Parsing Gabrielle

Notes made while watching interview with Diane Sawyer.

Her speech centers are still intact ..but some of the pathways that connect speech with concepts may have been severed. They show her a picture of a table and she comes up with words all right ..just not the right ones. She’s guessing and her therapy involves prompting her to narrow down the range of possibilities until she’s in the vicinity of ‘table-ness’. It is geared toward building alternate pathways to replace the one’s she lost. The connection between her lexicon (the place where words are stored) and semantic memory (memory for meaning) may be all that’s affected. Prognosis is good. She can read words from her lexicon OK. Her difficulty is connecting them with ideas in the mind. So it’s just a process of generating alternate pathways. I wonder if she can write or type in complete sentences. I wonder if there’s a way to prompt the language pathways of the brain to act with equipotentiality, same as they did during childhood, to help facilitate the regenerative process. Apparently music can help because it activates greater brain-area ..and she can sing the words she has difficulty coming up with on her own.  Spontaneously however, she doesn’t speak in full sentences yet. Her two word utterances show a ‘return to the kernal’ ..meaning she can express the main idea without the generating the phrase-structure necessary to produce a full sentence. Hopefully, she hasn’t lost the rules of grammar ..only the ability to pick-out the words to express them. 

Kernal: When asked if she wants to return to Congress, she relies: “No, better!”
Generative grammar: Two embedded verb phrases are required to turn the kernal “No, better!” into the sentence: “No, I want to get better first” 

Beauty of uncertainty

based on a study showing what happens when we discount the surprise value of unexpected events ~> [link]

Network theory of communication

I have a theory that says whenever messages are transmitted between people in different locations; the accuracy of communication drops by 60%. I call it the ‘displacement theory of communication’ and it's an extension of findings in the field of human information-processing [link].

This drop in communication is wide-scale and can occur anywhere from cell phones to air traffic control systems. Messages are by nature incomplete and often assume knowledge of local conditions that aren’t available to the receiver. Without exacting protocols, like those developed in the air traffic control industry, incomplete messages are at best probabilistic and rely on the receiver to supply the most likely meaning intended. Since this is an innate function of human information-processing; it can happen quickly and imperceptibly. When it does, we are prone to making overconfident and faulty decisions about the most likely meaning intended. It has long been know that the most frequent decision we make during conversation is about the intention of others .. it’s also the one we get wrong most often. So, facebook users and text messagers ..beware! We are making the rules up as we go.

Anti anxiety

“With the ideal comes the actual
like two arrows in mid-air ..they meet” ~ Sandokai

What does this have to say about stress and anxiety ..? The odds of events meeting our ideals are about as likely as two arrows meeting in mid-air. At the local-level, what we think people should do or say is an ideal ..what follows is the actual. Like arrows in mid-air, they seldom meet. At the neural-level, when events don’t meet our expectations, an orienting response is triggered. Pupils dilate ..light intensifies ..sounds get amp’d ..muscle tone increases ..acetylcholine is released .. blood vessels constrict and blood pressure rises ..all in a fraction of an instance. The orienting response is meant to be transitory. It should subside once dissimilarities are found to be non-threatening. But when the incidence of dissimilarity occurs too often, and the orienting response doesn’t get a chance to recover ..it becomes chronic. You experience a constant sense of vigilance both mentally and viscerally, which is similar to what someone with PTSD suffers. It takes a toll. There are many reasons for experiencing a higher incidence of dissimilarity. I have a theory that highlights one possibility: memory becomes scripted with age and repetition. Many of our old views of the world simply don’t match present-day reality anymore. However, we persist. This leads to a false sense of knowing and anticipating what comes next. However, what comes next is never certain ..only imagined. Anticipation-fueled imagination is a vicious cycle that leads to more frequent experiences of dissimilarity between the imagined and the actual. I believe this results in chronic anxiety and a pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction.

transformation cycle

Dr George, professor of ‘lifespan development’, can identify what year you graduated from high school during a 20-minute interview while blindfolded. Clues? Verbal expressions, vocabulary, explanatory-style, values, ideals, etc. “..basically, it’s recognizing what’s in focus and what’s on the periphery of their narrative. Tells you what cohort they belong to.” What’s a cohort ..? “A cohort is a group of people who pass through periods of historical and social change at around the same age. As a result, they experience these events during the same period of development. People who were in their adolescence when 9/11 occurred for example, or those who were coming-of-age while fighting in Iraq. It makes a difference in the way they express themselves and how they explain current events. Their narrative is an interaction between lifespan-development and socio-cultural development.” He says, however, if college was a transformational experience .. they’re not so easily pegged. “It’s a game changer” Why’s that ..? “Because it sets in motion a transformation-cycle that follows them throughout life. Like recurring periods of renewal ..they shed what’s out-of-date and adapt more contemporary elements to their narrative. In other words, they periodically cover their tracks.”

Reading behavior

When I make a conscious effort, I can kind of catch a glimpse of whatever’s going on inside my head that helps me grasp the meaning of what I’m reading and relate it to other things I know about. It may be part of my training, but ..what I’m seeing is not unique to me. It is a process that’s common to everyone. It’s universal. It’s been observed and documented by linguists all over the world. As I read, I’m building an ‘event-chain’. An event-chain is made up of information from prior-sentences, which I get from working-memory, and prior-experience, which I get from long-term memory. When I read about the rebel invasion of Tripoli this week, I immediately built a relatively simple event-chain based on a limited set of events stored in long-term memory. It looked something like this:

However, as I read further ..I discovered this was not the case. The invasion was the result of Kadafi’s own undoing. Now my event-chain looks something like this:

Suddenly NATO air strikes don’t seem quite so important anymore. My first reading was in error. It doesn’t take into account a whole heap of events I didn’t know about. My second event-chain probably doesn’t either. However, I still come away with the feeling that I’m sufficiently informed, which leads to something else I’ve noticed: I struggle with yielding to the probability of the unknown, which is always greater than what I can fit into an event-chain. However, an event-chain is about all that I can fit into my pea-brain.

Temporal binding

The hippocampus is a brain structure that plays a major role in the process of memory formation. It is not entirely clear how the hippocampus manages to string together events that are part of the same experience but are separated in time. Newly published research finds that there are neurons in the hippocampus that encode the sequence of events that make up experience [link] and [link].

Dyslexia

Voice recognition involves perceiving differences in the way people speak. Individuals with dyslexia, however, cannot do this. The problem is a slight auditory impairment. They can understand perfectly well what others are saying and who is speaking. They’re just not as sensitive to subtle phonic variations between speakers. 

A study by Tyler Perrachione at MIT [link] reaffirms the theory that the underlying deficit in dyslexia is about processing the sound of what’s written, not about seeing what’s written. They took it a step further and discovered a link between reading difficulty and the social ecology surrounding spoken language. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty hearing consistent properties of speech within speaker as well as differences between speakers. “Lots of research has shown that individuals with dyslexia have more trouble understanding speech when there is noise in the background” says Perrachione. “These results suggest that part of the problem may be trouble following a specific voice.”

They took it another step further and found something that I find interesting. Individuals without dyslexia have the same difficulty hearing phonic variation between speakers in their second language (Mandarin Chinese) as dyslexics do between speakers in their native language. This corroborates my observation that children, without dyslexia, often perform at the same level as children with dyslexia when they are being taught to read for the first time in a foreign language. They don’t have the ‘phonic background’ necessary to identify the phonetic compounds of words. I believe this puts children from non-English backgrounds at a disadvantage when learning to read in English-speaking schools [link]

Sensory sampling

Rubén Moreno-Bote, David C. Knill, Alexandre Pouget, Bayesian sampling in visual perception PNAS July 26, 2011 vol. 108 no. 30 12491-1249.

Abstract: It is well-established that some aspects of perception and action can be understood as probabilistic inferences over underlying probability distributions. In some situations, it would be advantageous for the nervous system to sample interpretations from a probability distribution rather than commit to a particular interpretation. In this study, we asked whether visual percepts correspond to samples from the probability distribution over image interpretations, a form of sampling that we refer to as Bayesian sampling. To test this idea, we manipulated pairs of sensory cues in a bistable display consisting of two superimposed moving drifting gratings, and we asked subjects to report their perceived changes in depth ordering. We report that the fractions of dominance of each percept follow the multiplicative rule predicted by Bayesian sampling. Furthermore, we show that attractor neural networks can sample probability distributions if input currents add linearly and encode probability distributions with probabilistic population codes [link].

Bayesian inference

Bayesian inference is a function of Bayesian probability. Bayesian probability is a measure of the likelihood of a desired outcome (H) (Colts winning the playoffs for instance) based on the conditional probabilities computed for a set of event-sequences (D) that would lead to the desired outcome ..adjusted for (divided-by) the conditional probabilities computed for the set of event-sequences leading to other possible outcomes (Hi ) (Dallas Giants or Eagles winning the playoffs).

Bayesian inference may be native to the way people make judgments. At the level of sensory processing, studies show that the nervous system perpetually distinguishes the most relevant signals, from incidental/peripheral signals, using likelihood estimates of a Bayesian sort. Signals that are the most likely outcome of ongoing activity, based on the contents of working memory, are given a boost. Signals considered less likely are held in abeyance and immediately suppressed if subsequent events do nothing to rehabilitate them.

In Bayesian terms, where H is the candidate signal and D is the current state of sensory memory, then the probability that H will be the winning candidate or P(D|H) ..is a function of sensory memory (D) mitigated by P(D|Hi) ..or the probability that the contents of sensory memory might favor other winning candidates (Hi ).

speech recognition

The way we process and interpret speech is largely dependent on the neuro-anatomy of the brain. Speech signals must travel from lower to higher regions before something resembling someone speaking can occur. Sound waves enter the ear canal where they are first broken down into their component-frequencies or ‘tones’. Individual tones are then converted to signals that get transmitted, over auditory pathways, to higher centers of the brain responsible for processing and synthesizing complex signals of speech such as phonemes, which are essentially complex bursts of multiple frequencies [link]. After completing sufficient cycles of phonemic synthesis - the phonic representation of a word is formed. Compound signals representing word-sounds are then passed to higher centers of the auditory cortex (Wernicke’s area) where word-meaning is retrieved from areas in the cerebral cortex where semantic processing is performed.

agents of expression

Most children learn to speak and understand what’s said effortlessly. It’s a spontaneous process that doesn’t require classroom training. The brain is innately tuned to extract the rules of spoken language. Observations show that parents rarely correct for rules of grammar during early childhood. However, they frequently correct for the rules of semantics ..making sure their children convey the proper idea [link]. That’s why it’s interesting for me to see that, while children may discover the correct rules of grammar on their own ..by adolescence they’re playing pretty loose with the rules of semantics they’d been taught. In other words, they frequently use well-formed sentences to fabricate and misrepresent what’s going on.

Beauty of uncertainty

In 1975, Baruch Fischoff identified a major obstacle to forming new memories ..ourselves. He found that people frequently underestimate how surprised they are when events don’t turn out the way they expect. He polled a group of students before and after the Watergate hearings. Respondents who felt Nixon would be exonerated (with say 80% confidence) .. overwhelmingly came back and said they weren’t surprised by the verdict (and remember being just over 50% confident). When people learn the outcome of events, they unconsciously go back and adjust the estimate for what they thought would happen. This has the net-effect of revising memory so that it feels as if they “..knew it all along”, which diminishes the surprise-value of information [link]. More recently, neuroscientist Moshe Bar says that surprise is what gives ordinary events the informative-value necessary for transfer to long-term memory [link]. What we retain are mostly the novel bits of information we pick up along the way. They go on to form a ‘pool of scenarios’, which we use to prepare for future events. So if we go around dismissing the surprise-value of information, we sabotage memory, lower our ability to deal with the unexpected ..and don’t learn as much from experience. My friend Audrey likes to say that we can prevent future memory loss by making a conscious effort to do something out of the ordinary everyday ..increase our exposure to what’s new ..or at least give ordinary events greater value than “ ..it's just the same old story.”

Reading behavior

“Our universities deliver education in English ..[so] we should teach reading in the language that will be most useful.” Letter to the LATimes re. dual-language immersion ~ [link ]

As reasonable as this may sound ..it is not consistent with the way nature prepares children to read. Nor is it supported by the state-of-the-art in neuroscience and language development. The language children are going to need in college isn’t as important for reading education as their native language. Learning to read in one’s native language is the most effective route to fluency. That’s because learning to read starts out as a process of linking the sound of words on paper to their meaning in memory [link]. This puts children from non-English backgrounds at a disadvantage when trying to read English first. They have no ‘phonic memory’ for it. That’s what accounts for the high percentage of high school students in the U.S. who cannot read or write well. Furthermore, it is widely known that reading fluency in one language is easily transferable to another [link]. It only makes sense to teach children to read in a way that assures early success in one language and boosts their chances of future achievement in other languages.

Academic captivity

I have a theory. I think home schooling is more native to childhood development than the classroom. If you took a random sample of home-schooled children I think you’d find the same incidence of so-called ‘learning problems’ coupled with higher levels of achievement. That’s because dedicated parents, tuned to the strengths and weaknesses of their children, can overcome many problems ordinarily associated with classroom learning ..and do so without drugs. I’m talking about problems with attention span, short-term memory, and communication. Public education in the US is way behind the learning curve and traditional classrooms are designed to tap only a limited range of childhood potential. For instance, the kind of focused attention ordinarily required in a classroom is not all that helpful overcoming obstacles found outside the classroom. There are many instances where a wider focus of attention, which is usually associated with ADD, is way more adaptive [link]. This is also true of other developmental disorders, including autism. I know of a mother who taught her son to communicate even though he was in the most disabling range of the autistic spectrum. He’s now a prolific writer with several published works to his credit [link].

Neural basis of PTSD

Anxiety is a conditioned emotional response. First it focuses attention, and then it clamps the brain into rigidity by obsessively replaying past traumas [link].

Coming of age in a combat zone is bound to leave a deep impact on the tissues of the mind. I know that early experience with driving, while exposed to roadside bombs, can lead to phobias for city and highway driving. Witnessing the devastation of a mortar attack on a remote Afghan village can make a walk in the park seem like a high-risk venture and experiencing the impact of bombs detonating in town square can make it hard to sit still at Denny’s. Hearing someone say, “you’ll get over it” is not going to sound all that convincing. Why ..? I have a theory. We already know that the networks of the mind continue developing well into a person’s twenties. In fact most neural-development takes place outside the womb where it can be guided by culture and experience. I believe when combat is someone’s introduction to the ‘ways of the world’, it profoundly affects development that prepares them for adulthood. Depending on a soldier’s degree of resilience going in, the experience can produce a conditioned anxiety so pervasive; it becomes debilitating. It’s not uncommon for veterans to feel suspicious when neighbors knock .. panic in public places. Or they may find themselves taking different routes to work everyday ..sleeping less than five hours a night and barricading themselves indoors all weekend. Early combat experience becomes neurologically ‘cemented’ in the naive soldier’s mind creating a generalized fear that, at any point, at any time, someone’s going to take their life.

Gene pool

The qualities I was born with do not necessarily come from my parents ..it turns out that they could not have been ‘genetically engineered’ with much success either..not that anybody would want to try. No, life in the womb is way too volatile for that. Scientists - reporting in the journal of Nature - say they have found genes that can introduce random variation during embryonic development of the nervous system ..causing deviations from the genetic blueprint that guides the growth of the brain. Genes called ‘retro-transposons’ jump around in neural stem cells ..the cells that give rise to tissues in the brain and nervous system. Retro-transposons act to produce changes in the electro-chemical properties of nerve cells ..changing how they respond to signals ..and the way they link up to form networks. This explains why individual brains differ so much, even between identical twins ..allowing traits to vary from one generation to the next ..without waiting a millennium for some ‘cosmic mutation’ to occur. It also explains why ‘selective breeding’ for psychological traits - such as IQ or music ability - is not always a sure thing. I don't think we have to worry about creating a master race. Life defies our attempts to control these events.

Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar has been recognized as one of the most effective teachers in the L.A. unified school district. By devising a method of his own for teaching reading and language skills, he moved his students from the bottom 30% in the district to well above average. When they looked at what he was doing, they found he wasn’t simply ‘teaching to the test’. He broke the material down and prompted students to identify narrative components while they read. For instance, he would frequently stop and ask them questions about the goals and actions of the characters. He Then did something interesting. He would ask the class if they understood what kind of information he was looking for. Example: was it an inference about the character’s intention or a prediction about the consequences of their action. He wasn’t just teaching them to read the narrative explicitly ..but how to process the narrative implicitly [link]. I’ve heard people refer to this as the ‘meta’ or ‘pragmatic’ levels of comprehension. Studies show that when students start doing this on a regular basis, they become more active participants in what they previously considered to be a passive activity .. and reading scores improve dramatically [link].

Best practices in education

During graduate school, I figured the easiest way to tell if a teaching method was effective would be to use students as their own benchmark. I proposed collecting per-student changes periodically over time to evaluate a new teaching method. That way I could control for background and socio-economic factors that I didn’t have the time or facilities to deal with [link] . Per-student changes were averaged and the net change was used to see if a one teaching method was better or worse than another.

This is the basis for the ‘value-added’ method that’s currently being proposed for the LA Unified School district to evaluate the performance of teachers. Students act as their own benchmark. Prior year performance is compared with current year. Because it measures students against their own track record, it largely controls for influences outside the classroom. The aggregate net-change from one year to the next is telling. It may not be perfect, but it is the most representative and least contaminated method we have for identifying the most effective teaching practices in a heterogeneous school district [link].

Social Anxiety

Children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones, a new study shows. “If you misread facial expressions, you’re in trouble, no matter what other social skills you have,” says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki, a clinical researcher who developed the tests used in the study. “It can make life very difficult, because other people’s faces are like a prism through which we look at the world.” Nowicki coined the term "dyssemia," meaning the inability to process signs. They also developed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) to assess subtle cues to emotional expressions, including visual signals and tone and cadence of voice. DANVA is now widely used by researchers in studies of everything from behavioral disorders to autism spectrum conditions. “..nonverbal communication can be taught. It's a skill, not something mysterious." They have found that in a range of children with behavioral disorders, including high-functioning autism, direct teaching can improve their non-verbal communication [link].

Remembering David Rumelhart

“Language, like most knowledge, relies mainly on memory and is represented in the brain by a network of connected meaning.” ~ David Rumelhart [link]

While at the University of California, San Diego, David Rumelhart developed the ‘adaptive structural network’ model for both encoding and retrieving information in long-term memory. According to his model, information is stored in a database and retrieved by an active interpretive process. Storage is a process of construction from a sensory-base whereas retrieval is a process of re-construction from a conceptual base [link]. David’s contributions influenced my field of study; he informed the direction I took and the decisions I made. He will be missed.

Aphasia

Written in response to an article in the LATimes ~>[progressive aphasia]

No wonder we don’t know how to relieve aphasia, we still talk about it as though it were a speech problem. It’s actually a memory problem. What’s lost are the pathways that enable look-up and retrieval of words stored in memory. It only presents itself as a speech problem at early onset [link]. That’s why aphasia doesn’t lend itself to speech therapy. Treatments that focus on memory skills for word-retrieval are more helpful [link].

Symptoms: First, you have difficulty finding the right pronouns and names for things. They may escape the speaker entirely. Verb usage generally remains intact. “I can’t find the right world.” comes out instead of “I can’t find the right word.” “I’m going to the office.” in place of “I’m going to the store.” Homonyms or words that sound alike frequently get switched: “I’m going dental.” for “I’m going mental.” When I think of the all the steps that have to be performed in a fraction of a second and in the right sequence ..I’m surprised speech is possible at all. Even though speaking feels like a single, automatic process ..it’s by no means a  single skill. When you break it down, it looks something like this:

Idea ~>  Lexical    ~>     Context    ~>   Syntax     ~>     Speech
              Look-up &         Integation        Generation        Timing & Production
              Selection                                                                        

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Part two

Continued from [ part one ] below:   Now I want to talk about ‘discourse analysis’ and what it reveals about communication over social networks. Discourse analysis is the branch of psychology dealing the way people process information from what they hear and read. I think it’s telling. Face to face communication is a probabilistic event. Language is a relatively narrow band of communication that can only suggest what the speaker has in mind. This presents the listener with a range of possibilities. Communication is successful only when the listener infers the most likely meaning intended by the speaker. Ordinary conversation is generally successful because we have context to help guide us along. We rely on facial expressions, intonation, emphasis, location and other visual and auditory cues. However, where ordinary communication is probabilistic, text messaging is a crapshoot. Text is cryptic. Context is lost and we rely on memory to supply the missing cues. However, memory is fallible. Research in discourse processing has shown that the biggest piece of missing information we supply is the intention of the speaker ..and it’s their intention that we most often get wrong. We perceive threat where none was intended. Offense at what may have only been sarcasm. By nature, the flow of conscious experience is displaced over social networks. This simply means it occurs outside the context of our immediate situation. That’s the beauty of the Internet. It allows us to share experiences that are ‘displaced’ in time and space with users from all over the world. It also places a heavy burden on text comprehension, which is much less developed than speech comprehension in the language centers of the brain. I believe this will provide a rich source of field-observation for the study of human consciousness for years.

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Anthropology:   I’m going to start with what I know about anthropology, which isn’t much but I feel it’s relevant. In my view, facebook is a fairly tame and nontoxic community – unlike others I’ve been in (such as high school, workplaces, dinner tables, neighborhoods, yahoo chat rooms). Without a constitution or written protocol, congeniality prevails. I think this says something about human nature.  Social networks are tuned to the way we are wired.  Like taking the first step out of a cave and into a larger community where there’s no anonymity – it’s best not to offend anyone. Privacy is a recent development. Tribal villages are more typical of human existence. Just look at the indigenous people of the Amazon. They live in circular settlements with one wall surrounding the perimeter, but no walls on the inside. They’re never alone and everyone can see what everyone else is doing. It pays to be on-guard and congenial otherwise you risk offending others and being banished from the tribe. In the Amazon, that means certain death. I believe that’s where the fear of abandonment comes from. I’m not talking about some trendy catch-phrase from pop psychology. It’s built into our constitution because it was essential for our survival. The threat of death-by-banishment is no longer real but the feelings certainly are. So, on facebook ..we tread carefully.

Behavioral science:   Psychologists have known for a long time now that there are few things more rewarding in life than validation from our peers. It beats television and ice cream and it’s the motivation underlying most communication. That’s why Twitter is so widely popular. Without let-up, it provides a constant stream of validation for every thought that crosses our brain.

“Still your mind and you will not age as fast as people whose minds are constantly struggling to hold their personalities together.” 

This is a Buddhist recommendation aimed at countering a very active function of the human ego:  impression management.   We put a lot of effort into presenting the right ‘persona’ .. or the way we want others to see and remember us. There’s nothing spontaneous going on there. The messages we broadcast are anxiously crafted to make us look the way we want to be perceived. Don’t believe me ..? Look no further than politicians approaching an election year. Newt Gingrich recently found religion because it sends the right message to Christian conservatives. Mitt Romney has ‘reinvented’ himself to look stupid and appeal to the average voter. What people choose to share on facebook in no way presents the whole picture. It’s not our nature.

Extraterrestrial adaptation

Robert Sapolsky

If an alien creature invaded earth by entering the brain of human beings, hijacking their nervous system and driving them to engage in high-risk ventures sure to lower their chances of survival .. you’d think some of us might notice something. Yet something disturbingly like this may be happening without notice. When mice get infected with toxoplasmosis, an alien bacterium, the toxoplasmum goes dormant inside the amygdala of their brain and reduces their fear of cats [link]. Cats eat the reckless mice and ingest the toxoplasmas where they wind up in the intestine mingling with others of their kind. Toxoplasmas reproduce sexually only in the gut of the cat, so suppressing the fear response in rats and mice is a sure way of gaining entrance into the cat intestine. Neuro-practitioners call this ‘adaptation by behavioral manipulation’ [link]. A parasite learns to manipulate host behaviors that enhance their own chances of survival. In other words, these alien bacteria learn to perform brain surgery in order to get rides to wild parties where they can exchange DNA and procreate!

Apparently these clever little creatures have found their way into people too. Nearly one third of all humans have dormant toxoplasmas sleeping inside their amygdala. Since people are pretty high up in the food chain ..the only real threat comes from themselves (or perhaps an unsuspecting bear or mountain lion). Chances are, infected individuals will start acting recklessly and wind up getting killed in a car accident involving excessive speed. So they only appear in the traffic section of the paper, or the actuarial tables of an insurance company. Otherwise, symptoms appear close enough to schizophrenia that they wind up in a psychiatric population and are never heard from again. I think I would call this a successful alien predation.