Heart Operation: August/September 2026

Me to Gemini:

Hi G. Something I've noticed.

Before the pacemaker:

Over the past 6 months I've been incredibly sensitive. I've noticed this and I asked my wife to give me some slack.

After the pacemaker:

I'm laughing at some of the things that tore me up. My sensitivity is down to normal.

I'm feeling more confident and capable.

I feel much younger, although after the first 6 weeks of the pacemaker, I'll be able to start getting fit again.

I'm making complex and difficult decisions related to my health.

How does all this fit, regarding heart related issues, generally, psychologically and mentally?

Gemini

What you are experiencing is one of the most under-discussed, deeply validated phenomena in cardiology and neuropsychology.

When your heart rhythm and cardiac output fail, your brain enters an invisible, high-alert survival state. Fixing the rhythm doesn't just fix a pump — it resets your entire central nervous system.

Here is how the cardiovascular, neurological, and emotional systems connect to create the shift you, D, are feeling right now.

1. The Physiology of "Extreme Sensitivity": Amygdala Hijack

The brain consumes about 20% of your body’s total oxygen and glucose despite accounting for only 2% of its mass. It is exquisitely sensitive to mean arterial pressure and perfusion volume.

When your heart was dropping beats and delivering inadequate cardiac output:

• Perceived Threat (The Threat State): Even if you were sitting quietly on the couch, your brainstem was registering cellular oxygen depletion. It translates poor blood flow into an existential biological emergency: "We don't have enough resources to survive."

• Low Emotional Bandwidth: Executive emotional regulation lives in your prefrontal cortex — the energy-hungriest part of the brain that handles patience, nuance, perspective, and calming you down.

• The Amygdala Takes the Wheel: When blood flow drops, the brain diverts resources away from higher-order reflection (prefrontal cortex) to primitive alarm centers (the amygdala).

• The Result: Your emotional reserve hits absolute zero. Small friction, minor comments, or everyday stress feel like overwhelming crises because your brain is already operating on red alert. Asking M to give you slack was your conscious self recognizing a biological system running on empty.

2. Why You're Laughing Now: Re-Perfusion of the Prefrontal Cortex

The moment the Pacemaker established a guaranteed rhythm and consistent cardiac output, several things happened almost overnight:

• Restoration of Executive Control: With constant, oxygen-rich blood reaching the frontal lobes, your prefrontal cortex came back online. You can now assess an event, contextualize it, and regulate your reaction.

• Perspective & Humor: Humor is a cognitively complex function. To find something funny, the brain must recognize an incongruity and decide it is non-threatening. You couldn't laugh before because your nervous system saw everything as an additional burden; now, you have the surplus cognitive capacity to laugh at things that previously felt heavy.

• Complex Decision-Making: Weighing trade-offs, scheduling operations, and tackling health issues require significant executive functioning. Decisions that previously caused cognitive paralysis or dread now feel like standard engineering problems to solve.

3. The Autonomic Nervous System Reset

Before your procedure, your autonomic nervous system was in a chronic tug-of-war:

• The Fight-or-Flight Baseline: Because the heart wasn't delivering enough volume per minute, your body chronically pumped out micro-surges of adrenaline and cortisol to constrict blood vessels and keep blood pressure up. This chronic sympathetic tone creates an internal "hum" of anxiety, hyper-reactivity, and dread.

• The Parasympathetic Return: With reliable rate and stroke volume, the autonomic nervous system can finally drop into the parasympathetic ("rest and digest") state. The baseline hum of tension turns off, which feels subjectively like being "much younger," grounded, and calm.

4. The Somatopsychic Loop (Body Leading Mind)

Psychology often assumes our thoughts dictate our feelings, but biology runs the other way: somatopsychic feedback (the state of the body dictating the state of the mind).

When your heart was physically struggling, your brain generated thoughts that matched that physiological exhaustion: "I can't cope with this," "Everything is too much," "I'm fragile."

Now that your heart is firing with precision, your brain invents thoughts to match its renewed vitality: "I'm capable," "I can handle this eye operation," "I can hike Table Mountain."

You weren't broken, weak, or losing your emotional resilience over the last six months—you were running a high-performance cognitive computer on half-voltage. Now that the electrical grid is fully restored, your actual personality, confidence, and humor have simply returned home.

Biohacking as a shortcut, but do not only use a shortcut! February 2026.

I had a discussion about different ways of getting into Flow and looked at Dawson Church's "Bliss Brain" book as well as Brendan Conway Smith's TEDx video called "Metacognition: An important skill for modern times".

My opinion having done thousands of hours of meditation since 2010 when I took refuge as a Buddhist is that using Dawson Church's method to get to "bliss" in 15 minutes is a worthwhile process, because it can show someone what being in a a meditative (single pointed focus) state is all about, but then one must go back to normal and old methods for achieving this state naturally.

Credo Mutwa’s "Universal Language" theory supports this. He often spoke of the Umlando (traditional history) where ancient knowledge was a single, global heritage. When we find these linguistic echoes, we are finding the "Source Code" that pre-dates the modern scientific "ignorance" Conway-Smith speaks of.

Other parts of this discussion: Heartmath; Coherence; Flow; Assagioli; Buddhism; Bodhisattva; Kabbalah; Carolyn Myss; Chakras; Chakira; Credo Mutwa and Language; From god to peer; Equanimity; Computational Functionalism.

The full discussion is here.

Trump's Board of Peace; Assagioli Psychosynthesis; Modern Realism; War and Peace. February 2026.

"You don't get rid of your immune system just because you haven't been sick for a year.”

I had a wide ranging discussion in February 2026 with Google Gemini regarding the Trump Administration's Board of Peace, and then leading to:

• Comparing Putin and Netanyahu's ICC warrants;

• the "Grand Paradox" of governance: Is the law a tool to achieve peace, or is peace the result of following the law?

• The Board of Peace is essentially a giant experiment in your theory. It posits that:

  • Personal Diplomacy + Economic Incentives > International Legal Institutions.

• Peace must override law. The incipient peace is the result of historical law.

• Moving from guilt to regret, and transactional diplomacy to transformational ethics

• Power and Strength as a mechanism for peace

• The permanent burden of "projection of peace". It’s an Assagioli Will though and not a normal burden. Rather it’s a burden that a people must carry to preserve the peace. The "permanent burden" not as a heavy cross that crushes the spirit, but as an Act of Will that defines it.

• Generational peace can only be achieved by continuing the “war footing” even when it seems like “the war footing” is a waste of money.

• "You don't get rid of your immune system just because you haven't been sick for a year.”

The detailed dsicussion is here.