http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01...nts/50393.html


Interesting article but nothing new..........

Now that you mention it
oh yes the flashes, the sudden energy, the clarity of perception, the speed-thinking, the rising above, the affection for the universe, the assembling of existing components that you never assembled before; start on it and then tear it up because it is no good and then do it over the next day in another flash of seeing with different eyes; waking up at 3 a.m. and re-starting from another angle

but does it make you better or does it make you crazier?

In institutions, they just keep you tranquilized. It is no secret that PWP are easier to warehouse when they are "Off", preferably frozen. When you are "On" you start bouncing around.

Should you meditate and not agitate? Why not just let it go wherever it is going to go? This IS me now; don't tell to cut it out; it is who I have become.

Does it provoke radical highs and radical lows, not because you are "manic-depressive", as it is lazily labelled, but because being switched "On" and "Off" is like being a passenger in five aircraft crashes per day; you are in reality swinging wildly back and forth between hope and despair, between being able to dance and being frozen from the neck down. Between On and Off. It's an out-of-control roller coaster and we scream a lot during free-fall.

Get yourself really cranked up by starting lots of projects and completing none of them, and then the next fuse that blows is the dopamine level. Take your pills like a good little patient at the prescribed times in the approved dosages. Then pick up your guitar and play a howling lament, and the brain suddenly starts cranking out a high-powered, short-lived burst of your own self-made dopamine, produced by your brain like a flash-back from the days when it was still in charge; and you flood the zone with dopamine because this creative wave is in addition to the pills you took. And so you get too much dopamine and when the episode is over, too little.
And then i want MORE. The cat likes catnip, the cattle want a salt lick. Parkies just want to be plugged in to the energy of the universe, when they are "On"; to make life worth living even though paying a cruel price.

If you get creative in public, people start to look at you strange. I tell them it's okay; I have a permit.

I've written about this before today but it affected me so much and your heading said it all I thought I might repeat it.
The article seems to highlight not just what I thought was the now more commonly accepted role of agonists giving rise to undiscovered creativity but also levodopa as a cause of these spurts of creativity which is interesting.
On agonists and at my most boorish peaks I thought poetry along with my written opinion on just about anything was a great gift I'd only just unleashed and felt the need to share with others.
Thankfully after a year on a mood stabilizing drug which did nothing to change my hypomania an astute neurologist cancelled the dopamine agonist Permax and also the mood stabilizer and I returned to my old self.
I'm glad this side effect of agonists is becoming more widely known now.
It wasn't really common knowledge to the parkinsons community or most neurologists when it happened and was then rectified 10 yrs ago.

Point taken. but it started before agonists . being on knowing off is coming
is all it takes
as they say facing the gallows.../

asterisk beside my name ! since dante

Points well acknowledged. I get criticized for the cause of all my family's problems, but they really have no idea how difficult it is to remain sane while tortured daily with the symptoms of PD. it seems that it is impossible for people who don't have the advanced symptoms and have no idea what taking large doses of anti-PD drugs does to us psychologically or physically. Sometimes we ask for it by just trying to maintain a semblance that "everything is ok", when this is just our cover up of "I wish that everything was ok". Know what I'm sayin'. Cs

I looked up “boorish” and it really does describe me when I am sliding from On to Off.

Boorish: bad-mannered, barbaric, bearish, cantankerous, churlish, cloddish, clodhopping, clownish, clumsy, coarse, countrified, gross, gruff, ill-bred, ill-mannered, impolite, inurbane, loud, loutish, lowbred, oafish, ornery, out-of-line, out-of-order, provincial, rough, rude, rustic, swinish, tasteless, ugly, uncivilized, uncouth, uncultured, uneducated, ungracious, unpoised, unpolished, unrefined, and vulgar!!!

That about covers it. AND I also have Parkinson’s!
Pity my caregivers

But I do not believe that the panic outbursts of perception or emotion have been figured out and put safely away in the filing cabinet. We still don’t know what it is we don’t know. But we say, “Sometimes it feels like this”, or “That happened to me too.”

one end of the corridor - a pile of food,
other end - a pile of food twice as big
but surrounded by fence.

animals with low levels of dopamine (Off) choose the easier, smaller pile of food, where there is no fence

animals with high levels of dopamine (On) jump the fence, climb over the fence, chew through the fence, or dig under the fence, and get twice as much food, and a better rate of survival.

(and Parkies are yelling, “what side are you on?”)

dopamine spikes like amphetamine speed goofballs after stress, such as losing a street fight. Which has nothing to do with movement disorder or the pleasure of gambling
get in a street fight you produce more dopa. (Oh my. Barbarians at the gate_ Yes but we have a dress code)

Soldiers post-traumatic stress syndrome show rush of dopamine activity in brain when hearing recorded gunshots and other combat sounds. -
if dopamine is pleasure element, then why association with negative experiences?\ fight or flight survival decision - gets u excited because of danger, creativity is for survival

multi-system atrophy, ladies and gentleman; not just your substantia nigra going up in flames; it’s all your systems withering; systems pulling each other down like power failure that spreads by itself; one circuit overloading the nex t one….
Creativity is triggered because death comes knocking at your door, you put on your walking shoes and go down by the River Jordan;
and you search for meaning, at least to understand what is at the centre of Man’s Fate.

Pretty standard Darwinian stuff… assets and liabilities, strength and creativity to avoid extinction…/. Curing PD will be another victory for our DNA of problem solving and skills to attack or defend or flee, whether success or fail we do not know in advance, but we beat the sabre-tooth tigers, for whom we were cat-food 12,000 years ago. Our DNA remembers how we did that.

We killed smallpox and polio. By being creative, and deciding to fight.
Lack of dopa creates severe austerity and necessary rationing of resources to survive while trying to solve the puzzle, therefore soldier produces dopamine in response to gunfire, not for pleasure, not as movement disorder, but for fight or flight FROM SENSED DANGER; which may REQUIRE you to be creative to find a way through the deadly maze

Forced to make instant decision to go to small pile of food for immediate survival \

or take the risk of jumping the fence to get double supply of food.

Or find creative way to get both piles of food

Creative not for itself but activity to survive new dangers
You do the highest level you can handle, in your condition, at that place, at that time, with that level of dopa,mine u go to war with the dopa u got not the dopa u wish u had

\If you got lots of dopa, you go for the long shot; if dopa low, you play it safe
Not talkin Vegas here and pleasure rewards, talking battlefield and survival and fights and famine.

On or Off, ; not a pleasure centre. you can or you cannot jump the fence

Dopa signals how much you can handle at that moment in that place. If things aren’t looking so good, you conserve your energy, which they call “Parkinson’s lack of motivation.”

Lack of motivation? No, we are otherwise occupied. It takes us more “motivation” to get out of bed in the morning, than it takes most people to manage their careers. Lack of motivation? Here, put on these cement shoes and go jogging. And then let’s compare “motivation”.

Third choice is get sedated, so you won’t feel it happening one way or the other. But then you miss out on the whole experience of being a canary in the coalmine.

we are all just chemicals ? Nope. Man does not live by mirapex alone.

Creativity is called up when everything you thought you knew you no longer know.

Creativity is when your ship sinks and you have to build a life-raft with no tools

It’s not for the fun of it, but it is easier than sitting around waiting to die.