Is Hillary Having Seizures, Due To Amygdala Insufficiency?

There is a lot of buzz about this video:

This was not a traditional grand mal seizure, but rather more of an involuntary tic in response to the startle produced by all of the reporters suddenly barking questions at her at once. At Free Republic, a neurologist speculated it was an absence seizure, though it might be something more specific to Hillary’s amygdala deficiency, rather than a commonly diagnosed malady.

[ UPDATE: This would appear to fit the diagnostic criteria for “Startle Epilepsy.” ]

To examine it, turn off the sound so your amygdala can focus on her movements, and watch it full screen. There are two rounds of head jerking. My impression is that the first was not voluntary, and reflected a genuine tic/seizure in response to a startle response, which she tried to cover/control with a second round of humorous and playful head jerking, to keep it from looking as unusual as it would have if she had tried to ignore it.

Notice how controlled and aggressive the first round of jerking is, and how there is so little counter-movement of her whole body. Basically just a few neck muscles contracted repeatedly, moving her head in one plane, forward and back, as her body stayed static. Then it stopped.

The second burst of movement was her attempt to make the first look like a voluntary attempt at comedy, and cover up the tic. Notice how it is slower, more hap-hazard, more gentle, and how she slowly rolls her entire body in one direction, as she more gently rolls her head in the other, before rocking her head from side to side slowly. In the second round, she did not jerk her head along a single axis and stop, but rather gently rolled it along in a circular fashion, before gently rocking it from side to side. It was a totally different movement.

A sign it was something serious is the fact that Hillary immediately ceases answering questions, holds up the cold drink to divert attention, and her handler immediately moves out of the left side of the frame saying, “All Right…” to cut everyone off as he grabs her shoulder and spirits her away. Her handlers know there is some sort of problem, and when it hits she needs to be evacuated quickly.

Now, I have said for a while that I see things in Hillary’s mannerisms that indicate to me an extraordinarily deficient amygdala. I strongly suspect that her famous fall was in fact due to a brain shutdown triggered by a decently sized amygdala hijack from something related to the Benghazi scandal. She was admitted to the hospital right around the time Issa delivered a documents request.

My own Narcissist, Bob, had among the weakest amygdalae I have ever seen, so my observations of him inform much of my practical understanding of the disorder. There are two main things he taught me, that I believe are applicable here. One is that the amygdala can be overloaded, to the point of shutting down entirely and taking the brain’s function down with it.

The second is that such an overloading appears to be related to a structural and physical inability to supply sufficient blood to the structure, to fuel it’s operations with glucose and/or oxygen. Perhaps the amygdala is so excitable that a normal vascular structure can’t keep it fueled under load, or perhaps an insufficient vascular structure renders the amygdala vulnerable to exhaustion, or perhaps it is a combination of factors. Regardless, in such cases I suspect the amygdala is like a muscle which has never had sufficient cardiovascular training, and as a result it shuts down after only the most minimal use.

I’m going to post a few comments here from Free Republic’s discussion of the subject, because I have mentioned these themes before, but I want you to see others are saying the same things:

Possibly a “petit mal” seizure. I’ve had two happen to people standing right next to me. The head jerking is the clue…

She held up her iced coffee drink as if that was the reason. Maybe a seizure triggered by brain freeze from drinking something cold?…

I see nervous disorder and diabetic jumpiness… My mom was just like this…

I work with a guy who has the same thing. His head will bobble like a doll when he has to talk and is stressed. Early Parkinson’s onset according to him… [ed. note – Parkinson’s is an immunologically mediated dopamine deficiency]

watch the reporter about 13 seconds in— she asks hillary if she is ok.. you can read her words…

If anything it would be stimulus-sensitive myoclonus. “It is triggered by a variety of external events, including noise, movement, and light. Surprise may increase the sensitivity of the individual…” [ed. note – sudden noise, movement, light, and surprise are all amygdala stimulants, and Hillary was under the lights of the cameras, with phones invading her space, as the reporter on the left locked eye contact, and suddenly she was hit with surprise and noise.]

So Hillary may have restricted blood flow to the brain mildly with an iced drink. Then she was placed under the mild amygdala strain of the interview, invasion of space and cameras. Once her amygdala was so loaded, she experienced a startle stimuli, involving noise, suddenness, and surprise which startled her, surged her amygdala into action, and triggered what appears to be a minor series of uncontrolled muscle spasms.

So how could Trump use this? There are two major ways, the white hat methods, and the black hat methods. White hat would be to simply focus on triggering her amygdala in debate. These stimuli would be out-grouping, violations of expectation, splitting focus (carving the attentional pie), denigrations of stature, boxing in to prevent a response, uncomfortable physical contact, invasion of space, uncomfortable eye contact, still facing, slamming a table that both are sitting at for emphasis unexpectedly, uncomfortable imagery such as mortal salience, relative inferiority, envy, and unfairness (like Obama unfairly taking her ability to easily win the Presidency), conflict stimuli such as aggressive and demeaning body language, presentation of sad, fearful, or angering thoughts, talking quickly and sharply, use of hand gestures while speaking to distract attention, and so on.

These will all light up and load the amygdala under the already stressful milieu of a debate. Trigger her enough consistently, and box her in so she cannot relieve the stress with an outburst, and you would stand a good chance of triggering bizarre neurological symptoms that you could exploit, to argue she is unfit for office.

The black hat methods to trigger her amygdala would be more along the lines of stuff Roger Stone would do. This would involve organizing the audience to take pictures with smart phones at unexpected times, just as Hillary looked at them, to hit her with sudden and unnerving flashes of light. Knowing Stone, he would probably alter the cameras with flash strobes that were fifty or a hundred times as bright and more focused, to really hit the unexpected and extreme buttons. Sudden and unexpected sharp outbursts of organized applause and cheering could also hit the loud noise and surprise buttons. Weird movements in the crowd, explicit hand gestures, uncomfortable eye contact and still facing by the audience, and other things done by the crowd that are designed to split Hillary’s focus as she is trying to concentrate, would also trigger and overload her amygdala. Few things can trigger the amygdala of a focused person like splitting their focus with some seemingly meaningless stimulus as they try to concentrate on something they see as important.

However all of that would probably be superfluous anyway. Hillary is a leftist with a severely atrophied amygdala, that may have been damaged even further by a stroke, heading into a Presidential contest against a candidate who is a master of the amygdala trigger.

I really see no way this can end well for her. Hospitalization due to mental breakdown is at least a 50-50 possibility before November comes around, especially given how she has to bottle up the rage-aholic inside, and pretend to be happy all the time.

What a great time to be into politics.