Vital Systems: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
This week coincided with the Easter holidays and my first real week out of my masters program. The free time gave me a lot of space to reflect and root through my systems — not just those within my Hopfield network, but also those in my personal life.
On Wednesday, I published my essay “Whiteness Wants to Eat You Too” which was the first big essay I’ve written outside of an academic setting.
Whiteness Wants to Eat You Too
Light-skinned Arabs. Thin-lipped Latinos. Mixed Black women with small button noses. According to Internet users, a new realm of individuals have joined the White umbrella that have never been seen there before. These apparent newcomers are frequently hounded on social media by complete strangers, pressured to accept the identity they have been newly pr…
It was definitely a shift in how I saw myself and what I was capable of. The magnitude of the personal achievement and the writing material made me feel a bit claustrophobic inside the house so I went for a long walk to think. On my way out, I got a message from my mom saying that she had gotten the present my sister and I had sent her way back in January. My mom lives all the way in Rio de Janeiro, so the package took months to arrive and required multiple levels of fees and check-ins. Was it worth the effort? Yes, to see my mom happy. My biggest love languages are gift giving and acts of affirmation. I love to buy people a little something or make them a craft. After getting her message, I thought of the intense effort I’ve been putting in recently and wanted to love on myself for the upgrades I’d made in my life this year.
My intention in leaving the house had been to hunt down a present for myself — a book of some kind, preferably. But it was past 7 PM and my slow little neighbourhood was already mostly closed up. So instead, I did a little lay in the grass of my nearby park for a while and walked to my nearby Budgens to see what I could scrounge up. I gave myself room to splurge a bit.
The theme was meant to be “Big Girl Care Package”. I decided between some fancy cheeses (the cheapest on the shelf), silly little drinks, and exotic fruits. I ended up with a good haul to take home and a mini prosecco as the boujie cherry on top. I felt a little glow of pride in my growing identity as a writer and imagined a distant future where I shut myself in fancy hotel rooms like all the cool writers do and just forced myself to be creative for the weekend. That’s my aspirational image for my 30s and 40s.
On my walk to the grocery store and back, I had a revelation. Recently I’ve been struggling with a spiritual trend — I spend countless hours stressing about something and putting ridiculous levels of work in only to discover that I already had the thing I was hunting for. Last year, I was stressed out of my mind worrying that I wouldn’t be accepted into a masters program. Turns out I had been walking on my future campus the entire time. This week, I thought my student loan was running late because of a mistake on my form that delayed my ability to send in my student number. I cursed God multiple times, asking Him why He was always throwing a wrench in my plans for structure. I know God must have been side eyeing me crazy hard like girl if you don’t just…
Because after all of my annoying complaints equivalent to spamming God’s Insta DMs nonstop, I decided to pull out the big guns and do some ~manifesting~. I was doing meditation after meditation, affirming, the whole shebang. I started taking some “inspired action” by emailing my school asking where the money was. First, they said that it could take a long time to get to me, but that they’d pass my request along to someone who would know better. So I meditated again. Then I got an email saying the money had actually already been wired last week but could take two weeks to get in my account. So I meditated again. And I napped.
When I woke up, I had a flash of deep Einstein level brilliance. I have two bank accounts and the student loans had been sending to my second bank account all year. And yet I was waiting for a notification from the first bank account like that was going to do anything. I checked and lo and behold, the money had deposited in my second bank account a week ago. Goes to show that sometimes you’re just looking in the wrong places.
I called my mom to tell her all this and she taught me a Brazilian phrase, “crying with your belly full”. I do that all the time.
Actually, I spent agonising months doing anything I could to make my project “good enough” and “complex enough” to be worthy. Then I had my second meeting with my supervisor and he told me I could do what was, in my head, the bare minimum. Just recurrent excitation. That’s it. So I could have pretty much chilled out months and months before that. It’s good that I didn’t and I have a more complex scope of my issue because I think it will make my conclusion stronger but the point is that I have the horrible tendency to think and think and think when I already have exactly what I need in front of me.
I figured I would experiment with actually learning my spiritual lessons, remembering some random errors that ChatGPT had previously noticed with the pre-made model I was using. Maybe what I had done last week was already pretty good and I just needed to work through the kinks of the model itself. Maybe. I walked home inspired to embrace the goodness that was already within my grasp.
I got inside and assembled my little snack assortment, along with some mussels from Sainsburys, just as a close friend FaceTimed. I wanted to feel like a mature adult woman in the prime of her life but I honestly felt more like a little girl cosplaying a fancy lady, which was fun too.
And I truly meant to work on all of my new project resolutions the minute my FaceTime ended…
But I got prosecco sleepy and ended up skimming my neural network book and falling asleep instead. My bad.
I got back to work first thing in the morning troubleshooting the original code and and lo and behold — MY ACETYLCHOLINE FUNCTION WORKED! I barely had time to celebrate because…
An hour later, I had a meeting with my supervisor who gave me some inspiration as to how to move forward, including some ideas on how I could analyse my results.
He told me I could try different effects of Acetylcholine and then try combining them at the end. This made me happy because I had really been wanting to talk a bit about pattern separation but it hadn’t made its way into this model. My upcoming steps felt full of possibility.
In the evening, I was feeling incredibly restless and in the mood for an outing so I took a trip down to SoHo. I ended up doing some very rare shopping for fun items, perusing makeup up shops and aisles of self care items.
I’ve worked pretty much every year since I was 15. My first job was at a Korean style bowl restaurant. Then I worked at a neighbourhood diner. While the other kids I worked with had shifts one or two days a week they would skip often to go live life, I worked three or four days a week and picked up all their spare shifts. Usually, I even rode my bike half an hour there and back because no one had time to take me on weekdays and early mornings. I’ve always been a hard worked and I’m no stranger to sacrifice. I will easily give up outings, my looks, and my free time for a goal or to build my life.
The concept of manifestation, or the idea that our inner beliefs can shape our world immensely, has been an occasional reminder for me that depriving myself doesn’t inherently get me where I need to go. Sometimes it can be a product of lack of faith in myself and pushing a life forward that I can live today.
When I first moved to London, I was a volunteer at a hostel. I got free breakfast, room, and board in exchange for my first 12 hours of work I did per week, and a little pay for anything more. In that time period, I lived on £50 a week which is nothing in London. Everything else I made, I’d stuff away in the hostel safe for my first apartment deposit and moving expenses. I walked to my second job rather than always paying for the bus, and I bought groceries and that was it. After a month or two of this, I decided to take a bit of money out for me. I got my nails done and bought sneakers that actually looked like they should be on a 22 year old’s feet instead of the clunky old lady shoes I was wearing everyday. In exchange, I felt elevated and excited to keep going. I had to remind myself that sometimes investing a little in yourself can bring more money in in the long run by making you feel a little more normal and look a bit more professional. “Abundance mentality”, right?
Actually, this project has been a manifestation of one little financial leap of faith. Before I moved to London, I took a trip to Bristol to help move in my sister to uni. We took a stop at a discount book shop where I first saw “Rethinking Consciousness” by neuroscientist Michael Graziano, a book exploring his theories of consciousness. My money was very low and I hesitated, talking myself out of it multiple times.
You don’t need another book.
You’ll never read all the way through it. It’ll just be another deadweight book on your shelf.
You’re not a person who reads science books. Maybe you’ll get bored.
You can’t understand neuroscience.
But it was just looked so nice. It really pulled strongly at something inside of me. So I bought it. And two years later, that book would set my ball rolling fast. Best £3 I ever spent. Sometimes you just have to spend that money.
After shopping, I had a quick dinner and set out for dessert. I sat to finish my ice cream at the Outernet Global, a big permanent, outdoor installation space in SoHo. I have a love-hate relationship to this big wall of screens. Sometimes I step in and shake my head at the garishness of a massive wall of screens playing random psychedelic visuals. I walked the kid I used to nanny in there one time thinking he would like to see the virtual butterflies being displayed and he was not feeling it at all. His distaste confirmed my opinion.
But today as I watched the sea animal blown up to massive proportions with calming music in the background, I unexpectedly thought to our ancestors, as if I was looking through their eyes for a moment. We tend to feel like we’ve gone past them and disappointed them somehow in our modern-day hedonism. But I actually wondered today if we were doing exactly what they would do, given the tools.
This room might shock them, but I’m not sure that they would feel at odds with it the way I think they would sometimes. Maybe some part of us just innately craves the stimulation and the safety of watching some random sea animals without fear. Strangely, I figured this is exactly what they would blow up to epic proportions and watch for hours, given the chance. I don’t think we’re as different from them as we feel sometimes. If they could figure out video the way we have, they would have done it — which is exactly why we did it when we could.
I thought a lot this day about the world we build as a reflection of our inner mechanisms. Everything we see is constrained by the flesh ball in our skull. All we can picture, everything we could ever conceive of, is tied up in our innate urges and chemical reactions. It’s impossible to imagine something completely unnatural to us like we cannot imagine a color outside of the visible spectrum of light, except abstractly. Every building we make, every train, every billboard, is completely wrapped up in our natural, inescapable inner build.
I had this realisation once years before I started down this path, back when I lived in New York. I was struck by the form of a building, a reflection of our need for shelter and our ability for abstraction. It hit me how everything we create is just our brain splattered across the world in some way shape or form.
I love stepping back sometimes with that thought in mind, like watching all of the chemicals inside of us on full display to watch like I’m watching television. The prefrontal cortex in all the crisp circles and symbols of the signage which we never see in the natural world. The limbic system activating at the red lights. Our social natures creating a sense of camaraderie in the SoHo crowd. It’s so fascinating to watch our biology at work, sneakily and unconsidered. And to think of all the other dimensions of world happening under our noses that we have no access to. The UV light. The vibrations. All the other possible colours we will never be able to perceive. The world is so massively everything and we only get a small fraction. But just that small fraction that we do get keeps us endlessly occupied.
Troubleshooting this week taught me that just because a system seems to work on the surface, doesn’t mean it can’t break when you start to need more from it.
So I took some time to root through my own systems at home and got them prepared for a bigger life. I’m financially fine right now, but just like my Hopfield network, there’s a really good chance that that’s just by coincidence and a little bit more pressure will reveal the underlying issues.
Last week I learned about attractors, which are points in a neural network that a system will always converge to regardless of the starting point. They’re long-term patterns of behaviour that allow systems to do things like form memories and create oscillations.
My Hopfield network forms simple “point attractors”, meaning my system will always converge towards a single fixed point. That’s how it learns to recognize the same pattern over and over again, like a number 7 or a picture of a flag. It creates one stable memory for each item of information it learns.
Strange attractors are system formats that operate very differently. Instead of converging to one single point, they create atypical behaviors that change over time. Strange attractors are sensitive to initial conditions, like “butterfly effects” that spread through the system. These become magnets for surrounding trajectories, resulting in unpredictable behaviour dictated by specific confines. They display both order and chaos.
My ADHD brain is like my own strange attractor. Just when it seems to converge into one system, chaos strikes. Its behaviors have a rhyme and reason but the result is quite unpredictable.
To account for this sensitivity, my systems have to be a perfect combo of obvious and in-my face, low pressure, but mentally stimulating for me to stick with them. I’ve gotten significantly better at finding that balance over time. ADHD requires a lot of troubleshooting and self-acceptance, but also a lot of knowing yourself deeply. In that way, I find it’s been a gift. I appreciate the call to create something personal and aligned versus always opting for a default setting with little input involved. It’s deepened my relationship to myself as I’ve gotten older.
I spent about three hours pushing everything I had into new Etsy spreadsheets (I’ve found those work really well for me). I pinned by Google Calendar, Microsoft Planner, and spreadsheets into a bundle of tabs that would automatically open every time I clicked Chrome. I’m a chronic tab hoarder so might as well always have those on display to reduce the cognitive load of hunting them down. I named everything with a fun affirmation that reminded me what my incentive was in opening each document and made me feel more connected to my spreadsheets. I find that keeping my incentive visible and fun but never pushy or shameful really helps me gravitate more towards things that are overwhelming. There’s nothing that will shut me down worse than the potential to feel like I suck or I’m a failure. I’ve also found Etsy spreadsheets to be a good investment for me as they typically cost under $5, they look nice, and they save me the trouble of putting in a lot of work into something I don’t like the look of and thus will never use again.
At the end, my systems felt a lot less penetrable.
Over the next few days, I sat with everything I’d done so far and everything I learned from my supervisor. On Saturday, I went on a long outing, on which I had gotten incredibly exhausted by the swarms of people and food stands I had explored for hours. As I took a breather at the end of the day, it hit me why my supervisor had suggested I see if the problems were worse with high Acetylcholine when the system was at maximum capacity.
On my way home, I also took some time to visualize my next tasks.
The learning phase in Hopfield networks are kind of already operating like Acetylcholine is up, while the recall phase is like if it was down.
How do I make patterns separate and muddle in my code? That’ll be interesting.
What’s going on in the Dentate Gyrus during high stress?
Actually if Acetylcholine is up high and the patterns are separating, the memory should actually be more coherent in my output. Well, unless it never goes down.
I got back to work on Sunday over some Vietnamese food.
Taking some time to get more rooted, I skimmed the later pages of Tariq Rashid’s “Make Your Own Neural Network”, which is a very fun and plain language guide I’ve been really enjoying reading. He discussed some elements my supervisor referenced in my meeting, like how to start analyzing my results and translating them into visuals. I started brainstorming how I would adapt this into my own code.
On my way home, my mind drifted back to my own personal systems for a minute.
I’m usually a very active person who loves to run and exercise. I can easily walk 20,000 steps a day just daydreaming and drifting off into my own little world. But hyperarousal, life stress, and general busyness the last few years really killed my fitness routine and I’ve struggled to get back to it. Since I finished university, I felt like I needed to give my body the chance to rest and process. I was hungry all the time, overstimulated, and burned out. It was actually my sense that I needed to get rest and empty my mind more that led me to study Sharp-Wave Ripples and Acetylcholine in the first place. But I’ve found that the reality of healing has been a long process and its own phase in life. I remember reading other people’s anecdotes about how when they finally started healing from chronic stress, they slept a lot more and caught a lot more colds. I don’t know what the exact science if for that off the top of my head, but I’ve definitely resonated with the sensation that an emotional healing period can trigger physical changes. I personally can sleep up to 12 hours some days and feel much more easily depleted than back when I was struggling heavily with PTSD, couldn’t “turn off”, and was struggling with insomnia most nights. Leaving chronic fight-or-flight mode is a lot of work!
I’ve come back to myself feeling stronger, more certain, and more in control of my experiences and inner world. In exchange, these have not been my most aesthetically pleasing years. I’ve honestly felt pretty frumpy, unfashionable, and exhausted. But better and happier. I’ve been seeing my current softness around the edges as a transitional-healing-body.
I’ve felt guilty that I haven’t pushed myself into a strict fitness routine and diet, like I’m just undisciplined or I can’t do it. But first of all, my discipline muscle is already getting thrown into something massive and just like a neural network, your system hits capacity somewhere and past that point, things get a little messy. Second of all, it’s been nice to focus my energy into something of real substance and power in my life and I’ve found the sacrifice worth it. Third of all, having to embrace where my body is has really helped me to break away from the toxicity of productivity culture.
We’ve cultivated a mentality around productivity that encourages everything, everywhere, all at once. If you don’t jump in and get to it, you’re making excuses. You have low willpower. Lacking a high intensity fitness journey or putting on some weight on is a failure that the six-pack-having, protein-powder-chugging influencers are immune from because they’re just “built different”. Because of this, people feel like they have to start a new habit or lifestyle instantly and go from 0 to 100 without thought to context or building a strong foundation. Inevitably, this fails and they feel guilty.
Personally, over the last few years, I’ve grown immensely in life, with ADHD and all, by listening to my body and letting it guide me through what is appropriate. Healing from chronic stress and surviving an intense shift in my academic life have been just about all I can handle. Choosing to put these first was my own strategic choice in determining what would guarantee the strongest rock to build the next parts of my life on. I’ve left feeling like I believe myself and like I can handle the world, which has soothed my PTSD immensely and given me space to actually make bigger, more healing shifts in my personal life. Trying to deprive my body or push it into an intense exercise routine sometimes leaves me feeling a bit shell-shocked and deregulated. While productivity culture would teach me to shut down the voice that “makes excuses” and to just do it, I’ve been enjoying letting myself build alignment so that my habits stick. And in following that mentality, I’ve seen steady growth throughout the deepest parts of my internal foundation that have changed my entire sense of self and how I operate, not just what I’m doing on the surface for a few guilt-ridden weeks. Following my body into a scientific theory definitely taught me that our feelings hold a lot of truth and wisdom to them and that listening versus silencing can change your entire world.
As long as I’m eating healthy and getting outside, the aesthetics are really the least important part of this journey for me right now.
I’ve been continuing to read “It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over” by Anne de Marcken this week. It’s grown on me a lot as the story has gone on. I was reading a scene this week when the zombie protagonist went out into a golf field. For the first time in the story, she recognizes the dark hole inside her not as hunger but as grief.
I’ve really started to feel a lot about this story. It’s complex and sad. The zombies are finding themselves slowly unraveling, losing arms and core memories and names. As the protagonist looks onto a human encampment in this golf field, she remarks on all of the things the living do — sleep, give birth, have sex. The jealousy is not expressed outright but it’s felt.
Working on this project has been healing because it gave me something to throw everything into. It’s all-consuming and a perfect vessel for anger and sadness and hopefulness and a myriad of other post-traumatic emotions. I feel like I’m in a rush all the time. At times, I’ve felt a little bit like a living effort, just a walking attempt. My subconscious mantra that slips out when I’m sad or irritated or just feeling some abstract emotion I can’t quite place is, “I’ve been working so hard.” I can’t tell if it’s to soothe myself or a justification for something or a motivator. Sometimes it’s out of anger, like “God, why did you make all the salt spill into the pot when I’ve been working so hard.” It’s a sort of universally applicable phrase, a mental thneed.
I used to be someone very sensitive and immersed in my emotions. I cried sometimes just to feel something deep. I loved listening to music and getting deep into the feeling of an era in life. But the last few years have felt pretty emotionally blunted. I stopped listening to music for years after going through an extended trial that brought up so much grief and jadedness towards the world. When I make playlists now, I sit for a long time feeling lost, like I don’t quite know how to package my feelings. And sometimes I let some music play that I’ve been avoiding because it makes me feel something and there’s a memory of me there in all my hopefulness and excitement towards life and wonder and curiosity at where the world would take me that I felt in my late teens and earlier 20s. It makes me feel briefly like the air has been knocked out of me, or like I’m trying to open a broken program.
I referenced the hippocampus last week and how it takes memories and puts them into a linear narrative. Trauma can scramble that narrative up, throwing things out of order or making them feel like they’re floating way outside of any conceivable timeline. Working on finding this answer in dissociation science has been a shot in the dark hope that my own story is somewhere in there intact, and that maybe putting the pieces in the right places will bring back that piece of me that feels like it doesn’t compute. Reading de Marcken’s story this week hit close to home because it reminded me of how badly I wanted to feel human again too. I felt a lot like her protagonist in my undergrad years especially. I would remark to myself that I felt like a fish in a tank watching all the humans walk around outside. I wanted what they had, a sort of joyful normalcy that felt like it had been sucked out of my life. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve sometimes grieved the scramble for something that feels always right outside of my grasp. Like maybe if I had that I would really feel 24 instead of 106.
Even the zombie-induced amnesia has me relating a little bit. We underestimate how much even the little pieces are part of what makes us feel whole. As much as our brains are built to shield us from the scary parts, some days I wish I could recode my own brain to just rip off the bandaid and let me feel like I make sense. It’s complex because at the same time, I don’t think that I would be this person if not for the painful circumstances I navigated. I feel like there were pieces of me waiting here to be found that I may have never encountered otherwise. But I look forward to the day that I can truly weave all the different free floating versions of me together again — my shy and silly high school self, my 18 year old self who was going through inaccessible pain, the angsty 19 year old I became to cope, the serious senior who was just trying to make it through one of the most mentally intense years of her young life, the version of me who was living in a minuscule apartment trying to scratch an itch she didn’t know how to relieve, and the me now who has an incoming graduate degree and is finishing a project in something I didn’t even know two years ago. I get tired of feeling like 10 different unconnected people sometimes like a zombie with a loose arm.
It’s hard to know after trauma if you’re meant to let your old self die with dignity or reabsorb your old self into who you are or try to reclaim the missing pieces again. And if there’s a difference between missing and gone for good.
Monday morning’s attempts to learn noise-to-signal ratio were quickly abandoned for a little whimsical frolicking around East Dulwich.
I had a mini readathon in a coffee shop…
shared a little of my Joe & the Juice Spicy Tuna sandwich in exchange for a bit of companionship on my walk…
stopped for a slice of gluten-free spiced pear and chocolate loaf…
and laid in the grass for a little while just feeling without any attempts to change or fix.
I took a very long walk home and laid in bed a minute determined to do a little learning at night — and accidentally fell asleep with my cat at my side instead. I woke up at 8 PM and decided that the learning must just want to be done in the coming week.
The free time this week was an amazing opportunity to add some vibrancy to my day-to-day and recover a bit from one of the most demanding years of my life. I really felt my energy shifting and was grateful to have had a productive meeting that will add so much direction to my coming weeks. Next week, I’m aiming to embrace the superficial in life after a long period of digging deep. I’ll be taking some time to think about my self-expression a bit more and how I can spice up the energy a little bit. I am a Leo rising and Venus after all. Self-expression is sort of our life blood. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I’ll also have a pretty little graph so both my project and I will be feeling cute.