well, all I can say is that I hope everyone is doing well…considering the general unwellness of the human condition and the fact that things in general go mildly unwell it will be nice to hear that the well is on the rise and in general wellness does well. well well, well well well
I can’t speak for all ticquers; my experience is not universal. It’s closer to muscle spasm than possession, though.
I’ve always had an overactive and poorly-controlled internal monologue, but I’ve never been prone to disassociative hallucination. The mess is inside my head, but it’s always been there. I just have a harder time now keeping it from expressing in ways apparent to the external world.
I’ve described the experience here previously in another thread:
The verbal stuff is closer to the gross motor tics than the hemiplegia effect. Gets worse with declining mood, more likely to erupt when startled or self-conscious.
I tend to get horse-style lip-blowing, a bit of lip-smacking and frequent tongue-clucking most of the time. When I’m upset or stressed, actual verbalisation gets added to that, but I usually manage to choke those down to a squeak or scream (to avoid freaking out listeners more than necessary). Lately, I’ve also acquired a medium-severe stutter that usually only appears in moments of social/emotional stress.
The verbal tics don’t really feel like an external force, and they’re often clearly influenced by what I’m thinking immediately prior. For example, if I have a sudden recollection of a strong memory, it’ll often immediately elicit a verbal tic that is in some way related to that memory.
Suppression of verbal tics isn’t really a conscious process, though; they hit too fast for that. The suppression is more reflexive, kind of like catching yourself as you fall. Fairly often enough of the tic comes through that I can work out what it would have been if I hadn’t automatically choked it.
The stutter feels much closer to external than the tics do. The experience of that is kind of like trying to pound words through a force field.
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Not that surprising; a lot of speech disorders subside if you sing (or use a second language, or even put on an accent). Singing uses a slightly different pattern of brain activation to speech, and the different activation may route around damage.
Similarly, you get Parkinsonian patients who can barely move…unless they dance.
Illustrative tangent: tic disorders are probably somewhat similar to the evil twins of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s Chorea.
Down in the bottom of your brain is a region known as the basal ganglia. These structures don’t seem to have much involvement in cognition, but they’re closely involved in motor activity.
The oversimplified layperson version of how it works goes roughly like this: as the robot guys have discovered, running/walking/etc are actually really complicated tasks, mostly due to the difficulty in getting the assorted muscles to contract at exactly the right time.
Instead of making your brain calculate this from scratch each time, the basal ganglia contain a bunch of “rhythm” circuits, with pre-programmed sequences for common motor patterns (running, walking, etc).
As neurons are never truly “off”, all of those rhythms are normally quietly bubbling away in the base of your brain 24/7. There’s a very complicated network of dopaminergic circuitry that functions to activate the desired pattern when appropriate and suppress the others.
Both Parkinson’s and Huntington’s are caused by progressive degeneration of this dopamine circuitry. With Parkinson’s, the system suppresses everything, and the patient turns into a statue [1]. With Huntington’s, the reverse happens: you lose the ability to suppress any of the patterns, creating a constant writhing tremor.
Tourette-style tic disorders [2] are probably based in a similar mechanism. You lose the ability to suppress the not-quite-random static that is buzzing away in the background of everyone’s brain, and it expresses as involuntary behaviour.
[1] The stereotypical writhing tremors assocated with Parkinson’s are actually due to the side effects of the dopamine agonists we use to un-freeze the patients. As the disease progresses, we have to keep raising the dose on those, so the side-effects gradually increase until they become intolerable.
[2] My thing is officially not-Tourette’s, as Tourette’s is a syndrome partially defined by no-apparent-cause adolescent onset. The symptoms of my thing are basically the same, though.
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