Try for a moment to imagine this. You and I are talking. I’m droning on, and you’re saying to yourself, “Yeah, I get it. r/K Selection, and Rabbits and Wolves. How long can you beat this dead horse, you one trick pony?” Then you say to yourself, “He’ll probably start talking about the amygdala hijack next.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the walls close in. Blackness floods into your field of vision, your lights go out, and you collapse to the floor in a heap. I begin shaking you, but it is like shaking a dead body. You are out cold.
Five minutes later, you hear a voice off in the distance, and suddenly begin to wake up. “Hey, wake the fuck up! What’s wrong with you? I’m just getting to the good part. There’s this thing called an amygdala hijack, and you can actually use it against people…” Slowly, dazed and confused, you get the energy to prop yourself up, while I go on excitedly about how an amygdla hijack can actually turn someone’s brain off.
Imagine this really happened to you. Would you think your sudden unconsciousness odd, or would your attitude be, “Oh, that happens every so often. I probably didn’t eat enough today.”
What are you, a food-based narcoleptic? You would think it odd. I’ve never passed out while talking to anyone. Yet it does happen, and the victims don’t think it the least bit odd. They’ve seen this movie before.
Former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham collapsed during the first televised mayoral debate Tuesday night, casting a pall over the event and the future of her campaign.
Abraham, 74, crumpled to the floor seven minutes into the hour-long debate at the Kimmel Center.
As she lay motionless at the base of her lectern, other candidates and the debate moderator, NBC10 anchor Jim Rosenfield, rushed to her aid. Someone called out, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
After a few minutes, Abraham began moving and tried to sit up, telling those around her, “I’m all right.” Those helping her, however, kept her seated, holding her steady.
Fellow candidate Nelson A. Diaz, who was next to her, said she told him she had not eaten all day…
“While I was standing there looking at Tony, the lights went out,” Abraham said, referring to State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, who was answering a debate question when she collapsed. “I’m embarrassed, but I’m quite well.”
The picture of her bending over the lectern at the moment of hijack is here.
Some thoughts. One, there is a reason popular culture associates a woman fainting with a sudden application of amygdala-stimulating stress. Stress produces the faint by over-stimulating the amygdala. This isn’t voodoo, or magic. It is the presentation of specific stimuli to a specific brain structure. It can be learned, understood, and eventually purposely executed on other susceptible individuals.
Two, I’ve not eaten quite often. I fast for two to three days fairly regularly to reset my hormone balance for lifting, among other reasons (Growth Hormone can surge up to 23 times normal levels after just a day of fasting, and Somatostatin plummets to nearly undetectable levels). I have never fainted due to not eating, and I don’t think it would make me more faint-prone, if I were prone to fainting. However in this woman’s eyes, they are linked.
I think that is because when she is under the type of amygdala stress which makes her prone to faint, her stomach is upset and she doesn’t eat because of that. Then, when she faints later, she says it is because she hasn’t eaten, but in reality the not eating was going on because her amygdala was at the edge of fainting. Had she been starving that morning, she would have found something to eat. Had she been starving, she would have been under very little stress, and thus less prone to faint. Her not eating was a symptom of the underlying problem that actually produced the faint, not a cause.
Three, we seem to be seeing more of this. I do not know what variable exactly underlies the rise and fall of that Conservative Policy Mood graph line. I do not think we are resource restricted enough yet to produce what I am seeing, however, I also know a lot of it is relative. A poor guy with nothing in life can have the same level of stress as a super rich elitist who just failed to get one of a limited run of Ferrari’s. We have had it kind of easy of late.
But whatever it is that drives that curve, it is rising rapidly – I can feel the tension in our society like a giant rubber band about to snap – and I’m sure the rabbits do as well. Beneath that line is rabbit amygdala angst. I think as that line rises, and we approach ever worse economic news, something is happening in rabbit brains. They are on edge, stressed out, and as a result of that, the stress required to hijack them is very minimal. For that reason, we see people blacking out fairly frequently of late. As the collapse unfolds, that will get worse.
Finally, it is worth noting that this is not solely the province of elderly women. After several blackouts, they don’t even let Suge Knight walk into a courtroom anymore. Now they strap him into a sort of half Hannibal-Lector-handcart, half human-wheelbarrow and wheel him up to the defense table so when the judge tells him something bad and he inevitably goes lights out again, they can just wheel him back out without any fuss. Talk about from the ridiculous to the sublime.
That said, Hillary is tailor made for exploiting this in a debate. She is exactly the kind of crazy, glassy eye’d, high-stress, angry, entitled, control-freak, feminist nutjob, who at the smallest slight will fester with impotent rage. Get her in a debate, at a lectern, opposite a jovial Ted Cruz who gets the audience on his side and laughing, and then let him apply a few dogwhistles and a couple of amygdala hijacks while locking eye contact, and this could easily happen to her.
I couldn’t imagine a more entertaining sight.
Hillary seemed sort of resilient in 2000 when Rick Lazio got into her personal space, since she didn’t flip out. Then again, who knows how she’s changed since. Perhaps she was unfazed back then because she was younger (ergo more sturdy), it was a friendly crowd, she had fewer debacles on her resumé, and she knew she was going to win the election.
Watch the video clip a few times. Lazio seems perturbed, and Clinton looks calm. He points his finger & raises his voice. She walks toward him instead of retreating, she smiles, she looks composed.
The trick will be finding a way to reveal this Hillary over & over & over in each debate, until she keels over.
A lot of hijacking triggers are specific, often rooted in childhood. A round-heeled hippie like Hillary would see space invasion by a man differently than say, Sarah Palin.
From what I’ve seen, Hillary explodes when she feels men don’t take her seriously, her status is diminished, or especially if she is conditioned to expect deference, and then people don’t show her the respect and deference she expects. I’d assume it is rooted in a father who perpetually ignored her accomplishments and treated her as an inferior, but I don’t know enough to say that for certain.
How might Ted Cruz go about pushing her buttons on the debate stage while maintaining plausible deniability?
My guess would be to spend the entire debate talking about Bill and what Bill did.
Her big delusion is that she would have accomplished all (or for that matter, ANY) of this WITHOUT having married her way to power, that she somehow did this herself. Rub her nose in the fact that her main accomplishment is “not having the guts to divorce her serial philandering rapist husband” and she’ll implode.
Bill is her glass jaw.
Dogwhistles. Like calling her policies “ugly”. I bet she doesn’t like that word very much.
Brilliant, and the words write themselves. Dated, Old, Bloated, not to be taken seriously, a joke, Ridiculous, past it’s prime, not applicable to this world, lacking the energy, worn-out, disregarded, ignored by the people, disliked by most. You can go on and on.
If she was hypoglycemic and fainted from that, she wouldn’t have just woken up. She would have gone into a coma without a sugar infusion. She just wigged out, like you called it.