The EEG lady said that my pattern of injury is often associated with the following:

• inability to form intimate relationships despite other social successes;
• self-hatred far out of proportion to the evidence;
• hypercritical judgment of self and others;
• discomfort in crowds;
• inability to clean up or organize personal space due to emotional overload when attempting to do so;
• overcompensation with intellectual success to combat social failure;
• a sleep schedule that is about four hours “late”;
• complete overwhelming collapse on being confronted with multiple tasks at once;
• depression and anxiety that feel surprising or out of place even as they are occurring;

I mean, damn. I’m surprised my eye color wasn’t in there. I’m skeptical and wary of diagnostic lists that seem to dovetail to my life, having had a few of them over the years that falsely promised some discovery, but this is just plain eery.

I keep having experiences lately where I’m talking to someone who wanders away in mid conversation. Or other forms of communication: I IM someone and they don’t respond and then sign off, or I send email that goes into the Void.

I’m not at all sure if it’s significant, or if it happens to me more or less than it happens to others. In any case I find it harder to write it off when this happens lately. I’m far less socially confident than I was a couple years ago, and it’s easy now for me to slip into a near-paranoid assumption that the other person dislikes me and is hoping I’ll go away.

This despite the fact that it’s more likely that the other person is having a multitasking failure or distracted in some way. As with most of my brain lightning problems, it’s egotistical.

In any case I cannot tell whether I’m getting a “keep the hell away” signal from some people I know or not. I’m glad that I at least know that I don’t know, and that I have Occam’s Razor in my medicine cabinet.

I had an EEG and consultation for neurofeedback today.

As I expected, it was fascinating. I sat down in front of a PC running a crappy looking Windows program, attached to a pair of weathered speakers and a little junction box thingy with wires coming out of it.

The woman doing the evaluation was a talkative, intelligent New Agey psychologist. She had the evangelistic attitude of healers whose art isn’t quite accepted yet. The approach she has is to detect evidence of injury with EEG, and then to use a neurological form of biofeedback therapy to fix the problem.

I had three EEGs: one on the left side, one on the right, and one in front. They all showed up abnormal by her standards. Apparently big differences between two different voltages are indicative of problems, as are wide variations in the waves. I have a pattern consistent with injuries in the areas that would cause despair, inability to clean up my room, bad times with relationships, sudden inexplicable anxiety, frustrated rage fits, and assorted medical problems. Hey, whaddya know.

It’s odd watching waves go by and seeing them fly out of control when I swallow or blink, or even when the neurofeedback lady walked around behind me.

Anyway I’m going to try neurofeedback for a while, twice a week. I can afford it now that my car is paid off.