Medication Lost, and the sleepless speedy rush was lightning for the mind. But headaches and dizziness. Paranoid thoughts. Kaleidoscoping light shows and mandela overlays. Everything glows, like in heaven. Nothing real is real. But non-real things are too real. Wonder how that works? Itching, prickling skin. Empty staring thoughts. Dread-headed depression. Inky shapes like apparitions fly here and everywhere.

Was the medication lost? No. Denounced. Withheld maybe. There's a word I'm searching for. It'll come.

For now though, questions. Questions for the humans out there. The ones who are real. Not sure I'm real, or whether I can ever know if I'm real. I could be a character in a simulation based around someone else's reality, and I'm just an artificial intelligence programmed to think it's real to ensure I behave as such. Or this could all be a dream. I could never know the truth. Nothing can logically convince. Anyhow, wandering. Questions:

1. Anyone ever seen a kind of... how to describe... grey vapour-like stuff everywhere in the dark? It kind of rises like a slow smoke off of everything if you're inside and the air is still. Outside it is blown by the breeze. I've wondered what it is for a lifetime. Latest theory is that my eyes are slightly sensitive to the spectral wavelengths associated with heat. Not always though, just sometimes. Looks like what you would call the spirit world, with ghostly tendrils and wafting things.

2. Can normal people remember happy things? Not "those were the good old days" generalised memories about kinds of events, but memories of specific happy/pleasant experiences. I can't. Not for the life of me.

3. When you remember something, are you rooted in who you are now as you recall the thing, or are you teleported into the memory to experience it as the person you were when it happened? Hard to put into words... Does the memory subsume your experience to the point where it replaces this reality with the memory reality?

4. Are you able to think and have emotions at the same time? Actually, I should change that: are you able to be conscious of thought and emotion at the same time? Kind of related: if you're listening to music, can you feel the emotions and understand the meaning of the words at the same time?

5. If you focus on an emotion, does it get immediately amplified to the point where you feel like you're suffocating? Or if you focus on a pain/itch somewhere on your body, does it get amplified to the point where you can't handle it? When you think of your heart (or whatever body part), does it become enormous in your mind as if that's all that exists, as if you were transported to your heart as a tiny point of consciousness?

6. Can you feel love when you are around another human, or can you only feel it alone? This echoes the feel or think split I experience. Being around another person means I have to be in think mode because I have to be able to understand what they say and respond appropriately. So I can't feel any kind of warmth/love/etc around another human. But when I'm alone I feel emotions for people and wish I could be there and express them in person... A lifetime of experience has proven I can't though. Even if I try I get shifted from feel mode to think mode and the words become hollow and detached from the truth they are trying to convey.

7. Do you know who you are? If possible, dig deep before answering this. I am nobody, and have never been anybody, and the idea that others truly know who they are seems... I don't know, magical. Mystical. Maybe delusional? Feels like people think they know, but if you dig deep enough they would realise they're nobody like me.

8. Can you read other people's thoughts? This might attract joke answers, but I'm being serious. I suspect everyone reads everyone else's thoughts all the time, but no one wants to admit it. When I say thoughts I don't necessarily mean words. Thoughts are what words express, but thoughts exist on a deeper level. These pure thoughts are what we read, not the words above them.

9. If you close your eyes in the dark, then put a pillow over your face, can you still the rudimentary images of the room's contents? Just very low resolution edges and rough shapes in speckled grey?

10. Have you had an MRI brain scan? If you answered yes to two or more of the above questions and have an MRI would you mind checking the cross-sectional area of a region called the Anterior Commissure in the midline Sagittal plane? It should be a pea-sized artifact anterior to the anterior-inferior corner of the thalamus. I'm missing this region altogether. Pretty sure it's why I experience the world different o everyone else.

11. Can you imagine a happy future? I literally cannot. It's not an unwillingness. It's as if there is some cog missing. When I try I just go blank, as if the intention was meant to turn some mechanism but there's no mechanism there and nothing happens. Since I can't imagine a pleasant/happy future the only things that can motivate me are avoidant things. I lack true motivation and only ever try to avoid pain.

12. Do you feel as if other people's thoughts can change you, and you can change others with your thoughts? I know that sounds like a normal symptom of psychosis, but I swear it's real. It's not dramatic, but subtle. It's the reason everyone is so worried about what others think of them - because their thoughts will change you, and if they have negative thoughts their thoughts will change you in a negative way. I suspect everyone subconsciously knows thoughts influence the world around them, but no one speaks openly about it.

Reason I put all this in the schizophrenia thread (besides me not knowing where else to put it) is that studies have shown schizophrenics often have less anterior commissure fibers, and also tend to experience problems with lack of pleasant memories and motivations. I think the two things are related given that studies have indicated the following:

>The anterior commissure connects (among other things) the amygdalae across the midline. Interestingly the amygdalae process different emotions according to hemisphere, with the left processing happy/pleasant experiences.

>Happy/pleasant experiences have experimentally been shown to involve the left amygdala and the right prefrontal cortex (as well as some other regions). The most direct signal path between the left amygdala and the right prefrontal cortex is likely the anterior commissure, which means any reductions in commissural volume may impact the prefrontal experience/awareness of pleasant emotions and thereby disrupt any future ability to consciously recollect a happy experience in the future. If you cannot remember happy things you will have no material from which to imagine a happy future either.

Thanks for reading, and if you answer the questions, thank you.