Ep.12 Bootcamp

Chicken Mind Nuggets.

Hosted by Wifey

Chickenmindnuggets.com

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@mindchicken

References for this episode

https://massivesci.com/articles/glia-brain-giving-up-vr-neurons-quitting-astrocytes/

Introduction music graciously provided by

Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Thinking Music" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Show script: (may differ slightly from spoken word)

Your one two.........3 and 4............your one two THREE AND FOUR...

I hated hearing this when we marched. Our RDC’s threw in clever, “I’m a shitbag,” type sayings into the cadences which we had to repeat. Marching down roads proclaiming you’re a shit bag was fucked up then, but funny now. I was in berthing and someone got in trouble for something stupid, so we all had to do jumping jacks, 8 counts, and pushups in our Navy dress blues, you know the ones that make any guy look like a military stud muffin and any female look like a flight attendant? We did that for 45 minutes. Another jerk got in trouble for something and we had to hold a pen out at arms-length between two fingers while reciting the blue jacket’s paragraph of discipline.... for an hour and a half. I got my wisdom teeth removed in this bootcamp and some dumbass got in trouble for something and we all had to work out for 45 minutes again. This time I was bleeding all over myself from my wisdom teeth removal while my RDC’s watched blood drip down my white shirt and onto the floor. They didn’t care, but they cared enough that if I passed out, I would go to the doctor then probably get yelled at. Getting yelled at is a caring thing in the military....at least that is what I was indoctrinated to believe.

Bootcamp will tear you down and that’s exactly what it is supposed to do. You go in as you, but YOU are standing in a silent line with everyone else until you are led to a weird dark room where you get naked and change with the other YOU’s into fucked up newbie gear, and then you are led, and marched, and yelled at, and controlled, and verbally beaten, and emotionally beaten, and marched into something that gives up and just listens. It’s sometimes easier to do what your told right? If you have no choice, and you can’t fight back, you give up. That’s what boot camp wants you to do.

You can’t give up mid bootcamp. You’re going to get back on that track and run your 45-minute sustained mile when you are hurting so bad you would rather cut your arm off. You’re going to march and say cadences which you don’t believe in for weeks. You’re going to eat bad food, shower with strangers, wake up several times a night to stand a door watch, and start to believe that you are a piece of shit, and do it until you graduate.

The wanting to give up is an animalistic instinct that we have in order to conserve energy for vital processes. If we have a goal, we follow through, until we don’t, because we give up if we don’t see our efforts leading towards our outcome. Researchers used zebra fish to manipulate their environment to make them believe that their goal of swimming was unachievable by putting them in a VR type world where they believed they were swimming backwards, therefore never getting anywhere. I HATE animal testing, and I’m cringing with you, but just bear with me. The researchers used a virtual reality behavioral assembly to monitor paralyzed fish’s motor output using electrophysiology and found that when a fish believes it is swimming normal, its neural output shows normal activity. However, if the fish believes it is not swimming, it will put forth a ton of effort and then give up. The giving up is what the researchers called futility induced passivity. The fish’s brain activity showed that they went active, then passive, then active, just like they kept trying and then giving up. The non-neuronal cells called glia in the central nervous system which are little star shaped cells that were once thought of as not important actually help to control the neurotransmitters and synapses in the brain. The astrocytes, a type of glia, in these fish, activate right before the fish was about to give up. So right before the fish said, “fuck it, I’m not swimming,” their little glia spiked in activation, then futility induced passivity kicked in.

In bootcamp, you can’t run away, actually you can but you’re going to get into a ton of trouble for it. You generally choose to go to bootcamp and once you’re in, you pretty much want out. You see the final outcome and know that it is worth it, but any resistance you have is met with hostility and that breaking down will eventually get you to say, “fuck it, I’m not swimming,” and switch you into futility induced passivity mode. Think if all of the fish of a colony thought for themselves and each decid...