HikiCulture: A Forum for Reclusive People & Hikikomori (Site Blog)

Poll: What’s the longest you’ve gone without work (since turning 18)?

February 1, 2010 by Hikikomori

Click here to take poll.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged anxiety, Employment, hikikomori, hire, Jobs, longest, pay, poll, seeking, Unemployment, without work, Work | Leave a Comment »

Remy Shand: A Musician Gone Hikikomori?

January 18, 2010 by Hikikomori

Remy Shand is a soul singer from Winnipeg, MB, Canada (very close to where I live – my ISP is from there) who put out a successful album on Motown back in the early 2000's.

Since 2003, his whereabouts have been unknown. I find it strange because the sole album he put out The Way I Feel was successful here, in the USA and elsewhere. He must be living a highly reclusive lifestyle since nobody knows where he's living or what he's been doing with his life for the past 6 1/2 years or longer. He's not a massive celebrity, but he's successful enough that people should know where he's living, etc.

I find this odd. What do you people think he's doing with his life?

I just read on his Wikipedia page that he got divorced last year, so someone must know about his whereabouts. I remember reading his Wikipedia page last year; there was no info like this available.

Here's his most famous song Take a Message:

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged celebrity, hikikomori, isolation, motown, musician, recluse, reclusive, remy shand, shut-in, soul, winnipeg | Leave a Comment »

Group Hug Forum

January 16, 2010 by Hikikomori

I recently discovered a forum called Group Hug Forum. It's a place for general friendly discussion.

The users are friendly and the community has an overall good feel to it.

Consider signing up. It'll be a shame if the community dies.

Click here to visit the board.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged discussion, board, forums, boards, phpBB, chat, community, group hug forum, friendly, general, the place to be | Leave a Comment »

Foro Hiki: Un Foro Para Hikikomoris, NEETs, y Solitarios (A Spanish Hikikomori Forum)

January 15, 2010 by Hikikomori

There's a new hikikomori forum for Spanish speakers called "Foro Hiki". The forum was created by the HikiCulture member Hitori.

If you speak Spanish, be sure to check the site out.

Click here to visit Foro Hiki.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged board, espagnol, foro hiki, forum, hiki, hikikomori, hitori, neet, prophpbb, solitarios, spanish | Leave a Comment »

WrongBooger?

January 14, 2010 by Hikikomori

I sure got a laugh from this post on WrongPlanet.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged asperger's, autism, board, booger, forum, post, wrong planet, wrongbooger, wrongplanet, zer0netgain | Leave a Comment »

“Research Adds to Evidence That Autism is a Brain ‘Connectivity’ Disorder”

January 14, 2010 by Hikikomori

Studying a rare disorder known as tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), researchers at Children's Hospital Boston add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that autism spectrum disorders, which affect 25 to 50 percent of TSC patients, result from a miswiring of connections in the developing brain, leading to improper information flow. The finding may also help explain why many people with TSC have seizures and intellectual disabilities. Findings were published online in Nature Neuroscience on January 10.

TSC causes benign tumors throughout the body, including the brain. But patients with TSC may have autism, epilepsy or intellectual disabilities even in the absence of these growths. Now, researchers led by Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, of Children's Department of Neurology, provide evidence that mutations in one of the TSC's causative genes, known as TSC2, prevent growing nerve fibers (axons) from finding their proper destinations in the developing brain.

Studying a well-characterized axon route – between the eye's retina and the visual area of the brain – Sahin and colleagues showed that when mouse neurons were deficient in TSC2, their axons failed to land in the right places. Further investigation showed that the axons' tips, known as "growth cones," did not respond to navigation cues from a group of molecules called ephrins. "Normally ephrins cause growth cones to collapse in neurons, but in tuberous sclerosis the axons don't heed these repulsive cues, so keep growing," says Sahin, the study's senior investigator.

Additional experiments indicated that the loss of responsiveness to ephrin signals resulted from activation of a molecular pathway called mTOR, whose activity increased when neurons were deficient in TSC2. Axon tracing in the mice showed that many axons originating in the retina were not mapping to the expected part of the brain.

Although the study looked only at retinal connections to the brain, the researchers believe their findings may have general relevance for the organization of the developing brain. Scientists speculate that in autism, wiring may be abnormal in the areas of the brain involved in social cognition.

"People have started to look at autism as a developmental disconnection syndrome – there are either too many connections or too few connections between different parts of the brain," says Sahin. "In the mouse models, we're seeing an exuberance of connections, consistent with the idea that autism may involve a sensory overload, and/or a lack of filtering of information."

Sahin hopes that the brain's miswiring can be corrected by drugs targeting the molecular pathways that cause it. The mTOR pathway is emerging as central to various kinds of axon abnormalities, and drugs inhibiting mTOR has already been approved by the FDA. For example, one mTOR inhibitor, rapamycin, is currently used mainly to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients, and Sahin plans to launch a clinical trial of a rapamycin-like drug in approximately 50 patients with TSC later this year, to see if the drug improves neurocognition, autism and seizures.

In 2008, Sahin and colleagues published related research in Genes & Development showing that when TSC1 and TSC2 are inactivated, brain cells grow more than one axon – an abnormal configuration that exacerbates abnormal brain connectivity. The mTOR pathway was, again, shown to be involved, and when it was inhibited with rapamycin, neurons grew normally, sprouting just one axon.

Supporting the mouse data, a study by Sahin and his colleague Simon Warfield, PhD, in the Computational Radiology Laboratory at Children's, examined the brains of 10 patients with TSC, 7 of whom also had autism or developmental delay, and 6 unaffected controls. Using an advanced kind of MRI imaging called diffusion tensor imaging, they documented disorganized and structurally abnormal tracts of axons in the TSC group, particularly in the visual and social cognition areas of the brain (see image). The axons also were poorly myelinated – their fatty coating, which helps axons conduct electrical signals, was compromised. (In other studies, done in collaboration with David Kwiatkowski at Brigham and Women's Hospital, giving rapamycin normalized myelination in mice.)

Sahin has also been studying additional genes previously found to be deleted or duplicated in patients with autism, and finding that deletion of some of them causes neurons to produce multiple axons – an abnormality that, again, appears to be reversed with rapamycin.

"Many of the genes implicated in autism may possibly converge on a few common pathways controlling the wiring of nerve cells," says Sahin. "Rare genetic disorders like TSC are providing us with vital clues about brain mechanisms leading to autism spectrum disorders. Understanding the neurobiology of these disorders is likely to lead to new treatment options not only for TSC patients, but also for patients with other neurodevelopmental diseases caused by defective myelination and connectivity, such as autism, epilepsy and intellectual disability."