Personal experience with brain fog, per Michael Nels.

20231219

Michael Nehl's thesis in The Indoctrinated Brain – How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom - is that the evil powers in the world are making a two or more-pronged attack.  First they are overwhelming us with fear porn, and secondly they are using diet, medicine, and social interventions to weaken our powers of thinking.

Nehls has the right background. Just two years a. he published The Exhausted Brain, describing how our mental capacities are simply being overwhelmed.

I'm in a good position to comment, recovering from some sort of a nondescript virus. For three days of the past week, I didn't have the energy to read, and for another three I did not have the energy to write. My body needed all the resources it had to fight off this bug.

The symptoms are not severe – a persistent wet cough, runny nose, aches and pains and a general weakness. A slight temperature for a day or two. Throughout this, although I was reflecting on Nehls' book, rereading sections of it, I couldn't bring myself to write.

Today for the first time in a week I could bring the children to school. Glad to have done it, but also glad to be sitting down. I'm still coughing.

A part of Nehls' thesis is that the Covid 19 spikes (his word for the injections – they are not vaccines in any sense of the word, but there is no consensus on what else to call them. Gene therapy injections? Jabs?) were designed to weaken our brains.

To repeat my post from a week ago, Nehls describes memory as a three-step affair. Thoughts are held momentarily as electrical impulses in the front of our brain. They are available for combining and for action, but they can be easily lost.

Next, they are temporarily stored in new memory cells in the hippocampus. Neurogenesis, the process of creating the cells within the hippocampus, is essential. A brain should retain its natural ability to create new cells throughout its life.  Nehls makes a distinction between “natural” ability, which doesn't diminish, and “normal,” or average ability, which does. It is a function of the volume of the hippocampus, initially about 10 cm³ but shrinking down to half of that in the average modern person per the graph I posted last week.

When we suffer a brain fog, as I have experienced, the energy that would've been necessary to generate new memory cells and perform other brain functions is being sidetracked to fight disease. I can write this because I feel like I've recovered a bit of the ability to think.

Building on his thesis from The Exhausted Brain, Nehls goes back to Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."  Our brain simply does not have the resources to think through the immense number of trivial problems it encounters over the course of a day. We rely on "fast thinking" to solve easy problems like whether to close a window when we feel a draft or wash our hands after changing the baby.

Our "System 2" logic kicks in only when we need to give original thought to something. Here's a case in point linking back to last week's book about cultural inheritance.

I give no thought to clearing the dish drainer, putting dishes away before I start to wash them. I need an empty place to put the wet dishes.  I give no second thought to drying pots and pans in the process. There is not room to leave them in the dish drainer.

Oksana's mother likewise tackles the task without thinking about it. But she does it in a different manner. She never clears the dish drainer. She will pile dishes in a precarious two-foot stack in the dish drainer rather than put them away. She never uses a towel.

Both her approach and mine are the result of fossilized System 2 thinking from ages ago. She grew up with a kitchen too small for a place to put things away, and with too few dishes to bother with. I grew up as one of three kids whose rotating assignments were wash, dry, and set the table. The upshot is that I could never convince her that drying dishes made sense. I don't argue. I simply do it my way when I'm doing it and ignore her when she tells me I'm wasting my time and doing it wrong.

That's an example of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Fast and slow. Nehls’ observation is that modern life forces too much System 2 thinking on our exhausted brains, to the point that we take shortcuts and figuratively throw up our hands and say "whatever."

His thesis is that the perpetrators of the Covid Plandemic - you could call it as well plandemodium - intended to flood us with more decisions than we could possibly cope with and reduce us to accepting what everybody else was doing and what was being forced on us.

The public was deluged with instruction, advice, fear, apprehension and such about airborne germs, germs on surfaces, mutating viruses, asymptomatic transmission, killing grandma, herd immunity, sterilizing immunity, the dangers of vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine, handshaking and so on. Not only was there a continual waterfall of new information, but it contradicted itself day in and day out. Nehls’ thesis is that this was by design.

His thesis is also that this was unique in degree if not in kind. I am not so sure. Human society has been swept by panics throughout its history. Every communications medium has been put to use stirring up panic. Books, when they first came out. Pamphlets in the day of the American and French revolutions. Yellow journalism and newspapers by the Spanish-American war. Radio by FDR and the dictators of the 1930s. Television, of course, from its beginning in my youth. And now, social media is supplanting television.

My generation's fear of the Soviet Union was no doubt fanned by the CIA in much the same way as today's generation's fear of global warming and Covid. Along the way there was a fear of overpopulation which has led to a vast decline in birth rates. Therefore, although I endorse Nehls' book I think he may be going overboard on the uniqueness of the threat this time.

I’m in a somewhat unique position to comment. My parents never listened to the radio.  I don’t even know if they heard FDR’s fireside chats. Television was in its infancy when I was a kid. Although Walter Cronkite was there, I didn’t listen to him.  I have recollections of being out of touch. In the fourth grade I reported to the class about a hurricane I had read about in Mamie Florida. I had never heard Miami pronounced. 

I could likewise never figure how anybody could say something useful in 140 characters, or what one would post every day on Facebook, or why one would take a selfie.  I’m not a creature of my time.

Every generation has been stampeded by its government into decisions that go against its own self-interest. The calm, sure voices of people who are capable of examining the evidence and coming to and dependent conclusions have always been rare.

I am not even convinced that the calm, sure voices of my generation are totally on target. They seem overly preoccupied with the evil that has been done and less concerned with shaping our rising generations. Books about exposing and convicting the global predators sell far better than anything about how to raise your daughters to be good mothers. I pose the question which will have more influence on the future of the world.

I recommend Nehls' book for a good explanation of how the brain works. He has a plausible thesis for the ways in which the Covid spikes, quite likely intentionally, decreased human capability for rational thought and therefore for reasoned analysis of the changes being pushed on humanity from every direction.

I recommend other books, in particular by Naomi Wolf, Robert Malone and Ed Dowd, for an analysis of the many other implications of the spikes. They have raised all cause mortality. They have increased the incidence of spontaneous abortion and death among neonates. They have decreased fertility. They have changed the human genome in ways that may cascade down through the generations.

This is far too much information to expect even a highly intelligent readership such you, prepared by education as you are, and with the time afforded by retirement to examine. In other words, I can't expect any of you to wrap your minds around most of the stuff I write about.  And I, in turn, must ignore a lot of stuff by Joel Smalley, Matthew Crawford, Jessica Rose, Naomi Wolf and others that I simply don't have the ability to digest.

Even were I able to digest it, I could not pass it along to my children or even to my wife. We need simple rules for life. System 1 rather than System 2 thinking. System 1 thinking tells me to make sure that the kids get a good education and don't get subjected to pharmaceutical or environmental toxins that might damage their health. This task, simple enough to state, will be hard enough to accomplish.

I'll mention another thread to be tugged on. The theories about how the evil people in the world are operating mostly project that they have been successfully pulling off their schemes. Conspiracies seldom come off 100%. My bet is that what we see is partial success of any number of schemes, none of which have followed the paths envisioned for them by their authors, however evil. People just aren't that smart, and the world is too full of unintended consequences. How much of what we see of global warming, alternative fuels, gender confusion and Covid are simply massive unintended consequences? A topic for a later date.

Graham