That actually does spell weirdo if you rearrange the words. I never noticed that. I wonder if it’s on purpose.
Good eye, Wendy!
Generally they increase one function by inhibiting others. Such leads toward a permanent alteration, often leaving out the enhancement and only maintaining the disabled, making a permanent overall decrease effect as well as personality change, usually more fear based (as that is all that is left for the brain to use ==> suspicion and paranoia).
So far in my career of drug induced intoxications, I’ve come up with two theories to explain paranoia:
Theory #1: direct stimulation of the fear centers. Drugs that are known to give one “bad trips” usually strike at the hypothalamus, which plays an important roll in basic emotional responses. The paranoia comes about because we cannot deal with fear that comes from an unknown source. We experience terror, but cannot name that which we are terrified by, so we fill the void with something–people are watching me, that man wants to kill me, the cops are onto me, demons lurk near to me–so as to feel that we at least can identify the source of the fear and thereby gain a better sense of control over it. Nothing is scarier than fear we don’t understand. (makes you think our paranoid delusions are actually helping us).
Theory #2: alarm system in the brain–same as theory #1–fear without a source–but this time stimulated indirectly. It’s a theory that says the brain has an embedded alarm system that goes off when it detects insanity. Drugs, by definition, put one into a temporary state of insanity. If too intense, this state might set off certain “alarms” in the brain that signal the presence of danger–not danger from outside, but within the body–just as the stomach gets nauseous when it detects poisons–so it triggers the fear response. How does the fear response help? It compels one to hide somewhere, to find shelter, a safe place where nothing can get you. It’s more or less the equivalent of lying down to rest when you’re sick. If you just find a safe place to hide–stay there and do nothing–chance are your temporary state of insanity won’t get you into any really trouble.
For a while, I figured theory #2 must be correct because bad trips triggered by unnamed terror arise on all sorts of psychedelics–mushrooms, acid, pot–chances are pretty minimal, I thought, that all such drugs happen to strike at the fear centers directly–more likely they all put one into a temporary state of insanity such that the “alarm system” in the brain gets triggered. But then I had a counter thought: all these drugs–the psychedelic–stimulate similar systems in the brain. I haven’t researched it enough to pin down exactly what this system in the brain is, but on all such drugs, one has very similar experience–there must be a system in the brain that coordinates emotion, musical experience, and the imagination–all these drugs seem to heighten this system–emotions are more intense, music is more intense, the imagination is more intense–and so maybe it’s this brain system that, when over stimulated, triggers the fear response–not necessarily in response to an alarm (but maybe it is in response to an alarm), but directly since fear is probably one of the emotions that is heightened within this brain system.