Drugs in the verse.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

It seems obvious to me that Miranda can't be River's only demon. She didn't even seem to be aware of Miranda underneath all the other chaos and trauma until the memory was accidentally brought out when she was triggered. I see most of River's behaviour, through the series, as stemming from her trauma endured at the Academy. After all, it's what she has recurring nightmares and psychotic hallucinations about.

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The Miranda secret is the reason Hands of Blue and Operative are after her, right? so when she is being chased, and trying to evade, it is becuase of her subconscious knowledge of Miranda, right? Her coming into contact (merely telepathically) with Reavers on a regular basis also triggers in her subconscious the knowledge of their origin, their cause, that they are the original innocent victims of the Alliance, right? Most of her "traumatic scenes" in the series result from her knowledge of Miranda, and she keeps being reminded of this, albeit not consciously. I'm not sure your assertion that Miranda does not explain practically all of her episodes holds water.
Once the Miranda secret is out, she can handle the Reavers on a conscious level, and she has fuller understanding of the Alliance's pursuit of her, correct?
You discount her Institute flashbacks as just being trauma, but did you catch the mini-inserts of the groups of "doctors" or others present in her Institute recalls? I did not really take note of them until reading the scripts. She is recalling the times when "key members of Parliament" were present, which is when she absorbed the Miranda knowledge. Once Miranda is open, she no longer must struggle to suppress this part of her psyche.
The Miranda knowledge and the weapons/combat knowledge are a package deal - subverting the whole package allows her to pretend to be normal, but intentionally triggering the combat weapon also allows the Miranda data to fall out, as well as any other institute-derived knowledge. Supposedly males are able to better compartmentalize different types or applications of data or training, but supposedly females cannot compartmentalize as well, all the data from a certain period is glued together, interwoven too much to allow only one partition to be extracted.

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I also do think River was more stable, happy, and lucid after Ariel, right up through her triggering in the movie. I think the drugs may have helped her handle her scary monsters, just long enough that the light could shine through now and then. And a few moments of relief/comfort/fun/happiness can be very, very important when you're dealing with post-traumatic stress, because PTSD goes hand-in-hand with depression, and that can lead to suicidal thoughts.

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Stable, happy, lucid like the cargo bay in OiS?

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Some pretty good points in that speech, Mangolo. Background noise was a little distracting, but the talking was interesting.

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
I had thought that the human brain's receptors for natural dopamine held a similar-formed bonding with a component of chocolate, thus making chocolate the substitute and simulation for health and pleasure - also an opiate had another similar bonding formation.

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I think it also ups production of serotonin, I could be remembering wrong. Theobromine and flavanols are also theorized to lower blood pressure.

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
The Miranda secret is the reason Hands of Blue and Operative are after her, right?

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And the Operative states that "judging from her deteriorating mental state" he and the doctor are better off not knowing what secrets River may have gleaned. The script has a line that was cut from the movie, too: "It has come to our attention that River became much more unstable, much more... disturbed, after you showed her off to Parliament." Miranda may not have been the only, but it was a biggie.

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Once the Miranda secret is out, she can handle the Reavers on a conscious level, and she has fuller understanding of the Alliance's pursuit of her, correct?

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Exactly. She can face those nightmares in the daylight, so to speak.

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The Miranda knowledge and the weapons/combat knowledge are a package deal - subverting the whole package allows her to pretend to be normal, but intentionally triggering the combat weapon also allows the Miranda data to fall out, as well as any other institute-derived knowledge. Supposedly males are able to better compartmentalize different types or applications of data or training, but supposedly females cannot compartmentalize as well, all the data from a certain period is glued together, interwoven too much to allow only one partition to be extracted.

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That... explains a lot. I never knew that. Cool, learning new things.
Can men really extract one 'partition' of an experience?

[/sig]

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Originally posted by PhoenixRose:


And the Operative states that "judging from her deteriorating mental state" he and the doctor are better off not knowing what secrets River may have gleaned. The script has a line that was cut from the movie, too: "It has come to our attention that River became much more unstable, much more... disturbed, after you showed her off to Parliament." Miranda may not have been the only, but it was a biggie.

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Without the Miranda portion, the rest of the psych problems may have been resolved once removed from the stressful, constant Institute setting and indoctrination. Once escaped, these may have been easily dealt with - only the constant pressure of the Institute's "training" regiment maintained the problem, which they NEEDED to maintain to build on the established regiment of training. Perhaps only the Miranda segment of horrors was the block from which she could not escape, could not work around. She, and even Simon, had not apparently ever met Reavers, so learning of it in mere academic setting was not the same "filing away" process conducive to using it when abruptly encountering them in real life.

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The Miranda knowledge and the weapons/combat knowledge are a package deal - subverting the whole package allows her to pretend to be normal, but intentionally triggering the combat weapon also allows the Miranda data to fall out, as well as any other institute-derived knowledge. Supposedly males are able to better compartmentalize different types or applications of data or training, but supposedly females cannot compartmentalize as well, all the data from a certain period is glued together, interwoven too much to allow only one partition to be extracted.

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That... explains a lot. I never knew that. Cool, learning new things.
Can men really extract one 'partition' of an experience?

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I was largely referring to the compartmentalization capabilites of men and women - there have been many studies of the subject.
I am told I have vast capabilities of compartmentalization, allowing great concentration and focus for deep thought (or used to anyway). As a guy, i can understand this part of the study well.
From much reading of the subject, I try to comprehend how the women view and recall the same information differently, but obviously I may never fully understand it.

Supposedly women have more interconnectivity among their experiences, thoughts, etc. When women "multi-task", they merely share their concentration among all the things they are doing, and think they are doing all tasks very well. Men are more able to "multi-task" by selecting specific functions they will chose to do, focusing on those tasks, delaying which are not as important at the instant, and successfully ignoring all else which do not pertain at the greatest level of need.

Consider driving a car. Many things can degrade from the optimal performance of operating a motor vehicle. Radio, conversation, road noise, vehicle noise, phone or bluetooth conversation, horns, traffic noises are audio input, and road view, dashboard instruments, environmental landscape, lights, flashers, signs, symbols are visual input, plus physical input of g-forces, brake feel, steering wheel feel/feedback, arm/leg stress & force & feedback, all contribute to the peformance of operating the motor vehicle. A woman might choose to flit from one facet of the experience to another, multi-tasking while thinking she is maintaining more than one converstaion and still driving safely - even if she causes an accident. A man may try to supress, ignore, or eliminate specific facets of the experience to allow adequate focusing on the required tasks at hand - and if involved in an accident must understand how many more facets needed to be addressed by suppression to have avoided the accident.
The term used is "task attention saturation" - paying attention to too many things until a critical task is compromised.
If you had any understanding of the Clinton coverup of the

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It's not ALL the time, remember when just after the scene in War Stories when she is happy, how she quickly regresses to being incoherent and upset again?

But she's able to play with Kaylee, in the Message the crew feels she's stable enough to wander the space station without Simon looking over her shoulder constantly, in Heart of Gold she helps with the labour (though we don't know how much), and in Objects in Space, after her brain took a little walk and she hallucinated about autumn, she pulled together and formulated a plan to get Early off their ship. I can pinpoint a lot more moments where she looks and behaves stable and happy after Ariel than I can before.

As for Miranda being in her traumatic flashbacks during the series, actually, no, I don't see that. The one flashback I recall is her in a darkened room in the experiment chair, hooked up to wires and a probe heading for her head, and we don't see anyone around her. That tells me her trauma is the whole government scientists hurting her thing as opposed to Miranda. Trauma occurs as a fear of or harm actually being done to oneself or to others, or as intense feelings of fear and helplessness, not as a side effect of being exposed to secrets. Miranda is not what traumatized her.

Do Reavers remember what they are? Somehow I doubt it. And River seems less like she's able to read their memories and more like she's overwhelmed by the rage and aggression, not because she's remembering Miranda, which should have no personal psychological impact on her.

I hate broadly generalizing psychological studies that try to claim they are the irrefutable truth for EVERY individual in a population. Those studies speak ONLY in percentages (that is, if they're any good, and not merely the products of the biases of the experimenters). And they shouldn't ever be USED as case-by-case commentary because they're NOT case-by-case examples!

However, I don't disagree that triggering her weapon training also triggered her memories of Miranda, likely BECAUSE it was during weapons training that the members of Parliament observed her.

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
I should stop before this sounds like a rant.

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Oh no worries, if you can't rant here, you can't rant anywhere.

I pretty much agree with you on most of that - it is absolutly shocking and disgusting what the government passes for use, not only in food for humans, but also food for the animals and plants that we'll eventually eat - i mean who thinks 'yeah, lets feed animals their minced up relatives, throw in a cocktail of drugs to alter their natural growth patterns in ways we have no idea about - won't it be great!'

Meanwhile the E.U is demanding the (expensive, time consuming and largely illogical) testing of thousands of herb and plant based remedies, despite the fact that we already know about them because we've been using them for centuries and the properties and contraindications can be found on ANY wafty website.

And whereas i'm dubious of need to cut out some of the foods they say to, i really can't tolerate smoking or drug use while pregnant (a while ago there was a group story thread and drinking while up the duff was the worst self destructive behaviour i could think of for a character).
It gets to the point where i do think that women who refuse to give up smoking or go into rehab when they are pregnant or have a child in the house should be fined or even maybe prosecuted for abuse. Beat a child and you (should) get put away, give them a life long health issue that comprimises their quality of life and costs everyone else millions in medical care? Apparently that a human right.

I'm also astonished at the reliance on painkillers. I do take them - way more than i'd like to, but way less than i'm told too.
I've done everything i can to get the doctors to investigate headaches and their best answer is take pills, pills and more pills. I pushed to the point where i managed to get scans to look at my sinuses to see if there was a problem there, when the scans came back clear the doctor shrugged, told me to take pills and all but told me to f*** off so he could get some paying patients in. Mean while i'm still getting headaches that come on sometimes simply by bending forward.

Ranting is good.

But, i think i have seriously over shot my 'personal sob story' quota so i'm going to butt out now.

x

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And that sounds like a blood pressure issue to me. You ever get dizzy, bending over? Is your headache more of a poundy thing? Do you see spots?

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Huh. Well, and for the movie, there is a bit of disconnect between it and the series. Personally, I never saw any hints of Miranda in Firefly. I believe Joss did have something about Miranda planned, maybe for the second or third season, and in the movie he had to make some jumps to get there.

I guess this situation with Miranda being the sole cause of River's disturbance is the same problem I have with how Joss has claimed since the movie that River is fully cured now after having gotten the Miranda secret out of her. I just don't see how it's possible. Her brain was cut into and I just see general evidence of abuse. And the way her brain was cut into would make it even harder for her to deal with the abuse.

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