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My incredibly brilliant and incredibly wonderful friends at Divergence Neuro are hiring for a full-time customer support position for their new software platform. (Toronto only, sorry!)
https://www.divergenceneuro.com/career/customer-support-representative-full-time/
I don’t speak tech, but you can look yourself at the job specs and see if you qualify. CEO Alex Ni is a genius, and so is his business partner Heather Hargraves – who is also the best thing to ever happen to me. If you want a job with brilliant folk where you will make a difference to the world – and you can be patient with tech dunces like me… apply.
However – I might not speak tech… I but I do speak biology, and I’m telling you that neurofeedback, and Divergence’s platform, is very much the real fucking deal…
As many people know: I have NEVER been able to sleep. Ever. People love to give me lazy (and insensitive) advice about cutting down on caffeine, or just having a 9-5 schedule, and I just want to scream with frustration. I couldn’t sleep when I was five, this has nothing to do with caffeine. And it’s not about sticking to a regular schedule either – I had a regular schedule for my entire early life in school – that didn’t change a thing. I’d still go days without sleep. My mom started giving me weird pills from Chinatown (that my aunt Kelley Harron nicknamed “Chinese Roofies” after they knocked a friend out cold) when I was ten, then four years later I discovered weed, and since then I’ve been reliant on some kind of substance to turn off the lights. Nothing else has ever worked. Even the NHS told me I was “potentially untreatable” when I signed up for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to try and kill this demon.
The CBT helped a bit – but I was told that a big event in my life could trigger the insomnia to rear its head again… and it did. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer I didn’t sleep for twelve days in a row… *Twelve*. And then on the one year anniversary of her death, something in my brain snapped and I went without ONE minute of sleep EVERY OTHER NIGHT for A YEAR AND A HALF.
For eighteen straight fucking months I would toss and turn in bed ALL NIGHT without a minute of sleep, and by dawn I’d be exhausted, worn out, miserable, and in tears. Words cannot express how much it was ruining my life: I constantly had to cancel meetings, events, gigs… everything. I was spending 40-60 hours a week in bed – more time than I was spending working or exercising or doing ANYTHING ELSE – just tossing and turning, worrying about everything in the universe, smoking constantly in a desperate attempt to turn off the lights… I was really losing hope. I cried a lot.
Heather however believed that she could crack my problem with *physical rewiring* of my brain… You can see on my insta a bunch of diary entries with me experimenting with the tech in slutty outfits:
And some very very unsexy ones too…
By October I was able to adopt a new and regimented protocol of exercises, and after just a couple of weeks of using the technology… I started to sleep better.
Then by the end of December I realised I hadn’t had a sleepless night in a month… It seemed too good to be true. I was excited and hopeful, but it still seemed too premature to state with confidence that my brain is changing.
Now it’s been FIVE MONTHS since I’ve rolled in misery all night… and I can say with confidence: Neurofeedback is changing my brain. This is the real fucking deal.
I’ll continue to work with it, and I intend to write many science features and personal testimonies about it – as well as to sing the praises of neurofeedback to anyone seeking a non-drug based way to change their brains for conditions such as ADHD, epilepsy, anxiety, migraine, and so much more…
More to come from me. I will shout from the top of every mountain about this: I really feel this tech can change people’s lives. Medics will dole out poison pills (because they’re cheap as chips) without ever mentioning neurofeedback to people because it’s expensive – and because people just don’t know about it.
Well, as a writer I can’t make it cheaper or easier to use – that’s Alex’s job – but I sure as fuck can do one thing, and that is tell the world about it… Watch this space.
I’m officially, thoroughly and totally disinterested in the solar eclipse: It’s a bit cloudy and I can’t be bothered to make any effort to see it.
But I’m also just completely over space. I’m thoroughly bored by it now at my old age of 41. I skip every news story about astronomy or space science. All the yawn.
And I have nothing but the deepest revulsion for anyone who rants about how we need a “plan b” by moving to Mars – that is literally the stupidest idea in the universe. We can’t live on Mars without bringing earth’s atmosphere, life, water, and soil – every single thing we’d need to live for even five minutes without starving or asphyxiating. Even if the Earth is now toxic, coated in microplastics, “forever chemicals” and radiation, it’s still paradise compared to anywhere else. The idea of surviving elsewhere is a ridiculous fantasy for boys who play too many video games and need some fresh air instead.
Space is like astrology – it an amusing and fun distraction as a teen, but I grew out of it when I realised what a pointless waste of time it was.
While up in Lancaster giving a lecture on the history of LSD for the Royal Society of Chemistry, I asked my hosts if I should do anything before leaving town.
“See the Castle on a guided tour – trust us.” True to form, I heeded their advice and changed my train tickets the next day so I could take two hours to explore the innards of one of Britain’s oldest “working” prisons. How old? Some brick foundations supposedly date to the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian (hands down my favourite Emperor). Historians (of course) squabble over whether or not that’s true, but it’s undoubtedly true that the prison cells were used right up until 2011. Seeing the rooms – grim and clammy as anything you can imagine – was chilling as fuck.
And because the building is still used for legal proceedings for the Crown Court, the castle *technically* belongs to King Charles III (… though I’d say it belongs to us, the citizens and tax payers). So we were not permitted to take photographs in most of the chambers. I’m sure we could have surreptitiously snapped pics with our phones, but – as I’m still a Canadian at heart and didn’t feel like being a dick – of course I didn’t.
It gave me great joy to learn that the building had been used extensively by Henry IV – as Shakespeare’s Henry IV Pt AND 2 are among my favourite plays by The Bard. I would get the “Yet herein will I imitate the sun” speech tattooed all over my back (if it wouldn’t make my mother spin in her grave – she despised body inking).
But what moved me the most was the very graphic and very disturbing stories about horrific torture devices from antiquity on display, such as the “Scold’s Bridle” (a metal cage that disobedient wives would have to wear as they were paraded around town on display). And of course the chambers for public executions.
Remember: it was only a few hundred years ago that public executions were basically the Netflix of the day. We’d like to think we’re so much more sophisticated and empathetic now… but give us a few decades of drought, famine, migration and starvation – plus no internet – when climate chaos wipes out electricity supplies. I guarantee that horrific displays of human cruelty – in public, not on the telly – like this could come right back into everyday life.
The world may have changed, but human nature has not.
I always say: If I hadn’t studied zoology, I would have studied history. She who does not know her history is condemned to repeat it my friends…
Further to my point that people need to stop having prissy pants freakouts that AI is going to be sooooo amazing and replace aaaaaall the writers. I just got a Google Alert about a “summary” of my book on Youtube.
It’s not only an obnoxiously wooden and awkward “summary” of my book, it doesn’t even capture the ethos of my thinking – or simply plagiarise my writing (which, honestly, is what all AI “large language learning” models do). For example at 1:14 a section called “Economic Thinking Unveiled” rants about my “thinking” on issues in “microeconomics and macroeconomics”. Which there bloody isn’t. The bot just auto implanted that due to some stupid algorithm and template.
This is obviously a bottom-of-the-barrell example of AI generated writing, but it’s laughably awful and it’s still mystifying to me that anyone really thinks computers can do what the human brain can do when it comes to art, music and storytelling. Rough calculations, fine. But computers don’t have life experience, emotions, regrets, sorrows, aspirations or jokes. Or as I like to say, a bot will never be able to make me laugh or make me come. (A vibrator can help sure, but half the magic is what’s going on in your mind.)
As I always say – I’m not afraid of AI being smarter than humans… I’m afraid of people *thinking* it is and continuing to just give their brains to their phones and relying on microchips to do things they bloody well know how to do themselves.
And I’m much more worried about people having too much faith in technology and allowing it to make horrific errors that destroy people’s lives, such as incorrectly identifying people with facial recognition software (already racial bias has been shown over and over). Or incorrectly targeting people in criminal matters – look at the Horizon scandal with the Post Office.
Reminder to non-Brits: The UK government used a form of software called Horizon to process Post Office accounts that turned out to be flawed and bullshit. It accused all these harmless everyday folk of stealing hundreds of millions of pounds. Instead of going “maybe the computer is wrong and this nice little old lady wouldn’t try and embezzle £150 million” the government took the poor post masters to court for years and destroyed their lives. Four people committed suicide.
Look up issues to do with phenomena to do with “quantum biology and the brain” and the “emergent properties” you see in biological systems that are staggeringly sophisticated compared to any computer. Even the shape of the DNA double helix depends on it – so just imagine what happens in something as complex as a brain or an eye.
And we don’t stop functioning if there’s a power cut or the internet breaks down.
Again: I’m not afraid of AI being a better writer, thinker or doer than me… I’m afraid of idiots *thinking* it will be.
Put another way: I just worked on an enormous feature about the dangers of ketamine addiction, and included graphic stories about friends of mine who destroyed their teeth, vaginas, prostates and more. One editor went, “ew yucky!” but I replied:
“I’m sorry but that’s the grim reality of what happened, people need to know about this. And anecdotes like this, things I saw with my own eyes, will reassure people this wasn’t written by some lame and monotonous ChatGPT bot or some other such mindless bullshit. AI will never replace the irreplaceable importance of a lived human experience.”
It’s a cliche but it’s true: it is darkest before the dawn. And this was one damned dark January. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many storms in one month. I don’t mind the rain, it’s soothing to listen to… but when you have barely seen the sun or gone for a walk in six weeks it gets tiresome.
… not to mention that it’s totally true what people say about grief, losing somebody indescribably precious to you: the second and third years after their death are harder than the first.
In the first year, you’re so focused on the practicalities of dealing with their finances, house, and will – plus relieved they are no longer suffering – you don’t really have time to grieve… then after the dust has settled, the reality of the fact that you will never… see them… again… really sinks in. Plus all your friends (who are too preoccupied with babies and such anyways) stop calling because they assume the worst is over… when really the worst has only just begun.
I’ve experienced heartache before… but never anything like this.
However, there is still life to be lived. And I feel every winter has one day – one moment – when it feels spring is finally here… and light comes back into your life.
For a few reasons, this was that moment. I was going to make my bed for this shot, to symbolise a new beginning: for two years I have spent roughly 50 hours a week tossing and turning with the worst insomnia I’ve EVER experienced. “Torture” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But this year – miraculously – I haven’t had one sleepless night. So tidying the shot seemed appropriate.
But then I thought… nah. Leave the sheets in their chaotic state – rather than sanitise this moment. I’ve suffered a lot with knives in my heart, pained by memories of my mother, tossing and turning and tossing and turning. I can’t even convey the misery of the experience, truly.
Everything seems to have turned a corner. And I hope I didn’t suffer for nothing. She most certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to.
Either way… a little sunshine is never a bad thing.
I will be in Lancaster on February 13th to give a lecture for the Royal Society of Chemistry about one of my favourite subjects in the whole world: the history of LSD. The event is free, and you’ll receive a lovely lysergic gift if you attend. Details here and official text about the event below.
Now, I try to leave personal anecdotes about drugs out of my writing and my talks. I once read that “other people’s drug experiences can be boring”, so I took that on board. However, I am obliged in the interests of accuracy, history, and – above all – comedy to share one story about my grandfather’s second wife (second of four, but who’s counting!?), Virginia Leith (1925-2019).
Virginia was a starlet in Hollywood in the 1950s (more about her here), best known for the sci-fi cult classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, which you can watch in full on YouTube.
In the 1950s, when LSD was still legal and psychiatrists were fascinated by its effects on the brain, they enlisted volunteers from LA’s high society – artists, musicians, actors, and other “creatives” – to examine the effects on their cognition. Virginia, a starlet at the time, got to take part. Lucky girl.
The lab-coated shrink wanted Virginia to solve puzzles and scribble drawings, and she flatly refused: in her mind, she had turned into a four year old girl, and had no desire to fill out paperwork. All she wanted was for him to take her for ice-cream.
… so he did.
My grandfather’s second wife, famous for a a film about a sentient dismembered head, received high potency acid in the 1950s and was given ice cream as a reward. Can’t make that up. As I say… Truth is stranger than fiction.
– – –
Of Parasites, Bicycles & Saints: A Short History of LSD
February 13, 7pm sharp, The Storey Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH
Most are familiar with Bicycle Day – when a Swiss chemist accidentally tripped balls cycling home from the lab in 1943 – and Timothy Leary’s tiresome “Turn On Tune In Drop Out mantra”. But the full history of LSD is so much more colourful, so much more hilarious, and so much more disturbing. From CIA operatives agreeing to dose each other with “surprise acid trips”, hookers hired to spike unwitting San Franciscan civilians, how the founder of AA achieved sobriety through a mind-bending trip, and medieval peasants losing all four limbs to gangrene… the history of acid has it all.
If you know anything about the world of superstar DJs, you’ll know this: women are woefully underrepresented. Just how underrepresented? Only 1% of the world’s top DJS are female. Nothing but pathetic. Watch the excellent documentary Underplayed for more on this.
Big stars like Charlotte de Witte and Nina Kravitz are breaking the mould. Palestine’s Sama’s Boiler Room set – spectacularly staged in her own home country (before it was razed to the ground by Israel) – is the most viewed BR video ever.
But still. Only 1% of the world’s top DJs are female.
Nonetheless, the tide is clearly turning.
Please appreciate Pleizel the newest addition to Max Cooper’s magnificent label Mesh.
Max and co. recognise that we need more women in the scene, and he wisely scooped this lass up after meeting her. Nice call.
At her debut gig in London in December 2023, opening the after party after Max’s incredible show, you could literally feel the love in the audience for her. “YES PLEIZEL!” people squealed – important considering this was her first major UK gig.
As I said to one of Max’s managers: “You can see that everyone is rooting for her. People WANT her to make it – nobody likes that techno is so dominated by men.”
Just how promising is she? When I listened to the new album from Mesh, Lattice 001, her opening track Liana gave me floods of goosebumps from the first five seconds. As all music does: my body knows if something is good.
Pleizel, if you’re reading this, I’m the Canadian girl who went up to you as you were smoking a ciggy before the show and said bashfully “Are you Pleizel? … I LOVE YOUR TRACK.”
Nice work young lady.
*LATE POST – I’m in the middle of a gargantuan photo dump of memories from 2023, apologies for tardiness. I blame smart phones and the internet for making it impossible to get anything done these days. I miss the 90s.*
I don’t believe in the millennial concept, spread on social media like an infectious virus, of “positive vibes only!” It’s vacuous and unhelpful. We’re never going to make the world a better place by ignoring awful things, no matter how depressing they may be. Only by staring darkness in the face, and dealing with it, will we ever improve as a species.
If people expect an Instagram account to be populated with selfies, flowers and sunsets… I disagree. Edward Burtynsky is recognised as one of the world’s greatest photographers for his devotion to making horrific landscapes alluring and enticing. Drawing naive viewers in to examine his deceptively beautiful landscapes, causing them to then ponder their own impact on the planet, is an incredible achievement. Sod superficial fashion shoots. This is what every photographer should aim for: to use their images to make you think more, not less.
I passed by the underpass at Finsbury Park on my way home, and quickly snapped this pic before bursting into tears and heading off. (And yes, I know that the last thing any homeless person needs to see is tears in the eyes of a middle class white kid.)
I see the tents and mattresses here daily, and it used to be MUCH worse years ago, but today it really shook me. It was the carpet and the newspapers. People had clearly set up camp expecting they would be there for a while.
The carpet tells me they want some level of dignity. And the newspapers show me they read – and they think. Like any other human.
Empathy is supposed to be a defining feature of human consciousness, and yet everywhere on earth you look – from the exploding homeless populations in the wealthiest cities in the world to the treatment of Palestinians as sub-human – you just see its absence.
The solution of course is not to go the way of heartless normies who say vacuous things like “Well if I can’t change it why should I think about it?” Or “I’ve stopped reading newspapers – it’s bad for my mental health!”
The solution is to pay attention to the darkness in the world – we can’t fix things we don’t know about.
Remember: if you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.
Well then. I’ve been saying for years… and years… and years…
Those ketamine clinics in America are playing with fire: it’s only a matter of time before those bullshit charlatans wind up inadvertently killing somebody. A vulnerable and depressed patient will become introduced to the drug legally through clinical treatment… develops a taste for it, gets it on the dark web… And dies.
Such as by drowning. Already in the UK we have had four recorded cases of people who died after snorting a fat, relaxing line, taking a bath, k holing without meaning to… and drowning.
I’ve been saying for years: it’s only a matter of time before we see a high-profile death in America and a media storm.
And here we are: Matthew Perry‘s cause of death has now been revealed to have been an excessive dose of recreational ketamine, taken in his hot tub (like many a naive k fan).
Perry, as it happens, just published a memoir about addiction and rehab.
How many times did he go to rehab you, ask? Fifty three. What an effective therapy! Sigh. There’s a reason they say “relapse is good for business”, and every addiction researcher with a brain describes America’s rehab sector (which only has a 3% success rate) as a “scam”.
I wrote about this in my huge story for The Nation last year
I predicted ketamine would be America’s next Oxycontin, and that those clinics would bring hellfire upon themselves for their outright lies. I also said the same thing at Breaking Convention in April
Thank you Celia Morgan, Alexander Beiner, Aimee Tollan, and the rest of the Breaking Convention team for giving me a soapbox be an incendiary, grumpy critic. GOD I hate those clinics – and god I love getting to rant about them.
I always say: Ketamine is the heroin for my generation, it really is. No drug has destroyed my friends more – not heroin, not even alcohol. I loathe that drug.
And while there are many drugs I love… the one I love the most is probably being right. And guess what: I was right.
However, it is sad that it was Perry who made my prophecy come true (sooner than I expected actually). He deserved better than to be rinsed by the liars in the rehab industry, or led down the garden path and poisoned by the asshole ketamine clinics. Tragic.
Next step: I want to see the liars in the ketamine industry given the same grilling, scrutiny and penalisation (maybe even imprisonment) handed to the liars who peddled Oxycontin and other opioids while downplaying the risks.
Pretty please and thank you.
I have suffered from crippling insomnia for my entire life, and the past week has been particularly dire thanks to a construction crew commencing work at 8am with hammer drills busting apart masonry below my window every day.
Normally if I’ve had a sleepless night I can daysleep a bit to make up for it… not this week. I am a delirious bunny.
Despite indescribable fatigue, I dragged my ass down to the EartH venue in Dalston (a neighbourhood I can’t stand) to see the unparalleled @maxcoopermax. I wouldn’t miss his shows for the world, and this one featured a Q&A to provide insights into his creative process.
I already know plenty, having interviewed him several times, and now having the honour of working with him in a few capacities.
But there’s always more to learn from a bona fide musical genius with a PhD in computational genetics.
I was in such a foul mood when I arrived, hating Dalston, hating hipsters, hating my stupid insomniac brain, and most of all, HATING THAT CONSTRUCTION CREW.
After the Q&A – illuminating as hell – I wasn’t sure if I would stay for the gig. My energy reserves were at zero. Plus I’ve seen his 3D/AV show three times already.
Moreover, EartH can be sonically messy. The constant noise from cracking beer cans ricochets around the theatre and can ruin a performance (a nuisance I’ve only seen Chilly Gonzales handle masterfully). But I love that show and I love Max, so I figured I’d stay for at least twenty minutes and see how I felt.
But HOLY FUCK I’m so glad I stayed. The show was an absolute soul reboot. As with all great music… It brought me back to life. More energizing than any drug. There’s a reason I have always listed as my “religious belief” on social media: “Turn up the bass.”
Or as my friend Heather Hargraves, an extremely knowledgeable therapist puts it, “Bass is an essential nutrient. I truly believe this.”
I was worried we’d be bothered by the constant opening of cans, but thankfully Max cranked the music so loud you couldn’t hear anything else. Bliss.
I’ve seen that show so many times, and it always lifts me up. Heavy bass combined with bio-inspired visuals… What’s not to love? Especially for a biology nerd like me.
When various people started standing up and moving down to the front, I was annoyed. I thought, “Man, pick a proper sit down venue like the Barbican, or pick a proper standing room venue like the Roundhouse – not something in between where the audience can get unruly.”
But by the end, with half the audience at the front and everyone else on their feet, it was nothing but amazing and inspiring. I have seen a lot of shows there, but I have never seen an artist transform that space from a quiet seated experience into a raucous rave.
Hats off Max. There’s a reason we all say you’re one of a kind.
Zoetic 