Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Oh, you've seen the posts a hundred times. I don't care about her anymore, she was never anyone special, she got too old, I talked to her and found out she was boring, she got too fat, I got a real girlfriend (or at least a statutory rape victim with a compliant mother), I was only infatuated with the mystery, I never loved her, I loved the idea of her, she wasn't real, I was temporarily crazy. Rubbish. Hitler was right about the "Big Lie", and sometimes the one you really need to convince is yourself.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. But the human mind is the most complex piece of software ever compiled; it contains certain glitches, but also certain safeguards. Programmers often refer to "sanity checks" built into their programs to filter out destructive input before it can cause real damage, but they failed to grasp how truly appropriate the name really was.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. I want you to try something. Find an object that's too heavy for you to lift, and try to lift it anyway. There's a reason that your attempt is cut short before your muscles rip away from your bones, and that reason is all in your head. As a muscle reaches peak contraction, the brain sends inhibitor signals to it, telling it not to contract any further. This is the painful feeling of limitation that tells you that you won't be able to continue your exertion. In reality, you could, but you're stopping yourself in order to prevent injury.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Your mind isn't necessarily fully in tune with what you're capable of. Sometimes, an inhibitor signal won't be sent when it should have been, and you'll pull a muscle or otherwise injure yourself. Sometimes, an inhibitor signal will be sent too soon, long before you reach your actual limits. Weight lifters and body builders know that they're changing not just their bodies, but their minds as well. Their brains are actually reprogrammed to learn more precisely what each muscle is capable of. Only about half of their increased strength comes from actual physical changes to the body, the rest comes from the brain's improved ability to control it. As the brain learns the body's limits, the person becomes able to more fully exert himself, with less risk of injury.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Urban legends tell of people gaining superhuman strength and lifting heavy objects such as cars to save trapped people. There is some truth to this -- when danger is present, the brain can stop sending inhibitor signals to the body. Combined with a rush of adrenaline and norepinephrine, this can allow seemingly superhuman feats, but with great cost -- the person will usually end up with multiple hernias, pulled and torn muscles, and other severe injuries. Certain neurological disorders put their victims in this "no-limit" state permanently -- they find it very easy to exert themselves, but can very easy to kill themselves in the process. But what if everything that applies to the body could apply to the mind as well?
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Game Theory is an interesting field of applied mathematics that is increasingly being used to study and understand human behavior. Practically any conflict or contest between human beings can be broken down and explained by mathematics. But researchers have recently been uncovering solid evidence of something disturbing: someone acting rationally and strategically can often be defeated by someone irrational and insane. Consider an experiment with two players. The first is given a pile of money and can choose how much of it to offer to the second player. The second player can then choose to either accept the split, or destroy all of the money. From the rational perspective of game theory, the second player should always accept the offer, even if it's a grossly uneven split, because even getting a little bit is better than getting nothing at all. Because of this, it's most rational for the first player to offer as little as possible, on the assumption that the second player is rational and will accept it rather than destroying all the money and walking away with nothing. In clinical trials, sane players sometimes made threats of destroying the money if they weren't offered at least half of it, but these threats were not seen as credible and they ended up accepting the unfair offers anyway. But truly insane and irrational people, who were genuinely prepared to destroy the money and walk out with nothing, fared much better in the game. Many throughout history have known it: madness is power. From ancient shamans who ingested psychoactive drugs, to prophets whose delusional visions spawned powerful and enduring religions, to characters such as The Joker from Batman whose only “power” is their lack of sanity, madness has proven to be an almost superhuman gift to some.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Consciousness, in the grand scheme of the mind, is like the visible portion of an iceberg, with the vast bulk of it, the truly dangerous part to any passing ships, hiding beneath the water. Recent research has found that consciousness does not even play a role in decision making; the "self" is merely an observer that sees its own actions after they've already been committed to by other parts of the mind, and then seeks to rationalize and justify why it did what it only thinks it decided to do. In experiments, when consciousness is left unimpaired but decision making is otherwise interfered with, the conscious self fails to notice, and remains convinced that it's acting rationally and of its own free will, even when manipulated into doing things that would ordinarily shock and horrify it.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. Human literature if rife with the "motif of harmful sensation", the idea of something perceived by the senses that's destructive to the body and mind. An image so horrific it drives someone to suicide, a joke so funny that to hear it is to die laughing, a woman so beautiful as to drive men mad after one gaze at her, another woman so cursed and hideous that to look at her is to turn to stone forever. This literary device has existed since prehistory, because it is based on truth. These harmful sensations truly exist, sights and sounds and thoughts and ideas fundamentally incompatible with the basic functioning of the human mind. But over time, through both evolution and cultural programming, we've learned to protect ourselves -- whole parts of the software known as the human mind exist solely as an immune system, attempting to filter out mental pathogens or to destroy or mitigate those that have already entered. This happens far below our threshold of awareness, and you should be thankful for that.
Nobody ever stops loving Cracky. The word "meme", long before 4chan and its innumerable tiresome fads, referred a legitimate scientific theory regarding ideas that function as mental viruses, spreading and mutating and evolving from one mind to another, competing with other mind-viruses to control and modify infected minds while trying to avoid an autoimmune response. But as infected as we are with thoughts and ideas that aren't our own, our defenses let us live a relatively normal and healthy life, filtering out anything truly beyond our ability to integrate and correlate into our mental framework. That's how it works for most of us, at least...
