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balillee · 2 years

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okay im compiling all of my opinions on the finale before i forget them

i think elliot isn't as awful as everyone says he is. he's fine. i like his character a lot and i didn't mind the song for rue because it was clearly about rue and him acknowledging that he likes her a lot but his presence overall was bad for her and he feels guilty being an enabler. i hope elliot returns next season and starts to recover in his own way and i hope we get a little more backstory for him. i like him a lot, although the song did go on a little too long for him to say he's still working on it. they could have shortened it and released the full thing later - they could have even done both a labrinth version and a dominic fike version. could have been sick. irdm tho lol

despite all of nate's flaws and the awful things he does, he is still someone very deeply traumatised by his father's actions and he wanted justice for that. he deserved to get justice against cal. that doesn't mean he's being let off the hook, it just means that he's got justice for what cal has done and the type of person cal turned him into. cal admits that nate is his biggest regret and who he made nate is his biggest regret, but nate is too far gone to want to hear any of it. i hope next season starts to explore that trauma lingers even now that his dad is in prison.

the show does now have a decision to make. the spirit of euphoria is empathy, and if they go that route fully they would have to in some way bring peace to nate's character. i just wonder if they go the route of rehabilitation and kindness being the way to help someone heal from trauma and the awful person it's turned them into how well that would be executed and/or received by the audience. not to say they have to do that, nate is an awful person and it wouldn't be right to have the main cast accept him as a friend after all he's put them through and it wouldn't make sense, but like everyone else he is still someone who needs help more than he needs anything else. what they do with nate from now on is a big decision, whether they decide to redeem or condemn him is up to them and in a very vague, prospective sense i wouldn't be angry about either of those decisions unless they were poorly executed.

cal isn't a pedophile, at least the way i see it. jules was seventeen but he was clearly unaware of that considering jules told him that she was 22. he's the product of repressed sexuality and rigid conservative and family values and in it's own way it's a story of very dark and disturbing queer generational trauma versus the idea of the nuclear family and toxic masculinity. a gay man was repressed very young because of unfortunate circumstances and because of that he became a toxic father imprinting very toxically on a young son that he ruined the life of. they are all fucking AWFUL people, don't get me wrong. aside from aaron and that mystery son we don't know about really, the jacobs spawn have GOT TO GO. yuck.

cassie has dug herself into a hole and has become a very hateful, spiteful and quite frankly embarrassing person. she embarrassed herself and she's so allergic to self-reflection and retrospection that she can't see it yet. she's shown the truly ugly person inside of her for everyone to see. i think it's interesting that cassie and maddy are the stereotypical popular mean girls that we would kind of hate in high school, but we learn their perspectives, we learn that there's a reason they are the way they are and that even if they are kind of cunty they're still people, and especially we learn to sympathise with maddy (which is important, because in a lot of situations it would be flipped to where the blonde white girl is the victim and the girl of colour is the asshole in the situation which doesn't happen here.)

people don't like the fact that elliot got more screentime than jules this episode but i think they just skipped over the fact that rue herself found it a lot easier to talk to elliot before jules. there's a lot more discomfort there and having a longer scene with elliot that lays his and rue's dynamic out flat together compared to a short scene with jules is a kind of perfect way to pause things with them. rue leaves to focus on herself because if we're being honest, rue and jules weren't healthy together and they still can love each other and admit that. just because these characters are minorities doesn't mean they're the pinnacle of morality and it doesn't mean that showing that they too can be bad, messy and downright fucking annoying at times is bad writing or any sort of bigoted and sometimes things aren't right for them. it's just portraying humans as they are - beautiful.

ashtray is definitely dead. people are speculating because of the golden rule that if you don't see the body, they can always come back, but like this isn't pretty little liars, you know? they probably didn't show him dead because as far as euphoria will go, there's a line that can be drawn showing a literal dead child on the screen. the laser pointer slowly moving up to ash's forehead and fezco's haunted expression are enough for me.

ethan got the screentime he deserved. and also more appreciation from suze fucking howard than he did from kat. kat, be nicer and a little less gaslighty next time.

lexi isn't a bad person for putting on the play. cassie seems to think that her coping mechanisms for all she's been through are more valid than lexi's, whose form of coping and self expression is the play (because she's under the illusion that she's had it the worst, which to her excuses how awful she is, when we've literally seen the trauma of all of these characters - rue loses her dad to cancer and turns to drugs, lexi and cassie's dad leaves them because he's an addict, maddy's parents fight, she was abused by her ex, and she was stopped from doing pageantry which was her dream, nate was exposed to very traumatising sexual material at a very formative age which warped his ideas about sex and sexuality, fez and ash were brought up by a drug-dealing grandma who they later needed to become full time carers for.) cassie's background is no less traumatising and frustrating than anyone else's which makes her a much more frustrating character to deal with because she deals with her trauma in much more destructive and unhealthy ways than she would like to admit. lexi deals with the trauma of her dad leaving her and her best friend ODing by putting on a play and talking about it for once instead of caring for everyone all of the time. sure, i don't think EVERYTHING needed to be put on display and some of it was definitely questionable (such as nate's gym scene which makes fun of the homoeroticism of toxic masculinity and cassie's carousel moment, which again is just cassie embarrassing herself), but when talking about someone expressing the trauma they experienced, especially for the first time, i don't expect that expression to be the most sensitive or perfect in any way. fezco was right to say that sometimes, some people need to get their feelings hurt, and lexi has a right to be very fucking angry at cassie for making everything about herself all of the time when her little sister is right there, struggling all the same.

faye was in a bad spot. custer was a damn rat and she was stuck between two different places - loyalty to her bitchass boyfriend who was co-operating with the police, or loyalty to ashtray and fezco who had housed her and fed her and taken care of her when she was hiding from the authorities and when she was struggling with her own substance abuse. in the end she chose to stay loyal to fezco, telling him that he needed to be quiet about mouse because custer was wired. she waited a little too long and in the end her indecisiveness was probably one of the reasons ashtray died, but she isn't an awful person and there's no way that she could have predicted what ended up happening. she was stuck between some very difficult decisions to make. stay quiet for her own safety and throw fez and ash under the bus, or try to protect them. faye and fez had a good friendship from the little moments we saw of them together, and chloe cherry in her interview about the s2 finale talks about faye as the last missing piece that ash and fez didn't know they needed.

rue ends the season in a better place, and i'm very happy for it. the season 1 finale ended with rue relapsing after jules leaves her at the train station because there was still a heavy codependency there, and jules talks about that in her special episode, and then we get the all for us scene with rue back in her red hoodie like a safety blanket. this season, rue decides to leave jules this time but on much healthier terms, and instead of a big dance number and a big song we instead get rue staying clean from drugs for the rest of the school year and heeding ali's message that the promise and the hope that one day you'll be a good person is enough to keep her trying to be one. lexi's play gave her hope and an outside, more sympathetic perspective on her life and i hope we get to see them be better friends next season. we saw the lows and the messiness and the ugliness of recovery from drug addiction and we saw rue through her relapse. i think now we see definitive hope for rue, and next season i want to see her get better and her family heal. i want to see her repair relationships, i want to see her clean and happy and i want to see her become better friends with the main cast. give me more of rue being friends with maddy and lexi. i need that trio in my life bc they would kick ass together. zendaya talks about rue being like a sort of mirror of sam levinson himself, and in her interview knows that there's a good ending for rue and that she'll end up recovering and becoming a happier, healthier person because she knows sam's writing from experience.

i liked the finale a lot. some people hate euphoria and, having seen a lot of the negative takes, i think it is just down to people wanting to have bad faith interpretations of the show and people saying 'oh but this doesn't get explained' as if that didn't happen during season 1's finale and those things weren't talked about in season 2 and as if season 3 isn't happening. i'd give the show a chance, and hey, if you don't like it you don't like it, that's fine and not everything is for everyone, just please - and i am fucking begging you - shut the fuck up about it. nobody cares that you hate it. i think some euphoria fans definitely interpret a lot wrong about the show because of their own biases and that's on them. but if you're the type of person who needs warnings before you watch something, seek them out. there is a lot of fucked up shit and fucked up imagery and euphoria Will Go There. it's just not as conventional as you would expect and a lot of people who criticise it want it to be. nobody is a stereotypical villain or bad guy because that's realistic and for all of the almost goofy surrealism the show has, it's grounded in real people and real stories, all of which are deeply complex and should be seen with a critical eye.

#euphoria #euphoria s2

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steelycunt · 2 years

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1,3, 10, and 17!

thank you!!

What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

answered this one here but fuck it, i can go again: hinny. like-- it's fine? but i am asleep.

Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

i don't think so? not for one lone opinion, at least, unless it was a pro-jkr opinion or something which honestly leaves the realm of 'fandom' entirely, anyway. as for dumb fandom stuff--i can disagree with my mutuals on something and still follow them <33 our love is stronger than that <33

Most disliked arc? Why?

oh fuck i've no idea. i dont remember much of the books. the whole remadora thing was just egregious, both idea and execution, so--is that an arc? i dont know. but i'll say that.

Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…

instead of having sirius accused of being the traitor and sent to prison for something he didn't do, i, the author, would have remembered that i had invented a truth serum in a moment of lazy writing, and just used that to sort things out, rather than accidentally create a plot hole through which seven whole books end up falling through. :-)

cunty asks

#ask game #mystifiedmess #the common theme here is that i just dont like harry potter. sorry

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ladykakata · 6 years

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I go off on GOT

[NOTE: I keep trying to add the Jon-Sansa hug GIFS but Tumblr REFUSES to let me save or post with them. It’s fucking annoying]

*Rubs face*

Auntie LK is annoyed and she is going to take it out on y’all. I’m gunna go ahead and go off on Sansa hate, Jonsa, Dark Sansa and all that shit so hang onto your assholes.

SO. The new promos. There’s been the idea for a long time, since S6 really, of the idea of Sansa plain murdering Jon or Jonsa becoming canon since, well, Jon and Sansa are now maternal cousins rather than agnate siblings (as in, siblings with the same father but different mother).

S6 had Sansa and Jon reunite for the first time since S1. A lot of heavy shit has happened, some of it they share (like losing their father and brother Robb, Winterfell getting a bad squid infection via Theon being a little bitch) but also stuff they didn’t share (an absolute battering and rape for Sansa, literally being stabbed to literal death for Jon). For Jon, who just came back from the motherfuckin’ dead 10 minutes ago and decided he had enough of this shit he’s out, this is pure shock.

For Sansa? This is pure RELIEF. Remember, Jon is the FIRST family member she has seen since the death of Ned. She hasn’t seen her mother (who is dead GOOD LAWL god I hate her), her eldest brother, her brat little sister, or her two littlest brothers since either leaving Winterfell or since Ned’s beheading. Not only that, he’s the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch as far as she knows, so he’s in a position of power that is untouched by machinations of the South. Who is in power? Who cares. The Night’s Watch doesn’t deal with that shit and Cersei can’t follow her up here. And if Ramsey decides to give chase, it’s more than Jon to fight back.

Look at the hug. She almost cries, listen to the shuddery inhale of breath as she fights that back, she practically falls into him, and once they hug she looks for comfort and support. For Sansa, this is absolute relief. Her ordeal, for the moment, is over. She escaped Ramsey, the rape, the torture. She survived the snow, the river, the chase and being hunted. And now she is safe in the arms of her older brother.

For Jon, he is absolutely stunned to see her. For as much as they didn’t really get along, she’s still his sister, and he said goodbye to his family in Winterfell years ago. Only Benjen went to the Wall, and he disappeared, so Sansa is the first he’s seen in a long time. Hell, Jon almost ran to join Robb in his rebellion, and only just resisted and came back.

Family came for Jon after his resurrection.

After this comes a really important talk. Sansa and Jon’s relationship was never really touched on; Jon and Robb hugged and treated each other as peer-brothers (and it’s fucking CUTE I would CUT SOMEONE to see more bro Jon and Robb!!), Jon and Arya were cute-as-buttons older brother/pint-sized sister, and Jon cared so much about Bran that he bore Catlyn’s cunty comments in order to say goodbye. The only two not explored were Sansa and Rickon. It’s really important to note that Sansa took after Cat. And that meant absorbing her loathing of Jon, something that is talked about. Sansa gets to brass tacks about it:

Sansa : I spent a lot of time thinking about what an ass I was to you. I wish I could change everything. Jon: We were children. Sansa : I was awful, just admit it. Jon : ( chuckles ) You were occasionally awful. I'm sure I can't have been great fun. Always sulking in the corner while the rest of you played. Sansa : Can you forgive me? Jon : There's nothing to forgive. Sansa : Forgive me. Jon : All right. All right, I forgive you.

Sansa knows she was wrong, wants to make it right, and does not allow Jon to sweep it away. She is determined to make sure he knows she knows she was wrong. It can be interpreted that she wants to secure his forgiveness and is in fact ordering it out of him, but I don’t see it that way. She knows she fucked up, and she wants to make it right. The following conversation re-enforces the fact they’re family. Jon even says ‘ If I don't watch over you, Father's ghost will come back and murder me’ (I’d pay good money to see Ned come back and give Jon a bollocking actually). Sansa brings up Winterfell, enforces it’s THEIR home and it’s for their family. She wants the Boltons out, but Jon came back from the dead 10 minutes ago and has Had Enough Of This Shit And Is Very Tired. Sansa lets it go temporarily.

Throughout the ep, and into the next, the idea is enforced that Jon and Sansa are brother and sister, and that Jon is Ned's son. Sure, currently that's kinda funny considering he isn't by blood, but the sentiment is true; Jon is every inch Ned's boy, and Sansa clearly feels safe with him, she even says so to Brienne:

Sansa : Jon isn't Davos, the Red Woman or Stannis for that matter.Jon is Jon.He's my brother.He'll keep me safe. I trust him.

Here is a thing I think a lot of people are missing. Yes, Sansa trusts Jon. She says it herself. But why, as Brienne countered, did she not tell Jon about the Knights of the Vale? Why did she outright counter Jon publicly? Why not wait?

The thing is, Jon is Ned's son. AND NED STARK IS FUCKING SHIT AT KEEPING SECRETS. Ned Stark is honourable to a FAULT, it's what got him Mcfreakin' killed. Jon is the Starkiest Stark that ever Starked, and Sansa KNOWS that letting him in on critical plans is a bad fucking idea. She's already learned from Pety 'I would honestly tongue a cat's asshole for fun' Baelish that one never shows all one's cards. But sharing a card with someone as upright and see-through as Jon? Might as well cut your own throat and be done with it.

Why publicly confront him? I never believed for a second that Sansa was displeased at Jon's sudden elevation to King in the North. When it was announced, he was stunned, and to me it looked like he was looking to Sansa to see if a) it was real, and b) wtf Sansa what do I do.

He's been suddenly promoted before, but the Night's Watch was different, and perhaps he's having flashbacks as to how THAT went. Hell, everyone was pissed before Lyanna Mormont straightened her big girl knickers and said 'Listen up you lil shits Jon is good King Jon 303AC 4lyf'. This is all good for Sansa. She has Winterfell back, Ramsey Bolton is more than dead, Jon has the support of the Northern lords firmly when they told them to eat a dick not too long ago. Everything feels great. Plus, in the North, she doesn’t have to deal with backstabbing political shit.

And then she remembers Littlefinger is there.

Oh fuckbastards.

What to do? While it looks like Littlefinger is getting to her, it’s VERY important to note that, despite being King In Da Norf, Jon is still as humble as ever. Before that, when Winterfell was first reclaimed, Jon noted that Ned and Cat’s room was prepared for Sansa.

Jon : I’m having the lord’s chamber prepared for you. Sansa : Mother and Father’s room? You should take it. Jon : I’m not a Stark. Sansa : You are to me.

Damn right he is, Sansa. Jon mentions they need to trust each other more and kisses her forehead. I think this, after the conversation about Littlefinger, really planted it in Sansa’s mind she’s got to protect Jon from this bastard. Jon can fight the physical and commend men no problem, but psychological shit he has issues with. Hell, Sansa told him outright not to fall for Ramsey’s shit in BOTB and he did anyway. There’s a gulf in Sansa’s Southern-trained psychological way of things and Jon’s straightforward hit-it-until-it-stops Northern mind. Both have had their ways beaten into them, so they can’t unlearn, but also can’t see the other’s view.

Okay okay okay. where is Auntie LK going with this? From what I see, Sansa was publicly denouncing Jon’s plans BUT doing so to keep him safe. The plan to give the Last Hearth and Karhold to loyal Lords? That’s a Southern tactic AND good sense. HOWEVER ... in this instance, Jon was right. The important think to note that both holds HAVE a new Lord and Lady waiting for them. And they are children.

These babs!

If anyone knows about a child having to bear the supposed sins of their parents, it’s Jon. He felt the weight of Ned’s supposed infidelity, even if it was absolutely no fault of their own. These children are terrified, Alys visibly swallows and tries to breathe properly. Hell, it’s scary when Sansa was all for taking their homes and Jon mentioned executing people, they probably worried they were next. However, Jon simply asks for allegiance. And that was a wise call; the idea of redistributing at first got a high then got a mixed to low response, given the chatter in the room and Davos looking down.

Don't for a second think I'm shitting on Sansa. From her point of view, this absolutely makes sense; if people stab you in the back, GITFO bitch. But that Southern way of thinking just will not work as well in the more traditional North. In this instance, Jon was in the right, and it's understandable how he is frustrated with Sansa openly challenging him. I think Sansa was trying to shore up any potential future betrayal, and simply didn't make the right calculation. She looks at Littlefinger in this scene, who likes the argument.

In this instance, Jon is right. These are children, and he rules like a good King; with a firm but gentle hand. He makes these kids feel like important grown-ups, spares them, and gives them this sense of awe and majesty. If Daenerys rules with terror and awe with her dragons, and a kind heart for the underdog, Jon wants to rule with practical kindness. They thought they were going to lose their homes, or even their heads, given that Sansa mentioned taking away their Holds and Jon mentioned executing people. Instead, King Jon asked for their word, and they gave it.

Look at what happens after; Jon tells Sansa to stop openly undermining him, Sansa points out that she should give advice and compliments his leadership skills. She tries to get him to see she has advice worth listening to, and he is clearly frustrated and tries to walk away, but she will not let him. To the point of GRABBING him.

She will not let Jon walk away from this. He tries to walk, but she physically makes him stop, and emphasises what she is trying to get through to him:

Sansa : You have to be smarter than Father. You need to be smarter than Robb. I loved them, I miss them, but they made stupid mistakes, and they both lost their heads for it.

To me, this clearly says one thing; Jon, for the love of fucking Old Gods and New Improved Ones, I am trying to keep you safe. She can’t outright say ‘Littlefinger wants to park his thirsty asshole on the Iron Throne and wants me on his lap because I remind him of my mother and he is willing to slaughter you like a sheep to get it’, Jon can’t be trusted with that sort of info. She wants to publicly make it look like she’s plotting against Jon in Littlefinger’s eyes ... but at the same time, make sure that her public outbursts aren’t ACTUALLY damaging her relationship with him. He is too precious. She needs him, and his abilities, but also needs to string Littlefinger along to ensure he doesn’t do something without sharing it with her first. She was dead set against Jon going South. That’s where Cersei can get her mitts on him, that’s walking into the mouth of the dragon and hoping it doesn’t eat him. The only positive for this was suddenly getting Bran and Arya back; she outright hugs Bran, her little brother who was in a coma when she left Winterfell, and even Arya gets a hug despite the pair being the most antagonistic towards each other.

Now. Arya and Sansa had issues. They had issues before Littlefinger littlefingered all over the place. Arya, despite her Southern training, is pretty much a hardcore Northerner, and seeing Sansa’s betrayal letters would have set her off and Littlefinger was banking on that. But when you have a family that TALKS, that has a legit psychic on staff to divine the truth (and Arya literally heard Bran recite the truth), that plan falls up the asshole. Did Sansa truly plan to ever murder Arya, and vice-versa? Honestly, who hasn’t entertained thoughts of murdering their annoying sibling, especially if one thinks the other has fallen to the Dark Side. However, Sansa and in a way Arya’s arcs have been about family. Only family can be trusted. Family will be there when you need them. Family will keep their word and protect you. For Sansa, this is in Stark (heh) contrast to the Lannisters and Baratheons, whom she was so eager to join as true Lords and Ladies. The Lannisters are at each other’s throats when not fucking each other, and the Baratheons tore themselves apart with infighting and backstabbing (and vagina shadowmonsters). The Starks bicker, but they have each other.

If Sansa wanted Jon dead or out of the picture, she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making him a cloak that is very similar to Ned Starks’ own. The man she literally saw beheaded in front of her.

Sansa : I made it like the one Father used to wear. As near as I can remember.

Sansa near panics when Jon decides to ride for Dragonstone, she keeps glancing to her right, either in Littlefinger’s direction or directly at him. All the Lords don’t want Jon to go, even his most hardcore supporter Lady Mormont, and Sansa is dead against it. Even when Jon names her Wardeness of the North in his absence, she is still wearing a face of panic.

Me? In charge? Oh. Uh.

Does Sansa enjoy being in power? Who doesn’t. Do I anticipate trouble when Jon returns? If he returned himself, I think the transition would have been smooth. Jon will be impressed by how well Sansa is preparing the north, and she will pretty much still be Wardeness while he is King; think of Sansa as the Prime Minister that gets shit done while Jon is the figurehead and commands the armies and does power deals. The addition of Daenerys is a biiiiiiig complication, especially with Jon boatsexin’ her all the way.

Which brings us to the hug. While I do believe Sansa is relieved to see him back alive, the arrival of Dany is a complication and now she has someone she needs to suss out and see if this person is a threat to her or the newly reunited Starks.

Do I think a Starkbowl is coming? Hell to the fucking no. The ENTIRE POINT of Sansa’s arc is that FAMILY CAN BE TRUSTED, FAMILY IS THERE TO PROTECT YOU. The biggest point for her is that Daenerys is not family. She’s Jon’s girlfriend for the moment, sure, but not family. She’s Essosi-minded, she’s not a Northerner for fucking sure. At this point, the issue will be the outing of Jon’s heritage.

But what does that really mean? Sure, Ned isn’t his blood father. But Ned raised him, he was raised with all the Starks as a sibling. Cunty Cat made him feel lesser, but everyone still treated him like a brother. Even Sansa. Everyone is zero’ing in on the father aspect, but A STARK IS HIS MOTHER. HE STILL HAS STARK HERITAGE. As Lady Mormont rightfully pointed out, ‘He has Ned Stark’s blood in his veins’. And he does; Ned and Lyanna are full-blooded siblings, and share the same wolf blood.

I hoep to hope, and I think it will happen, that Sansa will silently recalculate what the news will mean when others react, but as far as she and most certainly Bran and Arya are concerned, Jon is still their big brother. The big brother that said goodbye before Winterfell despite the coma, the brother that came to take back Winterfell despite the Bolton’s vile threats, the brother that choke-slammed a snake for wanting to bang them because they reminded them of their mother, the brother that rode out to save his little Rickon despite the odds, the brother that gifted them Needle, the brother that was willing to overlook past nastiness.

Jon Snow, the King in the North, the blood of Ned, the White Wolf ... he is their brother, and always will be. The gold/silver of Targaryen yielded to the coal of Stark, and Jon is the fucking Starkiest Stark that ever Starked.

Sansa is not going to backstab her brother. Fuck outta here with that shit.

LK out.

#Sansa #Game of thrones #GOT #Jonsa #Jonaerys #Dark Sansa #Starkbowl

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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A Map That Shows You Everything Wrong With Your Brain

The woman who would be mapping my brain, Cynthia Kerson, had tanned, toned arms and long silvery hair worn loose. Her home office featured an elegant calligraphy sign reading “BREATHE,” and also a mug that said “I HAVE THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT—SAINT CUNTY MCFUCKOFF.”

Kerson is a neurotherapist, which means she practices a form of alternative therapy that involves stimulating brain waves until they reach a specific frequency. Neurotherapy has a questionable reputation, which its practitioners sometimes try to counter by putting as many acronyms next to their names as possible. Kerson comes with a Ph.D., QEEGD, BCN, and BCB. She’s also past president of the Biofeedback Society of California and teaches at Saybrook University. Even so, somehow it was the tension between those two pieces of office ephemera that made me instinctively want to trust her.

Kerson used to have a clinic in Marin County, where she primarily saw children with ADHD, using neurotherapy techniques to help them learn to focus. But she also worked with elite athletes who wanted to improve their performance, as well as people suffering from chronic pain and anxiety and schizophrenia and a host of other disorders. These days, she’s so busy teaching and consulting that she no longer runs her individual practice, but she agreed to bring out her brain-mapping equipment for me: snug-fitting cloth caps in various sizes; a tube of Electrogel, a conductive goo; a black box made by BrainMaster Technologies that would receive my brain’s signals and spit them out into her computer.

I’m the kind of person who procrastinates with personality tests; I’m susceptible to the way they target that place where self-loathing and narcissism overlap. I suppose it stems from the feeling that there is something uniquely and specially wrong with me, and wanting to know all about it.

So I’ll admit that I was thinking of this brain map in overly fanciful terms: It would be like a personality test but scientific. I kept thinking about this line I’d read in a book by Paul Swingle, a Canadian psychoneurophysiologist who uses brain maps to identify neurological abnormalities: “The brain tells us everything.”

Kerson placed the cap on my head and clipped two sensors on to my earlobes, areas of no electrical activity, to act as baselines. As she began Electrogelling the 19 spots on my head that aligned with the cap’s electrodes, I was nervous in two different directions: one, that my brain would be revealed as suboptimal, underfunctioning, deficient. The other, that it would be fine, average, unremarkable.

* * *

EEG tests, which measure electrical signals in the brain, have been used for decades by physicians to look for anomalies in brain-wave patterns that might indicate stroke or traumatic brain injury. The kind of brain map I was getting used a neuroimaging technique formally known as quantitative electroencephalogram, or qEEG. It follows the same general principle as EEG tests, but adds a quantitative element: Kerson would compare my brain waves against a database of conventionally functioning, or “neurotypical,” brains. Theoretically, this allows clinicians to pick up on more subtle deviations—brain-wave forms that are associated with cognitive inflexibility, say, or impulsivity.

In neurotherapy, qEEGs are generally a precursor to treatments like neurofeedback or deep brain stimulation, which are used to alter brain waves, or to train people to change their own. Neurotherapy claims it can tackle persistent depression or PTSD or anger issues without resorting to talk therapy or pharmaceutical interventions, by addressing the very neural oscillations that underlie these problems. If you see your brain function in real time, the idea goes, you can trace mental-health issues to their physiological roots—and make direct interventions.

But critics argue that neurotherapy’s treatments—which might take dozens of sessions, each costing hundreds of dollars—have very little research backing them up. And although the mainstream medical community is starting to pay closer attention to the field, particularly in Europe, in the U.S. neurotherapy is still largely unregulated, with practitioners of varying levels of expertise offering treatments in outpatient clinics. At the most basic level, not everyone who’s invested in the technology that allows them to do qEEG testing is able to correctly interpret the resulting brain map. Certification to administer a qEEG test—a process overseen by the International qEEG Certification Board—requires only 24 hours of training, five supervised evaluations, and an exam, with no prior medical experience.

As Jay Gunkelman, an EEG expert and past president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, puts it: “It’s a Wild West, buyer-beware situation out there.”

All this is to say that while skilled interpreters can pick up all sorts of information from an EEG, these tests are also “ripe for overstatement,” according to Michelle Harris-Love, a neuroscientist at Georgetown’s Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. That’s worrisome since, in recent years, EEG technology has gotten cheaper and more widely available. A qEEG brain map can cost as little as a few hundred dollars, which means more people are taking a peek at their brain waves, not just for diagnostic purposes, but also with optimization in mind.

“People will come in for optimal training,” Kerson told me as she adjusted the sensors in my cap. “But what often happens is we’ll find something a little pathological. Which I guess depends on your definition of pathological.”

NeuroAgility, an “attention and performance psychology” clinic in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, brainmaps CEOs and then uses neurotherapy to help them “come from a place of action, rather than reaction.” Other clinics promise to use the technology to help athletes and actors get in the zone, as Kerson did in her private practice. “There are business executives who want to reduce their obsessive-compulsive traits, or athletes who want to tune up their engines,” Gunkelman told me. “At Daytona, they’re all fabulous cars, but every single one of them gets a tune up three times a day. No matter who you are, if you look at brain activity, there are things we can do to get you to function better.”

* * *

For the first five minutes my brain was being mapped, I sat with my eyes closed. My mind felt unquiet; I was thinking about what it felt like to have a brain, trying to describe to myself the feeling of having thoughts. “Your eyes are moving around a lot underneath your lids,” Kerson said. She suggested I put my fingertips on my eyelids to keep my eyes from shifting. I sat like the see-no-evil monkey for the rest of the test, trying to remain thoughtless and keep my jumpy eyes still.

When the first half of the test was done, I spied my brain waves on Kerson’s computer screen: 19 thin, wobbly gray lines stretching across a white background. My brain activity looked like an Agnes Martin painting. Kerson had me turn the chair around for the second, eyes-open half, in case watching the real-time brain waves made me self-conscious. Her software program chimed out a warning every time I blinked, which turned out to be a lot. “I’m going to turn off the sound so you don’t get frustrated,” Kerson said.

When we were done, she scrolled through the 10 minutes of brain waves. Two of the lines looked alarming—every few seconds they jolted all over the place, like some sort of seismic indication of an internal earthquake. Kerson told me not to worry; the EEG also picks up on muscle movements, and those were my blinks.

“So there’s one thing I see right off the bat,” she said. “We’d expect to see more alpha when you close your eyes. But it actually looks pretty similar whether your eyes are open or closed. That tells me that you might not sleep well, you might have some anxiety, you might be overly sensitive—your brain talks to itself a lot. You can’t quiet yourself.” This was all accurate, if not news to me.

Kerson continued to scan through the test, selecting sections that weren’t compromised by my blinks, trying to gather enough clean data to match against the database. She ran the four good minutes through the program, which spat out an analysis of my brain waves that looked something like a heat map, with areas of relative over- and under-functioning indicated by patches of color. By most measures, my brain appeared a moderate, statistically insignificant green. “You’re neurotypical,” she said, sounding minorly disappointed.

Kerson nonetheless recommended vitamins to beef up my neural connections, since my amplitudes were a little lackluster. “Meditating would be good for you, but you’re going to need something else for meditation to work,” she told me, noting that I should consider some alpha training, which would involve putting on headphones to listen to sounds that would get my brain waves into the right frequency. I should also probably change out my contacts if I was blinking that much.

Kerson began folding up the electrode-studded cap, and I realized with a slight feeling of deflation that that was it. “It was nice to meet you,” she called out as I pulled out of her driveway. “And it was nice to meet your brain!”

* * *

A qEEG may not be anything like a personality test, but it still left me with the same unsatisfied feeling of being parsed and analyzed but still fundamentally unknown. My mind had been mapped, I had seen the shape of my brain waves, but I didn’t have any new or better understanding of my galloping, anxious brain, or what happens on those afternoons where I lose hours to online personality tests. Instead, I was just left with the vague sense that in some deep and essential way, I wasn’t performing as well as I could be.

I decided to seek out a second opinion from Gunkelman, whom several people had described to me as the go-to guy for interpreting EEGs. Gunkelman worked as an EEG tech in a hospital for decades, he told me. “In the early 1990s, I figured out that I had read 500,000 EEGs,” he said. “And then I stopped counting.” When he looked over my results, he grumbled about not having enough data to work with; for a proper brain map, he needed at least 10 minutes each with eyes open and closed, he said. But he nonetheless zipped through the EEG readout with the confidence of someone who’s done this more than half a million times before.

Like Kerson, Gunkelman zeroed in on my alpha. “When you close your eyes, you expect to see alpha in the back of the head, and we’re not really seeing that,” he said. That meant that my visual processing systems weren’t resting when my eyes were closed—the same inability to quiet down that Kerson had noticed. He also saw evidence of light drowsiness: “With an EEG, we can tell exactly how vigilant you are,” he said. He was right; I had been sleepy that day.

Then, perhaps to throw my drowsy, overactive brain a bone, Gunkelman noted some nice things about my alpha, too. “The alpha here is 11 or 12 hertz, a little faster than average,” he said, which generally correlated with better memory of facts and experiences. But if I wanted optimal functioning, he agreed with Kerson that some alpha training would help teach my brain to chill out so I could sleep better and be maximally alert during the day.

There had been something appealing to my anxious, over-alphaed brain about having yet another way to think of myself as an underperforming machine that could be tweaked and tuned up. But in the end, hearing Gunkelman describe my brain waves in such clinical terms had the opposite effect. I felt protective of all the ways my brain was still a mystery to me, and everything the brain map couldn’t show.

I’ve kept one of my brain-map images as my desktop background. I’m not sure why I feel attached to it; I couldn’t pick it out of a lineup of other brains, and I didn’t really learn anything new about myself from the experience—the map is not the territory, as they say. But even so, I still like looking at it: my speedy, drowsy, neurotypical, not-quite-optimal brain.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/this-is-your-brain-on-qeeg/532035/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

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A Map That Shows You Everything Wrong With Your Brain

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As Jay Gunkelman, an EEG expert and past president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, puts it: “It’s a Wild West, buyer-beware situation out there.”

* * *

Article source here:The Atlantic

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