her up with another business leader who did the same thing at some point in the past and made it out just fine in the long run? Those are the types of connections I’d be looking to make through a mentorship program.
On another note, I also left college feeling frustrated that surviving took every ounce of strength in me and was a massive emotional feat. I worked hard to graduate. But that hard work and grit didn’t translate into any type of accolade nor a line on my CV. It would be great to give people a badge of honour for navigating life as survivors via a mentorship program or a grant that can feel special and prestigious as well. People underestimate the accomplishment that it is!
It would also be beautiful to run talks by people who are willing to share their success stories as survivors. The news tends to amplify the most tragic circumstances because they’re dramatic and fuel a narrative of downtrodden-ness. But I know there are a lot of success stories out there quietly moving through the world which are just waiting to be told. And plenty more on their way to being built!
Here’s another career struggle survivors might understand: I struggle horribly with hyper vigilance at school and at work. My nervous system is on fire all the time. I’m constantly worried about my place, if I’m working enough, if I’m doing enough…
When I started my job last year, I was constantly convinced that I was on the verge of getting fired. I felt like nothing I was doing was enough. None of my output felt like it was at the level I was expecting. I had to overperform to feel safe. Lo and behold, I spoke to two of coworkers and they told me how great I was to work with and how uniquely responsive I was to messages and requests. I was honestly responding quickly because I was trying my hardest to not make a single mistake, worried that going too slow meant I was lagging too far behind. And BAM, I’d get chopped for my pace. It’s funny how wrapped up we get in our perspective that we can’t see our own best qualities.
This project has been emotionally intense recently as I reach the end of the hardest part. As a result, I’ve genuinely lagged behind on some important emails the last few weeks. I accidentally sent one cluster through the wrong email because I had to send my first ever mail merge through my university Remote Desktop to access Microsoft 365. I’ve been beating myself up for the mistake all week, but today as I was sending out emails again from the right email, I got an automatic reply that went like this:
“im off on vacation right now. please send any urgent messages to [email redacted]”.
No capitalisation. No contraction. Just vibes. I’m not gonna lie, it did make me feel better about myself. Sometimes you’re holding yourself to a standard far beyond the average person because you convince yourself that everybody is up there or above you. But people are just people honestly. Nobody is perfect at work and perfection is not even the standard most employers are expecting.
On Wednesday, I started combining my two experiments together into one. I was having some trouble shooting issues and decided to leave it for now.
Instead, on Thursday, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to start brainstorming the numbers I could get from my “pattern separation” experiment and getting them into my paper. I was already pretty satisfied with how that one was running. Everything was modelled pretty much perfectly in my book. I didn’t have any residual issues with it.
I previously noticed that I was getting different types of (good) “problems” with my output at low ACh that were very in line with certain types of dementia. Sometimes, there were two little 1s, as if the memory was partly gone. And sometimes there were patterns that were randomly created from nothing, like a hallucination or confabulation. I wanted to make sure those different possibilities were also reflected in my numbers because I thought they told an interesting story that you wouldn’t see with just a mean.
On a bit of a random note, I was obsessed with Adventure Time when I was a kid. I wasn’t a Princess Bubblegum fan when I was younger. This pink candy girl, first of all, was stealing my first cartoon crush ever which was an unforgivable offence. Second of all, her little science girl/dictator persona annoyed me. She was so boring.
But this year, I’ve really started identifying with her. She grew on me a lot. She’s kind of dorky and forward and off in her own world.
I’ve been thinking about her a lot over the course of this project. Maybe if I had known I would one day be a science girl, I would’ve liked her more. Princess Bubblegum is weird but she has some kind of unspoken rizz looking back and that makes me feel better about myself (as I reschedule with another potential dating lead to work on this science project).
She is now featured prominently on my laptop to guide over my STEM activities.
(Me finishing this project probably)
I spoke to my mom this week who is just starting to get life a bit more picked up after moving back to her home country. I gave her some words of encouragement. I told her that a lot of people think they’re “just being realistic” by expecting that things won’t work out that well or are doomed to be mediocre. But if you were really “being realistic”, you would have absolutely no expectation for the future and you wouldn’t talk down on the things you care about. You know why? Because in “reality”, we have zero idea what’s coming next. How often are we completely shocked by some unexpected event in life? I could go out tomorrow and be hit by a car. Tomorrow could be the day that aliens finally show themselves and invade. I could unexpectedly win the lottery. You have absolutely zero idea how life will go.
You might think there’s an 86% chance your business will fail, meanwhile you had no idea that because of some wind current and the flapping of some butterfly wing, there was actually a 100% chance a hole would open up and you’d fall to the Earth’s core instead rendering the failure completely meaningless. You’re running your own statistical analyses off of much more limited information than you think you are. That’s why it’s best to have a sense of positive optimism about where you’re going next (which will translate into productive action) and not listen too much to people that are telling you to be “realistic”. None of what I did was “realistic”, if you were to compare it to other people’s lives and their experiences. But for tangible reasons relevant to my life, it did in fact get done. Something someone else might think had a 10% chance of occurring in your life might actually had been a 75% chance if they had incorporated the migration pattern of shrimp in the Pacific and the positivity level of the closest 100 people and the average size of their bosses’ left legs. But they didn’t think to factor that in.
So don’t get too bogged down in other people’s analyses of reality. Best not to be too “realistic” about your big dreams and save that energy for the steps you take towards them.
And with that thought in mind, I got to work on getting my numbers down on a spreadsheet for the first time.
This was probably one of the most transformative days of my life, genuinely. Something about seeing the culmination of all of this hard work in such a tangible form really made it sink in what was happening to me. This was such an incredible journey the whole way through. I can’t believe I did this.
And this is my THING!!! I’m actually good at this. I feel happy doing this. It made me feel relaxed and at peace. Actually, there’s nothing more peaceful in my day than when I work on my project. It’s the highlight of my life. I just want to do it all day. I’ve never felt so spiritually aligned in my life. I want to do more of this for more mental illnesses.
The most “unrealistic” thing I’ve ever done has made me feel like I make more sense than I ever have before.
I’ve been waking up in the night the last two days feeling uncomfortably hot and scrambled. My project just picked up drastically and it’s giving my kind of an internal shift. I think I might be a bit of a smart person maybe. It’s been making me feel both stable and discombobulated, like the floor was pulled from beneath my feet.
Alongside this whole process, an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in a really long time called me a bit incoherent and having a mental health crisis and I’ve been insanely worried but too far away to really be that useful. It’s been giving me anxiety in the night.
It had me thinking of a high school acquaintance that disappeared for months to years. I was worried be had gotten snatched up or was lost somewhere really dangerous. We weren’t that close but it made me unbelievably sad because he was the sweetest person ever and it hurt to think of him somewhere dangerous.
It turns out that recently he was spotted by someone in Las Vegas, going by a different name, maybe homeless, and apparently having a mental health crisis. They’re still trying to find him but at the very least he was spotted. Many times, if you’ve been missing for as long as he has, the chances of you being found again are pretty slim. Serious Mental Illness is no joke. People run away and can be of real harm to themselves. It’s a real illness just like any other with serious consequences. It’s not anybody’s fault nor a reflection of them. Brains are just quite complex like that.
The work I’ve done this week combined with this friend’s crisis has had me truly feeling blessed from the inside out. It was really special and the biggest of blessings to be able to survive a period of Serious Mental Illness and come out the other end with a special perspective and something to give. That’s a privilege not everyone gets. It’s really a calling and a life mission to be able to squeeze everything I can out of that perspective and support people like my friend who are struggling with something so complex and painful.
Reading my book this week helped me reflect on some of the “alternative” investments I made over the last few years. Despite having listened to and internalised a lot financial advice over time, a lot of it was beyond what I could do because as many people in their early 20s are, I was working unpredictable odd jobs and an unpaid internship. That made it difficult at times to budget or make a solid financial plan because I never knew exactly how much I would make. As a student, I also wasn’t able to work the kind of consistent amount of hours with a solid salary it would take to get to the point of investment or feeling safe opening my first credit card. I would start filling up my HYSA and BAM. Another month where my hours unexpectedly fell short and threw off the plan. I’ve tried to let go of that pressure right now until things normalise and I’m able to really secure consistency. But… I found another energy I can invest.
I made this video last year right before I started this project. It’s not that well edited and I made it on my MacBook camera so it’s a touch campy but the words are a philosophy I live by and obviously how I got here. In it, I talk about how your energy is an investment source too that can grow powerfully for you over time. Your early 20s are crazy. But they’re the best time to invest in building consistency, learning, improving important skills while you’re still fresh, and building a good foundation so you can hit the ground running in your mid- to late-20s. My budgeting skill is still in progress. I accumulated student debt. I’ll probably still be pulling out of my HYSA soon when another bump in the road comes along. But I have a masters degree. I have a strong direction in life I can build on for a long time. I built a writing habit. I learned high-value skills in growing fields like computational neuroscience. That’s a financial setup too.
I’ve been reminding myself in this period of time to take a very loose definition of “money”. A lot of what I’m doing is money even if I don’t have it in my bank account yet. Learning skills like Python were “soft investments” I made before I’ve even gotten to the point that I could actually make “hard investments”. Your relationships are investments. Your health habits are investments. A positive outlook is an investment. You mental health is an investment.
Just because your energy isn’t all there yet for your financial life doesn’t mean you can’t start building good infrastructure around it.
It might sound a bit morbid but I love wandering graveyards and reading the stones. It’s up there with reading bench plaques for me. I love them both. It’s kind of nice, like getting the know a lot of strangers at once. It reminds me that all of us have experienced tragedy and all of us have loved.
Sometimes you get the story of a family.
Sometimes you see aged couples who died a year apart buried together, like they couldn’t stand to be separated.
There’s something timeless about tombstones. You think you’re seeing someone from the 2000s and it turns out they died in 1936. Love and death are always the same no matter the era.
Graveyards always remind me of this guy I kind of almost dated. We met in 2020 during COVID. There was nothing much to do at that point because of lockdown. I was very alone and it was nice to have one friend. One day, we wore our masks and donned the gothest outfits we could. He picked me up in his car and we listened to glitch pop and bought Monsters at 7/11 (don’t ask why those are related; it was very 2020 of us and nothing made sense back then) and spent a long time wandering the Hollywood Cemetery in my hometown.
(These were THE COVID anthems and a frequent soundtrack in his car. All the music blowing up back then had this fragmented, digital, absurd feeling that I think was very representative of what my generation was feeling in quarantine. Like suddenly nothing really made any sense anymore and we might as well just revel in the chaos.)
Wandering a random cemetery encapsulates COVID activities in a nutshell — lots of social distancing space, outdoors, and kind of edgy. Weirdest quasi-date I’ve ever been on but also one of my favourite memories. I was really in a bad headspace back then so it never really turned into anything serious. I did like him a lot though. We met again the next summer and he asked me to date him but he was off to be stationed in Hawaii and I was going back to New York. I didn’t want my first relationship to be long distance. But I do always think of him when I walk through a cemetery. Probably the worst thing in the world you could associate an old crush with but oh well.
I used to think a lot about the exact way I wanted my body to go when I was younger. Cremation? Burial? I go back and forth on it all the time. I finally decided that I wanted my body to be donated to science and I wanted to be turned into a tree. I love trees. People have always gotten the best ideas from trees. I’ve personally met some very important people under trees as well.
I want a tree people can come visit so I can whack them on the head with apples and laugh at them and they’ll still attribute all their concussion induced ideas to me anyways. Suckers…
On a real note, it feels nice to imagine that your spirit can keep giving after death and that it’ll always be a part of Earth’s flow. It seems more like an eternity than being stuck in a box forever. But there is still something beautiful and lasting about a tombstone. It’s not you who is memorialized forever but the people who loved you.
This has been one of the most productive weeks of my project thus far. After getting off a call with my supervisor, who noticed that my graph for my sparsely coded recurrent excitation experiment was not actually randomising my patterns (meaning I might have been having bad luck with one particular set of patterns rather than a defunct system), I implemented that change and my graph went from this mess:
To this absolute beauty. Look at her:
The gradient. The sensible starting point. Chef’s kiss. Starting to look like a real scientist, aren’t I?
This era has truly changed my perception of statistics. How likely was it that an orange skinned reality star with a sex offender background would make it into one of the most prestigious positions in world government? Not once but twice? If you told me that pre-him, I would have probably told you the chances were low. And the chances that in that same time we’d get Artificial Intelligence and the same sex offender would start putting out AI-generated videos of him and Elon Musk redeveloping Palestine into resorts and of the ex-first family as monkeys? Not high. And the chances that there truly was a mass-scale child sex trafficking and torture ring all the higher ups were in on? I would have hoped the chances were low for that one at least. And that someone would eat a random bat or something and I’d be locked in my house for a year plagued by a weird experience I couldn’t even remember? Tell me that in high school and I would’ve asked you what on Earth you were on, in nicer words than that.
So when it came time to decide whether the probability was really that high that I would complete a project like this, I was already pretty primed to say “Sure, why not.” At this point, my bar for absurdity is pretty high. Every email in the COVID-era used to begin with the phrase “in these unprecedented times…”. Have the aforementioned times stopped yet? Mine definitely haven’t.
I spent a long time on breaks at my side job on Friday getting together the numbers for my densely coded recurrent excitation network.
The data coming together has been exciting but emotional. I feel proud of myself. I feel a sense of completion. I feel positivity for my future.
But these numbers and graphs also feel like a symbol of the lengths I had to go to by myself at a young age to feel protected and heard. These numbers are quite literally a product of my blood, sweat, and tears. This journey has been anxiety-inducing and isolating as well as beautiful and gratifying. It was a big leap of faith and a big investment of my time. So it’s been a lot of relief and happiness with a little twinge of sadness at this current phase.
On Sunday, I took a lunch time stroll to my favourite church (which I’ve never actually attended but ritualistically pass on weekend strolls) for a little update. I’ve been “going” to this church since I moved to London, before I even got baptised. God and I feel a little closer there, like somebody left a special payphone where my conversations just feel more amplified.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really feel like God can hear me when I’m at home. I don’t know why. It just feels like I’m speaking, not praying. But when I sit out there on a sunny day and watch the leaves rustle, I really do feel like I’m being listened to.
This might be in part because I started sitting there when I had next to nothing. I had just moved to London. I had no apartment. I had no idea if I would survive past London spring. It felt like a last resort nudge, a pull to connect in my most isolating time. It was there that I prayed for a home, and there that I thanked God for helping me find my first apartment. It was there that I asked God to please help me get into a masters program and got my first acceptance an hour later. When I stop by there, no matter how deep in my lack I am, suddenly I remember that life is good. Sometimes you get used to what you’ve gotten and forget where you’ve come from. The more I show up there, the less I feel like asking for more and the more I just want to say thank you and sit in God’s company for a while.
Today I went and gave God a little update, as I do. I told God that I saw everything He was building for me, the financial security coming around the corner, the roots I was building. But I told God that it was always in the “right now” that I felt the lack and the stress. All I wanted was to embrace how much stability I’ve grown in the last few years and be able to say “thank you” without asking for more. I told God I didn’t want to be needy anymore. I just wanted to enjoy what He had given me. And I wanted clear skin, but no biggie if not.
In the grocery store on the way home, I got the same old sugar cravings and felt a knowing inside me that God had already made the best candy in the world for me — fruit.
On the bus home, I was getting the doom-scrolling cortisol spike that had added to my thrown off hormones and felt the reminder that God had already made something endlessly beautiful and exciting for me to look at — His creation. I turned off my phone and opted to look out the window instead. And I was entertained! I even saw my friend’s daughter walking along the path by chance.
Sometimes our addictions to the artificial world are little ways we tell God, “What You have provided is not enough for me. It is not good enough. It is not beautiful enough.” We ask God for proof of His love all the time but we are not always intentional enough with showing that love and presence back through our attention and appreciation. That would hurt my feelings, personally, if it was me.
When I got home, I sat to watch YouTube and remembered that I didn’t need to feel bad for my life not looking perfect. I didn’t need to strive to be changing my circumstances all the time. Everything I needed to deal with was around me right now. One productivity shift I made along the years that has gotten me very far very fast is not looking too far beyond my scope. There is already enough here to work with or to deal with. Small shifts make the biggest difference and that requires being in tune with the here and now. Working with what I already have here — my master’s degree closing out, my project closing out — is already plenty. It’s not time yet to be adding new habits, changing my whole persona or my look, or embarking on a side quest. Everything will not get done today. But I can do a lot today by using what is around me right now.
On Sunday and Monday, I studied for an upcoming final this Wednesday (I’m extremely nervous for it). I caught up on a lecture on psychosis in preparation which spiralled into adding a new part to my paper which I was not expecting but I think will be useful. I remembered that like dementia, psychosis has also been linked to low Acetylcholine (ACh), and low ACh in my paper had produced hallucinations, meaning how they produced those will also probably be meaningful for psychosis.
I’ve had a theory floating around on chronic stress and psychosis which I was not planning on including in my paper because I thought it was too irrelevant but I decided it would not hurt to add that too.
All in all my paper has been really shaping up! Finals have been driving me a bit insane as I’m dying to delve into my experiments and see my results but they’ll have to wait until Wednesday. In the meantime, I fixed up my first experiment and am planning on rerunning it next week because of an accidental copy paste in my bias that had wiped out the hallucinations.
A very transformative week! Next week, I’ll get back to “The Piano Teacher” as well.