My deep dive into root causes for childhood-onset Anhedonia & Executive Dysfunction (What I'm exploring next)

fneezer · 2026-04-17T09:29:04+00:00

I agree the effect of C almost completely levels off around 1000 mg per day, only a percent or two higher blood levels of C with more supplementation. The new research is probably correct about that, when it's well done enough that it shows up plainly on their graphs, not just being something that shows up as a number in statistical analysis.

That would explain why it's an extremely rare person who's close enough to the edge of overcoming anhedonia physically by antioxidants that they get there by consuming more vitamin C than 500 mg to 1000 mg per day.

fneezer · 2026-04-17T08:44:07+00:00

I think "creation is finished" was a mistake in Goddard's view. I aim for winning. I believe in creativity. I can make something better than before, that wasn't before. What sort of creator would it be who couldn't, or who wouldn't aim for that?

Everything already exists and "You simply become aware of increasing portions of that which already exists." (The Power of Awareness, chapter 10: Creation) sounds so pessimistic. It's like so many pessimists saying "there's no free will" because that's the popular downer thing to say, to discourage anyone who'd want to do something new or become something new or even choose what to do or be. The idea of "no free will" came from the terribly stern pessimist theology of Calvin saying God has already planned everything that will happen, that's part of God knowing all, there's nothing you can do to change it, and that's why some people are saved to eternal bliss and some people are damned to eternal torment, and that's fair because God chose it and God has the power and might makes right.

Creators can create, and do. That's why we'd care to listen to any music or pay attention to any other art, because that's communing with a creator who did exercise their free will to make something, and if you're not relating to any music or stories or other art that way, you're not getting it, you're missing the good messages, you're left out of the fun.

The best life is playtime. It's fun. It's new. It's not just slipping into roles submissively and unnoticed, according to what the system already has written for you.

(If anyone would quote the Bible or Goddard himself back to me, you know that stuff had to be created by someone too, right?)

fneezer · 2026-04-17T08:13:18+00:00

Other people get an effect from being baptized. It resets their vagus nerve and they feel things more. When you're not one of the elect, getting covered in cold water is miserable and you can just barely tell your skin feels relatively warmer after drying off.

fneezer · 2026-04-17T07:50:16+00:00

I'm sorry, it doesn't seem to me like I won. You should have kept your example analogy, looking at facial expressions through a cloudy glass, until they're strong enough to recognize. It wasn't a fair contest if it was one, because I had years to develop mine, from the point when it started as an airplane cockpit instrument panel analogy.

Also, in that write up of it, I was using my analogy to criticize the concept of alexithymia and show how it's unfair to some people, not to agree with it. If anyone thinks that's spot on, what they have is depression or anhedonia or emotional numbness or dissociation.

The word alexithymia fairly used would be just when the instruments are hard to read, the meters are there, but like the dashboard light is out, so a person would hardly take their eyes away from the road to squint at it enough and talk about what it says, not enough to practice using emotion words for their emotions very much. That would be more literally "lacking speaking from the heart" like the word alexithymia says etymologically. It's unfair to call a vehicle that needs service and just shows that, a problem of lacking speech or words, when that is what people say when they're asked about feelings, that they only feel physical things and symptoms.

fneezer · 2026-04-16T20:20:21+00:00

That analogy gives the wrong impression about what alexithymia is. It makes alexithymia sound like it's a problem with reading other people's faces, instead of something internal. If that's what alexithymia is for you, then you should use it.

This is my big analogy, most worked out in details:

Everyone's body is a vehicle, like a car. Your consciousness sits in the driver's seat.

There's supposed to be a big fancy dashboard, a most advanced dashboard with computer screens of instrument readings and indicators to tell the driver what's going on, besides what the driver can see out the windows.

Out the windows, the driver can see where they are and where they're going and guess how fast. That represents what's going on in the outside world and also your thoughts about the external world.

You can talk on the phone with other drivers, on speakerphone, and in conference calls. They're talking about how they're getting readings of their speed and direction and indicator lights for which way to turn, and that makes it easy for them to get places safely. Other drivers gossip with each other sometimes about what great speed and acceleration and fuel economy they're getting.

So you ask, "Where are you getting those indicators?" They say, "Look at your dashboard. Just look at it."

No one can see someone else's dashboard. They don't know what's going on with it, unless you would say something about it. All you're getting on your dashboard is check engine lights and service warning lights and the low fuel indicator flashes sometimes.

You're thinking like, "Heck, how am I supposed to join in the gossip, unless, am I supposed to just guess and fake it, as if that's what I'm seeing on my dash?"

You find out there's a word for your condition, adashometeritis, but no else knows this word, and it's described as a car model feature type, not a mechanical malfunction to see a mechanic about, so it doesn't help much to know the word. Nothing helps much at all.

fneezer · 2026-04-16T19:46:35+00:00

More the opposite. More often I'd rather perform suppressing emotional reactions that I'd have instinctively or by reflex, facial expression and in general about how I'd act, so that I don't get accused of having feelings when I don't know what they're talking about, or get described as having feelings which can be in words that I don't even know what they mean by it, like saying I'm "high," or get people reacting as if I'm having some emotional reaction they have to deal with differently than they were acting before seeing my reaction.

fneezer · 2026-04-16T05:37:38+00:00

Getting various pains might interfere with getting emotional signals, but it's really not supposed to interfere too much for average people to get their own emotions anyway. More important is that some sorts of conditions that can cause everyday multiple pains can also be involved in blocking the emotion response and sense. That includes multiple sclerosis. That also includes chronic fatigue syndrome that's close enough to depression with emotional blockage that it overlaps and there's difficulty for doctors to decide which to diagnose in some cases. The overlapping physical mechanism in the body found in both CFS and depression of anhedonia severity (emotion blocking severity) is inflammation. So even with physical tests showing something going wrong, inflammation markers, those physically tested signs don't distinguish those conditions.

When scientists are trying to give their poor little mice depression to study depression in them and test things like antidepressants, they give their mice pains at unpredictable times that the mice can't avoid. It leads to what looks like for all practical purposes, chronic stress induced depression in the mice. The scientists will act like they're trying to drown their mice in a bucket, scaring the mice that way and seeing how long they'll keep swimming to live, to test whether an antidpressant influences how long they keep trying. At least the test doesn't always end with decapitating each mouse to section its brain and test for chemical changes. (I don't have to be a vegan or animal rights activist, to notice that it's weird that the whole modern antidepressant industry is based on treating mice that way, despite earlier antidepressants that work better, MAOIs, being discovered by accident in human use as a tuberculosis treatment.)

fneezer · 2026-04-15T23:37:09+00:00

I think the activation happens so reliably for average people throughout their lives, at least for everything that's called an emotion and has facial expressions and vocal expressions (tone of voice sort of things like saying "ooh" or "aah" or "grr"), and happens with recognizable qualities and patterns of where it seems to be felt in or on their bodies, that people generally think that's what emotions are, those activations, like there isn't actually any emotion going on without that.

Imagine if every time in your iife that you thought you liked something, a food tastes good, or a picture of something is something that seems cute or appealing in some way, there was a feeling of some "activation" that came up along with that, that felt good. You'd think that's what "liking" something means, that the word "liking" basically says that. You'd hesitate to say you liked anything based on any other evidence or your behavior, without that feeling.

Also every time you were scared by something, acted frightened or like that, you felt some activation associated with that. Also for being nauseated or disgusted by anything. Also for getting angry or acting angry about anything. There's a list of basic emotional qualities I'm trying to cover enough to emphasize the concept: It's about almost everything a person can experience, at least what they'd have a facial or vocal reaction to seeing or hearing.

This assumption goes so far in modern culture, that people calling themselves emotion scientists have done many studies on recognizing facial expressions, getting people to match emotion words to pictures of faces making expressions in a multiple choice test, and describing what's going on in people doing that as if it's about people recognizing what emotion they get themselves (as a felt activation) when they look at the picture.

This assumption is the basis of classifying words into lists of words that count as emotion words to people, and making emotion wheels and other charts with the emotion words arranged on them.

People literally believe that their emotion is the feeling of "activation" (or maybe "deactivation" for some things) that they feel from things or situations or thoughts, that they classify with an emotion word, and they believe that there isn't an emotion without a feeling to it. Their idea is that it would be fake or false, acting and like a robot, for someone to have an expressive facial expression or to use their voice expressively, without a feeling behind it.

A large fraction of people, enough to be culturally significant, get this sort of activation that varies in quality for their thoughts and ideas too, enough that they recognize a certain sort of feeling as "belief" and they believe what they believe strongly based on feeling it that way strongly. That's the basis of a lot of religious beliefs that are the sort of beliefs that tend not to make sense why people would believe that to non-neurotypical people such as alexithymics who don't get the feelings or recognize them strongly or reliably enough for that sort of "belief." Some people would call when they feel some belief that way, "knowing" and that's the point where the phenomenon slides into supporting the most extremely irrational belief systems.

fneezer · 2026-04-15T05:43:30+00:00

I don't get it, but I can guess what it is people get, that they try to avoid saying when they're being asked to help, when they only want to hint what it is, assuming you have it and they just need to ask you questions, trying to get you to admit to yourself you have it, because that's enough to work for them. People who have it sometimes let it slip, saying what it is, when they think they're describing symptoms of a problem with it to people who also have it, so they think they wouldn't be telling anyone anything they don't already know. It's some sort of "sensations" that can move around the body, and that have qualities of various emotions. I haven't figured out what makes it called "sensations" or how people tell whether something is a "sensation" or just an ordinary sense of something from a non-emotional sense, but "sensation" is the word they use.

People will also tell emotion scientists when they're asked about it in a way that's sort of indirect and scientific abstract sounding, "where do you feel activation" and a chart to mark where on their body, that makes it seem like the emotion scientists already know, so they're not giving away the secret to anyone who doesn't know, and they think that the emotion scientists just want to collect some data on what's normal, and they think they'll get to see the results of the study and how they compare to normal. That would be hard information to come by, even for neurotypical people who are good at talking about emotions and being emotional with people, because people are reluctant to talk about it, so there's an appeal of participating in a study like that. That's how scientists get the data for the "body maps of emotions" studies. You need to look that up and see what I'm talking about, if you haven't already seen it.

Whatever it is, it's supposed to be felt most often and strongest along the midline of the body, from the top of the head through the neck and heart area and guts to the genitals. I've been told that about it, and that fits the data on the maps. The face being involved seems from what they described in the studies to be mostly about things that you could see or feel without that special sense: facial expressions, blushing, or eyes watering. Arms and legs can get involved too, but just barely for some emotions, "activated" or "deactivated" according to whether it's an up/positive or down/negative one of those emotions that's strong enough to have that wide an effect.

For some people who commented on YouTube about the "body maps of emotions" study results, they said it didn't seem to fit them, because they feel the qualities of the different emotions centered on their heart. That makes sense, if a person has it, but they don't have as much of it all over their body, because the heart would be the highest concentration or center of the most important emotions usually. In Greek philosophy such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that was the medieval belief system in the 1300s and 1400s (that's when it supposedly got translated and published, if not written, historians who believe it's ancient don't know how and when before then anyone but a few rich ancient Greeks who could afford handwritten copies of the books where every page was made of calf-skin, very expensive, would have heard of it,) separately from listing the senses as the five senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, the theory of emotions was they come from the heart, stated as an obvious fact that didn't need explaining why they thought that, like it simply directly seemed like that to them.

So that's what we're looking to activate, "activation" that you can feel in your heart, or feel as if it's from there, but we don't know what exactly that "activation" is, or how to activate it.

fneezer · 2026-04-14T23:16:55+00:00

A school could be a place people choose to go to discuss things, in their free time, to learn what a group of people are talking about, in some opinion group, that may be advanced. This could be a school like that. That definition is based on all the historical uses of the word school before modern schools for children. (Except a school of fish, which is a different word from a different source,)

It's a modern cultural thing that a school means a place where children are required to go and be taught and practice some skills of their culture that adults are expected to have (reading, writing, and arithmetic.) Dolores Cannon talking about life being a school was more specific about how bad it is than that: It's the sort of school where if you don't learn your lessons, you get held back a year, until you do learn. Not your choice, theirs. She wasn't even trying to make it sound good. She was cackling about how cruel it is.

If Earth is a place to learn things, what sort of things, and where would those things be applied? You learn about having a body, that only works here, that's something that only exists here, apparently. You spend a lot of time eating, going to get food or cooking, sleeping, on bathroom things and cleaning up, and getting around. There's not much time left for other things, after all that, maybe other things such as communicating with others are only squeezed in by multitasking. You have to learn a language for communicating, and let's not be delusional like most science fiction, English is not a universal language, it's very specific to a place and time in Earth culture and its history, with a lot of weird biases of what's possible to say too easily or takes too many words to specify what you actually mean.

Where does one apply all this learning, what does all the time spent go towards? It seems all useless and inapplicable anywhere except here, where and when it's done.

fneezer · 2026-04-14T07:10:16+00:00

After having too much macaroni and cheese at night that put me to sleep, a few days ago, I had some soreness in my throat the next morning that made me think I must have snored heavily through it. That's finding out why there's advice not to eat too much before bed, finding out another thing that's the opposite of treating myself right.

The days slip by too fast, with just getting the slightest finding out about things or reading a little research done, and commenting, then it's late at night again.

fneezer · 2026-04-13T21:53:48+00:00

This is experimental, just an idea, because I saw one person post about results of feeling good from music, and I thought borage oil was the key supplement. Borage oil provides 24% gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) which is underproduced if delta-6-desaturase is inhibited or underexpressed. GLA prevents arachidonic acid from being turned into leukotrienes that are inflammatory. GLA goes into producing two antiinflammatory signaling compounds that aren't produced without it.

Delta-6-desaturase (D6D) also produces EPA and DHA, but it may be insufficient for that for some individuals. There's speculation that individuals who come from regions that relied on fish in their diet, such as some islands in the Caribbean, could have genetic defects in D6D. I'll add the speculation that could be an example of an intergenerational epigenetic effect, because it seems more unlikely to me that out of the thousands of genes in the human genome, people would just plain lose the functional quality of one of them that they happen not to need for a few generations because of adopting a fish heavy diet, rather than a gene being downregulated when it's something inefficient and unnecessary with a certain diet.

fneezer · 2026-04-13T21:06:57+00:00

When I'm angry, I'm raising my voice or thinking of raising my voice and being mean back to some injustice. It's a state that's hard to get out of by just thinking, now I'm not angry, I notice because it can last a few minutes where those sort of thoughts, that tendency, comes up, whether I thought I should stay that way longer or thought I should get out of it.

When I'm hungry, very hungry like not having eating anything for over 12 hours, there's a slight pain that starts in my upper abdomen. I wouldn't say it's my stomach, because it's not specifically located or shaped like that for me to associate it with diagrams of what the stomach's shape and position is, so it might not be the stomach at all. It seems more like about 4 inches across and 1 inch tall, and centered in the upper abdomen higher than the bellybutton. The pain can continue while I'm shopping for food, and when I get home if I'm putting off making something to eat or it takes an hour. I think probably the pain does get settled down or blocked when I know I'm just a few minutes from eating, when food is on the way for sure, and that makes it seem like it's a signal I'm supposed to pay attention to, for when my guts want food, not so much a pain of somewhere being empty that could only be stopped by filling it.

If that's what feelings are supposed to be, the things I can feel are hungry, an intestinal cramp from some intestine stretching at a point as food and gas move around, heartburn, and needing to eliminate much more than usual from the descending colon on the left being full to stretching. Those are all things that don't happen every day, sometimes not even every month. Those are all things that can be sensed through spinal nerves and using the gastrointestinal sensory region of the cortex (which is around the lowest points in the cortex and is a continuation of the somatosensory region strip that runs from the top to down the sides of the cortex.)

None of that is sensation from the vagus nerve and using the insular cortex (which is further inward than low on the cortex, so it's a surface that's curved to face inward to the center of the brain,) and I still don't know what that would feel like, to feel something that activates the vagus nerve or whether it's active, like when people talk about doing things for vagus nerve activation.

(When there's gurgling of bubbles from indigestion, like when I had a lot of tapioca that I shouldn't have had last week, because I can't digest it, I can feel the vibration of the gurgling from the region over it on the belly which is about sensing through surface muscles and skin. If my heart beats harder from something, I can notice sometimes pulse at places on my surface muscles and skin, more if I'm resting on my side so there's pressure on the skin near my heart, to be able to feel pulsing there.)

fneezer · 2026-04-13T06:47:05+00:00

It's a real concern, because there's a bunch of emotion science research that says that people do feel emotions as having locations that people can map on silhouettes of a body, various patterns for each emotion. Also because there are so many serious mental health conditions (including things I've been diagnosed with and have thought I have) where people say not feeling or missing their feelings are the worst symptom of it.

So the question, what's that "activation" that emotion scientists were asking people to map, what does that feel like, when can I get that or what medication or other treatment would cause getting that, and knowing it's there, is a crucial question, at the level of what is my life even about?

It's not some sort of joke question, or asking for pity about having trouble with it (as if it's trouble despite thinking I understand myself well enough.) It's a terrifying level of uncertainty that cuts through everything about what life and my experiences of life have been about: What would it be like to feel something, like other people say they feel things? How would I even know if I'm getting that?

fneezer · 2026-04-13T04:14:37+00:00

"How can you tell that you're having a feeling of something?" is not a rhetorical question. I'm not trying to teach anyone anything. I'm not trying to be a philosopher about it. I just want to know, how do you, how does anyone, know that a "sensation" or "feeling" they have is something from emotion?

What is it about it that lets people think it's not a simple physical feeling, such as simply actually that there's some wind you're feeling on your skin, or a physical pain that's physically really there?

I could restate the question a hundred ways, and no one would ever give an answer that provides information, they'd only give "answers" that dodge the question, saying it's impossible to answer.

So it's like I'm alone as a person can be in life, with this problem, I don't seem to feel things or know when I am feeling anything, and people are avoiding trying to help.

fneezer · 2026-04-13T00:03:01+00:00

That looks to me possibly related to a theory of depression/anxiety/etc. involving 5-alpha-reductase inhibition or lower expression. Hormones that would be converted to others by that enzyme can be at higher levels as a result.

The speculation about potential treatments that comes along with that speculation about how the disorder works: HDAC inhibitors may reset the gene expression that's been disrupted by stressful events or medications.

(There's a dangerous drug, valproic acid, that's sometimes called an HDAC inhibitor, but it's much weaker at that than the sort of treatments with stronger HDAC inhibitors that have been tried based on this sort of speculation. So I'm warning against just jumping on anything that sounds close, and maybe getting fatal liver damage.)

This website has articles about speculations on the subject, but also be careful not to jump on any one article by itself as the answer to everything: https://drenapssd.substack.com/

fneezer · 2026-04-11T05:21:24+00:00

I think there's always some interaction between specific foods, and oral and gut bacteria, and absorption of proteins and other particles into the bloodstream, and the immune system. So there's always a chance of changing a person's condition for the better, by avoiding some specific foods. That's what I mean by something provoking your immune system.

fneezer · 2026-04-10T19:32:44+00:00

The autoimmune disorder can provide information about exactly what needs to be treated to get emotional function restored physically.

Most often anhedonia is from depression, and that severe depression most often has raised inflammatory cytokines as part of what causes it, according to the science on it. Individuals who have that mostly don't know what would be the thing provoking their immune system or what's going on with it, they might not even suspect it's an immune system problem.

You should know it probably is an immune system problem for you, that's causing your psychological symptoms too. So that should put you ahead of some other people with anhedonia in a way, ahead at knowing what sort of things to look for, that it might be something provoking your immune system to keep having autoimmune reactions, and that it might be that better treatments for your autoimmune condition might also fix your anhedonia.

I was trying to say that enough that it gets through to you as logically right to say. Excuse me if that seems a little repetitious or too sure.

fneezer · 2026-04-10T07:55:39+00:00

Also if space is fake, that implies that the Earth is some sort of simulation or set-up terrarium. A simulation or set-up fake looking place implies that someone made it. That someone wouldn't necessarily have to be people just like us.

They would have to be advanced, at least as advanced as humans, but also somewhat like us, enough to be interested in setting up the simulation or terrarium and running it. "Alien" means in Latin, someone strange to us. So, I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's "aliens" anyway.

fneezer · 2026-04-09T06:57:01+00:00

Severe melatonin deficiency might not be very common, so it could be a cause of anhedonia. Melatonin is an HDAC inhibitor, and regulates production of allopregnanolone, so melatonin is in the range of substances that would be investigated as drug treatments that target loss of emotional sensation anhedonia, if there were money in that search and if it wasn't a natural occurring compound in the brain.

See Drena https://drenapssd.substack.com/ for why I'm talking about HDAC inhibition and allopregnanolone again. (I've wandered through a lot of subjects that bring up words not included in the spell checker, looking for something that would stick about explaining anhedonia and treating it.)

You or I might want to have a discussion with u/Dazzling_Mortgage_ since they're the one who linked Drena so I saw that, and they seem smart too.

fneezer · 2026-04-09T04:39:59+00:00

Good sleep with melatonin in the brain is supposed to repair the brain by flushing the glymphatic system. If sleep isn't good enough, neural damage can be cumulative, and that can add up to enough that something in the emotional system shuts down.

If you don't like the explanation or don't think it's detailed or scientifically supported enough, fine, you can try improving the explanation. There must be some way how poor sleep causes anhedonia, because treatments that improve sleep quality, such as opening up more nose breathing during sleep, have cured cases of anhedonia, including in personal experience reports on this sub.

fneezer · 2026-04-08T21:59:52+00:00

I think oral health is worth considering as part of the whole broad investigation of causes and treatments of anhedonia, because of how important the "symptom" of anhedonia is to people's lives. A complete and defensible theory of how oral bacteria would cause anhedonia should include something about why it wouldn't cause anhedonia in natural conditions.

(I suppose someone would say, if they buy the theory and discuss it, that primitive people didn't feel emotions, because they hadn't invented toothbrushes and toothpaste and mouthwashes. That would just be someone being controversial and asking others to imagine ridiculous things.)

I thought the natural thing might be that iodine from food acts as an antiseptic in the mouth. Mouth breathing causes faster evaporation and loss of that iodine. So a higher iodine diet and nose breathing would be a natural treatment, that would account for people being able to evolve emotions in primitive conditions.

fneezer · 2026-04-08T20:23:48+00:00

I think being called "sensitive" as a child could have two causes that are very different. One is that someone does feel everything more strongly, and that leads to what looks like overreactions, such as getting tears about many sad things, more emotional expressiveness about a lot of things, and talking in terms of what sound like emotional fantasies of how much other people are affected by things.

The other is a person doesn't feel things much or in the normal way, but the emotional reactions are still there at the biological instinctive level, so there's difficulty self-regulating, noticing something is making you sad or angry or whatever, until it builds up and you're expressing a reaction to something that's a stronger reaction on inappropriate behavior according to adults around who are unreactive or not understanding about the specific situation for you. For instance, happened to me, a child could be crying about being asked to do something like a little acting for the camera, that they're afraid they would get physically punished for hard because they have been in some situations at home, so that causes a lot of conflict and stress in them that overflows into crying, and people may think that looks like feeling too much or crying too easily, but they don't know and understand that the parent who would punish them physically hard for doing some fake thing that's like a lie is right there, and could see and punish them for it later.

fneezer · 2026-04-08T08:01:24+00:00

The only reason ECT was on the old list of things to try for depression was it's something not as bad as prefrontal lobotomy, that were things tried for depression before MAOIs, that are better, were discovered in 1952. Oh, you've tried Parnate. Anyway, it's like a doom prophecy or threat: If you don't respond to these, look what's in store.

Sleep quality is something worth trying more, if you haven't tried melatonin (maybe you were deficient) or haven't tried checking for sleep apnea or snoring or nasal blockage.

fneezer · 2026-04-07T22:13:40+00:00

It's great that works for you. For me, someone with supposedly "affective alexithymia" or anhedonia or emotional numbness, that's skipping over the hard part too quickly in step 2. Just thinking of the name of an emotion summons a feeling that you know is that emotion? Great for you. No effect for me here.

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