the game of the name

For the first time ever, Psychology Today contains a kind of awesome article. Here, a few highlights from the magazine's report on trends in baby-naming:

• "The current crop of preschoolers includes a few Uniques…" Sad paradox.
  
• "New parents rattle off diminutives and acronyms as if reciting scales. 'I wanted a truly awesome, convertible name that could collapse into a normal name. Something like Charles Henry Underhill Grisham Sernovitz, because CHUGS would be a great college nickname,' says Andy Sernovitz, 33, whose son Charles Darwin Grisham Sernovitz was born last November." 1. CHUGS is not a normal name. 2. If names are fate, what assholic parent gives the gift of Rush & liver failure?
  
• "'I hated my name when I was a kid,' Wven (pronounced you-vin) Villegas, 29, says. 'I stood out for all the wrong reasons. But I decided that if my name wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, then I wouldn’t be the same, either. Now I love my name so much that I had it tattooed on my right arm.'" That's the arm most people use for masturbation, right? (And I thought tattoos of ex-es were bad news.)
  
• Here's your Best American Short Story entry, in a nutshell: "Nakazawa cites the cautionary tale of a young woman who was adopted from China by a white American couple who gave her a Chinese-sounding name. As a teenager, the girl began researching her heritage and discovered her name was not, in fact, Chinese. She was devastated."
  
• "Michael Mercer, an industrial psychologist and co-author of Spontaneous Optimism, recalls a former co-worker who had interpersonal and legal problems: 'She changed her name to Honore, and it was her way of mutating from someone who goofed things up to someone who is honorable.'" Obviously, Spontaneous Optimism can have consequences.

Related: The most popular baby names from 2003 are now available at the Social Security Administration's website. Meanwhile, BabyNames.com irresponsibly alerts expecting parents to the possibility of naming their new arrivals after such LOTR characters as Fangorn, Farmer Maggot, and Wormtongue. (Last two links via Maud.)

another blog

I'm finally feeling brave enough to link to my newest blog, simply called Another. Initially, it was meant to be a diary, a dumping grounds for posts that felt too personal and self-indulgent to inflict on this Cup's readership. But the new blog changed genres and became something more specific when I realized that the only posts I'm hesitant to put here are the ones dealing with depression; and so, Another became a "literary" mental health blog, focusing on the relationship between writing and depression, but also linking to abstracts of clinical studies, essays about therapy, and reviews of recent and relevent books.

Some posts that may (or may not) appeal to this Cup's readers include

• a long essay about the rhetoric we use when linking creativity and mental illness. The essay is partly a response to the latest spate of articles on James Kaufman's silly paper, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young."
  
• an account of my changing relationship to writing, titled I Married Language (And Now She Doesn't Want to Fuck Me).
  
• an excerpt from Chase Twichell’s essay, “Toys in the Attic: An Ars Poetica Under the Influence,” in which Twichell discusses the subtle effects that depression and anti-depressants can have on the writing process.
  
• a series of reflections on memory, memoir, and emotion. ("When I write about the past, I don't preserve it; I lose it; I experience autobiography as sacrifice.")

Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things you'd like to.

Psychology Today, drawing on the results of a new survey on shyness, discusses solutions for shyness, and technology's ability to exacerbate it.

The irony of a World Wide Web packed with endless amounts of information is that it can also be isolating. As individuals head to their own favorite bookmarked sites, they cut out all the disagreement of the world and reinforce their own narrow perspective, potentially leading to alienation, disenfranchisement and intolerance for people who are different.

In addition, the shy are more vulnerable to instant intimacy because of their lack of social know-how. Normally, relationships progress by way of a reasonably paced flow of self-disclosure that is reciprocal in nature. A disclosure process that moves too quickly--and computer anonymity removes the stigma of getting sexually explicit--doesn't just destroy courtship; it is a reliable sign of maladjustment. Shy people tend either to reveal information about themselves too quickly, or hold back and move too slowly.

(Do the shy always have a lack of "social know-how"? I've encountered many extroverted loners: friendly, empathic, and witty in conversation, but "shy" by self-description. I'm thinking of my mother, a good friend, and that friend's good friend, and some others, almost all women: they're charming in social situations, but rarely enter them, disliking groups or preferring a private or solitary lifestyle. The article's too quick to conflate shyness with slow or stunted social development, and assumes that shyness expresses itself in all new social experiences, rather than expressing itself under specific circumstances or in a person's priorities.)
link via quasimeta

whenever a word has two possible meanings,

we're always likely to place emphasis on the unintended one.

And by we, I mean I. Going back to that stinky old issue of Marie Claire for a moment: it did have one feature I found enlightening. Identical photos of a proportional and blonde size-14 model were put on two billboards -- one billboard reading, "I think I'm sexy. Do you?" and the other, "I think I'm fat. Do you?" My response to that last question was, "God no, you're beautiful." And to the first: "Shut up, you whore." Or, since my response was firmly pre-verbal, let's say it was more like, "Not if you're the type of person who insists so." Apparently, I responded "incorrectly" to both questions. Marie Claire was trying to make a point about how our self-conception affects the way others view us -- a point confirmed by the men and women who passed by the billboards and consented to the survey. So, either the interpersonal variable of a Marie Claire intern waving a pledge-style clipboard can affect passers-by's honesty, or (or also, "and") I have a devious mind, always ready to overshoot the mark and drive round back to it for the sake of the best view. (The image that metaphor brings to mind, though, evokes something more "stubborn" than "deviant." I see a family on vacation, and everyone but the father willing to settle for the guide book-listed sights. But the father, assuming an air of vigour that grows larger with each of their complaints, always parks the car on a lonely, sloped dirt road and forces them to hike through thorn-bush for the less crowded, hence "more authentic," view.)

I always love illustrative quotes.

"Often women are characterised as being very co-operative, very kind-hearted and not competing directly," Fisher told New Scientist. "But there's been a fair bit of work on how women are indirectly aggressive."

For example, she says: "Rather than saying 'I'm going to beat that woman up because she looked at you', it's 'Oh my goodness, look how fat her ankles are'!"

That's what I say, too, whenever I catch elderly, female Russian immigrants giving Sam the eye.

if you were stranded on a desert island with a sufferer of "an unusual neurological state," which state would it be?

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome: "Damage to the front of the temporal lobe and the amygdala just below it can result in the strange condition called Kluver-Bucy Syndrome. Classically, the person will try to put anything to hand into their mouths and typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it. A classic example is of the unfortunate chap arrested whilst attempting to have sex with the pavement. Effectively, it is the 'what' pathway that is damaged with regards to foodstuff and sexual partner. As Ramachandran puts it, 'they are not hypersexual, just indiscriminate.'"

Cotard's Syndrome: "Named after a French psychiatrist Jules Cotard, this syndrome is characterized by the patient believing that he is dead, a walking corpse. This 'delusion' is usually expanded to the degree that the patient might claim that he can smell his own rotting flesh and feel worms crawling through his skin."

Capgras' Syndrome: "Brilliantly described by Ramachandran, Capgras' syndrome is another neurological syndrome that is often mistaken for insanity. The Capgras' patient will typically identify people close to them as being imposters - identical in every possible way, but identical replicas. Classically, the patient will accept living with these imposters but will secretly 'know' that they are not the people they claim to be."

---From A Collection of Unusual Neurological States, found via Quiddity

ok.

"Children have long suspected it, and now research confirms it: homework is a waste of time."

on the mind: the comforts of hypochondria

DISCUSSED: comfort reading, middle school narcissism, hypochondria, hypergraphia in The Midnight Disease, ex-boyfriends' mental issues, the mind/body divide

Earlier this week, some of my favorite bloggers posted lists of their top "comfort reads." Given the rate at which I buy books, three times the rate at which I read them, I rarely allow myself to revisit old books; so, I don't have "comfort books" so much as I have a "comfort genre."
That genre: psychological, psychiatric, or neurological studies of writers and the writing process. I first started reading these books when I was thirteen, and I can track changes in my personality by my choices within the genre.

At first, I read psychological profiles of "geniuses"; my favorite book at the time sought to find the traits or common life experiences of "geniuses," and because, at thirteen, I assumed my everday misery fostered or foreshadowed great intellect, I littered the pages with checkmarks and memorized all the indicators of genius that I could apply to myself: sickly, near-sighted, oldest or only child, Jewish, upper middle class, etc.

Over time, my reading choices changed. They stopped reflecting vain optimism, and, in college, began reflecting my losing battle with depression. For months at a time, I couldn't concentrate on anything outside myself; sometimes, I characterized this inability as a fear that, if I lost myself in a book, the losing would be literal. I could, however, read writers' autobiographies of depression, because they felt autobiographical to me, too, and my attention didn't have to wander back to my life, to make sure my life was still there.

If my readings first reflected narcissism, and then depression, they currently reflect hypochondria. The question while reading is, again and again, "Is that me?" But the inflection changes: from me in narcissism, is in depression, to that in hypochondria.

It might be strange to call books that inspire, or are fueled by, hypochondria "comforting." But the idea that there can be something out there which explains (and, in a sense, forgives or absolves) my lifestyle (both its invisible and visible components) is very comforting. It would be like locking a manifestation of a Platonic Idea to the Idea itself; a unified diagnosis for previously incoherent symptoms implies a deep sense of order to things, and this order could possibly extend to a cure. For me, hypochondria is not about worrying, but hoping.

But as first-year med students, and Woody Allen's doctors, can attest: hypochondria almost never leads to a correct diagnosis. Last month, I read a book about schizophrenic authors; even I couldn't take that self-diagnosis seriously. Now, I'm reading the much-blogged-about book, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice W. Flaherty. The book introduced the word "hypergraphia" into the blogosphere; and, in its early chapters, The Midnight Disease lays out the medical problems that can cause hypergraphia. One such problem is temporal lobe epilepsy, experienced by Dostoevsky and Flaubert (and possibly: Tennyson, Poe, Byron, Pascal, Moliere, Dante, and Petrarch). Flaherty writes,

Although the personalities of people with temporal lobe epilepsy vary, and in most cases patients are impossible to distinguish from the rest of the world, some exhibit a cluster of five personality traits often called the Geschwind syndrome: hypergraphia; a deepened emotional life sometimes described as hyperphilosophical or hyperreligious (a squishy category ranging from attending mass twice a day to believing oneself to be the Buddha); emotional volatility, including aggressive outbursts; altered sexuality (usually decreased sexual activity); and overinclusiveness, an extreme talkativeness caused by excessive attention to detail.

Fortunately, I don't have "the Geschwind syndrome." Unfortunately, in the past I've chosen boyfriends who do. And that, like an epileptic's EEG spikes, might also "look" like something. Flaherty continues,

The Geschwind syndrome's constellation of personality traits is one of the clearest examples of a well-defined brain state causing high-level personality changes. It may also have implications for the personalities of some people without epilepsy. Those with the same set of Geschwind syndrome personality traits, but without temporal lobe epilepsy, still have altered temporal lobe activity, even though they do not have outright seizures. So there seems to be a spectrum of temporal lobe activities and of personality changes that they cause.

Obviously, each subjective experience could "look" like something, given the right brain-monitoring equipment. But, what if personality could not just be a cluster of traits, but an implicit diagnosis of brain activity? If certain brain activities are more likely to occur together, we could begin to talk about "personality" like we do illness; traits would become like symptoms, grouped and verified by diagnosis.

Under the influence of hypochondria, we turn "traits" into "symptoms." hypochondria resists postmodernism's privileging of the signifier over the signified. It insists on looking for a deep structure or (metaphorically, staying on a vertical axis) a high-level ordering. Symptoms, unlike traits, imply and call for a diagnosis; without a diagnosis or the possibility of one, symptoms are only, simply, traits.

With personality tests, we already see traits being turned into symptoms. Their popularity relies on something like hypochondria, but hypochondria divorced from illness. Personality types confirmed by neorologists, though, might have more credibility than types confirmed by Jungians. But, more importantly, the idea of personality as brain activity might help undermine the mind/body distinction and shorten the percieved distance between fate and free will. It would be impossible to say that our brain determines us, or that we determine our brain's activity, if we more simply say that we are our brain, and consciousness does not take place in a different medium. At that level, hypochondria's search for "something else," something "deeper" or "higher" than surface traits, undermines itself.

And it would answer the question, "Is that me?" with yes. It would remove "that" and the grammar required of a question. My comfort reading is about imagining and hoping for that comfort.

shrink rap sheet

A friend of Spalding Gray recently recounted to me Gray's battle with depression, which culminated in electroshock therapy. (Here's a quick online summary of Gray's battle.) The other people with me at the time were surprised to learn electroshock, or electroconvulsive, therapy still exists; maybe they'd recently read The Bell Jar ("Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant."), or they associated ECT with lobotomies: relics of a deluded and regrettably experimental era. ECT, though, is still used, often as a last resort for depression (esp. the catatonic variety) or prolonged episodes of mania.

Even in the deepest depression, I always have hope -- or more accurately, an escape plan, a fantasy of relief. For a while, I secretly wanted to be institutionalized, calmed inside a white womb, handed a doctor's note to excuse myself from life. But I've had enough friends involuntarily locked up for suicidal ramblings to know that a mental hospital would probably be the end of me. For ex., at my very worst, I still take some pleasure in good food, but I'd be forced to eat at a cafeteria (corn dogs? lukewarm chocolate milk? overcooked spaghetti with corn syrup-y tomato sauce? Life would seem bleak and tough, like their chicken breasts. My parents were chefs when I was born, and bad food, for me, is a small death.) More disturbingly, I wouldn't be allowed to avoid people, and the people I'd be unable to avoid wouldn't be annoying, but insanely annoying, or annoyingly insane. (Hospital cutbacks often put people suffering from all types of mental disorders in the same hall. A depressed friend of mine had to spend the night listening to her schitzophrenic roommie scream at blankets.)
So, ECT has become a new escape fantasy. I'd seizure, like possessed by a demon, and then the demon would leave me. I'd stop shaking and my health would be returned.
But, reading about ECT last night, it seems that shock therapy might, after all, be in the same class as lobotomies. Critics of ECT

claim patients are left with permanent memory loss, anxiety, lack of concentration and forget skills such as counting or music learned before the treatment.
Out of over 400 people surveyed by Mind, 84% said they had suffered adverse side effects. Four out of ten suffered permanent loss of some of their memories and 36% had permanent difficulty in concentrating.
But three quarters surveyed said they had not been given any information about possible side effects and only 8% were able to consult an independent expert before agreeing to treatment.

Among the article's quotes from those who have underwent ECT was this from a mother: "I can't remember hardly anything about my past life, only very little bits. As for bringing up my three daughters, I can't remember a thing."

So. Unless I'm part of the Hilton family, ECT doesn't qualify as a fantasy. I'm slowly resigning myself to the impossibility of quick fixes, and the probable benefits of slow ones.

Anyway. On a lighter note, here's another article I found last night while reading up on ECT: The Ten Worst Publications in the History of Psychiatry, or what ideas modern psychiatrists hate. You'll get to read the word "anal" several times.

(do "verse writers" still wear knickers?)

This article is so amusing, I have to post it in full. (Thanks goes to Mark for the find.)

Death Stalks Poets
Verse Writers Die Younger Than Other Writers

All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.
-- U.S. poet Gwendolyn B. Bennett

Dec. 11, 2003 -- Death is drawn more to poetry than to other forms of writing, an intriguing study finds.

Poets die sooner than playwrights. Playwrights die sooner than novelists. And novelists die sooner than nonfiction writers, according to a study by James C. Kaufman, PhD, of California State University. The study appears in the November issue of Death Studies.

Kaufman combed through biographical references to come up with birth and death dates for writers in four different cultures: North America, China, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. The data spans millennia -- one Turkish writer was born in the year 390. Kaufman made an effort to control for the fact that life spans have increased over time and across cultures.

"Both male and female poets had the shortest life spans of all four types of writers, and poets had the shortest life spans in three of the four cultures," Kaufman says in a news release. "Only in Eastern Europe did poets squeak past playwrights by a few months, and that difference was not statistically significant."

Why might poets die sooner?

"Some of the reasons why poets have [been] found to be more likely to suffer from mental illness ... may also be applicable to why poets are more likely to die young," Kaufman writes. "Poetry may appeal to people who are more likely to be self-destructive."

But there's also a more prosaic explanation, Kaufman acknowledges. Poets tend to achieve fame earlier than other kinds of writers. That puts them in the history books at a younger age -- and gives them a better chance of being young when they die.

Kaufman, however, prefers the explanation that fiction writers die younger because fiction is lonely work. Playwrights interact with directors and actors; journalists must interview and interact with newsmakers. Fiction writers have only the blank page.

"This study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes," Kaufman concluded. "It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and health."

1. The phrasing here (: "That puts them in the history books at a younger age -- and gives them a better chance of being young when they die") makes fame seem like getting an Oscar, holding it up to the crowd, and then going backstage.
2. "Kaufman, however, prefers the explanation that fiction writers die younger because fiction is lonely work. Playwrights interact with directors and actors…" But, yo, the first paragraph clearly states, "Playwrights die sooner than novelists."
3. The "negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and health": hahahaha.

The next study: how reading poetry can make healthy American citizens consumptive. And: how an aura of doom looks a lot like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

why do we do anything else?

The NY Times asks, "Why do we sleep?". No one knows, but sleep deprivation supposedly causes real damage.
Elsewhere, a writer with questionable internet research skills endorses Uberman's sleep schedule: "The Uberman's sleep schedule revolves around forcing yourself to rely on six twenty to thirty minute naps spread throughout the day for your daily dose of sleep. I stuck to thirty minute naps, currently having them starting roughly at 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and 10 PM every day."
Strangely, it sounds just like my own sleep schedule, if one switches time spent sleeping and time spent awake.

it's really okay to leave your kids in a skinner box

All these years, I thought Skinner raised his daughter in a box. Instead, he invented a climate-controlled crib for her, which, depending on your news source, was photographed in either Ladies' Home Journal or Life, and caused readers who looked at the picture but didn't read the article to think Skinner was experimenting on his daughter.
Most people are less interesting than we give them credit for.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

The Economics of Suicide
Why trying to kill yourself may be a smart business decision.

Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don't seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become "cheaper" after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you.

Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.

in an otherwise useless article, this nice observation:

Among other things, this line of inquiry has led Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts looking into why people engage in unprotected sex when they would never agree to do so in moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various ''heat of the moment'' situations -- whether they would have sex with a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a partner who asks them to stop -- have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. ''These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we're more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,'' Loewenstein says. [more>]

Woman in vanity…Or skull?

more optical illusions.
The illustration (above) isn't a particularly good example of the genre; usually the brain clicks back and forth between two visual interpretations, but here, the double-image merges into one, women and skull. It's that failure that made me post this picture; the optical illusion seems to fail on purpose, because artists with the most simplistic message are often the most insistent. Vanity is the flip-side--the optical illusion--of an unstated and lonesome fixation on mortality. It's banally morbid, but has an emotional effect on me; I don't know why.

The Optical Illusion Exhibition, by the way, is only one of many exhibitions at the Neuroscience Art Gallery, which I found by reading Lee W. Potts' The Eyes Have It.

(my birthday is nov.6)

For a long time-- ever since I read the New Yorker article that featured it-- I've been lusting after psychologist Paul Ekman's FACS, a Facial Action Coding System. Unfortunately, though, I could never afford it; FACS costs US$260.00 plus shipping.
But now Ekman has summarized and repackaged FACS as METT, The Micro Expression Training Tool, and SETT, the Subtle Expression Training Tool, each selling for $30. Wired News has more information on Ekman and his new products.

(what about des women?)

CREATIVE genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work. [more>]

penis mightier than sword

For example, Koppel's group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-''I'', ''you'', ''she'', ''myself'', or ''yourself'' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' and ''these''-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' or ''some.'' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification with an of phrase''-phrases like ''garden of roses.''

It seems surreal, even spooky, that such seemingly throwaway words would be so revealing of our identity. But text-analysis experts have long relied on these little parts of speech. When you or I write a text, we pay close attention to how we use the main topic-specific words-such as, in this article, the words ''computer'' and ''program'' and ''gender.'' But we don't pay much attention to how we employ basic parts of speech, which means we're far more likely to use them in unconscious but revealing patterns. Years ago, Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, unmasked Joe Klein as the author of the anonymous book ''Primary Colors,'' partly by paying attention to words like ''the'' and ''and,'' and to quirks in the use of punctuation. ''They're like fingerprints,'' says Foster. [more>]

savant-garde

Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general. [more>]

soulcatcher

According to the soulmate calculator, I'll have to meet 420,547 American single males between the ages of 18 and 45 before I can meet my mate.

Or, to speed up my search, I can put to use some of the site's dating advice. To increase my "meeting frequency/exposure," I should "give [my] lover framed pictures of [my]self and make him/her display them in his/her office." Or, "If [I am] stuck in an unwanted relationship, [I should] refer to [my] lover as 'a friend' when he/she is not with [me]."

The site, solvedating.com, assumes that dating, like a mathematical problem, can be solved -- as can love. Its author writes: "I have created a mathematical model that could predict and explain all human behavior pertaining to love." Click here for the mathematical model. Or, read pieces of its resulting manifesto:

"Men prefer women who are shorter than them. Women prefer men taller than them. [That] explains why men prefer younger women and women prefer older men."

"Very moody people will fall in love faster and more frequently. [That is the] reason why people use wine, scented candles, lingerie, and romantic music."

"Crack or heroin addicts will have a harder time falling and being in love."

Even though the applied math is eye-catchingly wrong, I don't really think this site's a joke.

From the site author's personal homepage (previous link):

I have passed up some good women in the belief that she exists. Yes, they will make good wives and mothers. That's like settling for a "B" or "C" grade. I need at least an "A". After gathering their profiles and crutching their numbers in my wife model, I find that they are "not statistically significant".

the balanced brain

What type of brain do you have? According to Baron-Cohen's theory, a person (whether male or female) has a particular 'brain type'. There are three common brain types: the female brain, the male brain and the balanced brain. A key feature of the theory is that your sex cannot tell you which type of brain you have. Not all men have the male brain, and not all women have the female brain. The central claim of this new theory is only that on average, more males than females have a brain of type S, and more females than males have a brain of type E.

How male or female is your brain?

A friend once told me I have a masculine mind, but my test results claim my mind is "balanced":

But, like all psychological quizzes, this test seems to reflect self-conception rather than personality or 'brain type.'

dreamcatcher

New Scientist interviews Joe Griffin, "who says there is a way to lift depression in a day":

How can you deal with serious depression in just a day?

The important thing is to know how depression is manufactured in the brain. Once you understand that, you can correct the maladaptive cycle incredibly fast. For 40 years it's been known that depressed people have excessive REM sleep. They dream far more than healthy people. What we realised - and proved - is that the negative introspection, or ruminations, that depressed people engage in actually causes the excessive dreaming. So depression is being generated on a 24-hour cycle and we can make a difference within 24 hours to how a person feels. [more>]

I'll meet you in my dreams

The NovaDreamer, only $300, gives you unlimited lucid dreaming. This could be the end of nightmares as we know them (last link via quasimeta).

cognitive patterns

The cognitive differences start with basic sensory perception. In one study, Michigan's Taka Masuda showed Japanese and American students pictures of aquariums containing one big fast-moving fish, several other finned swimmers, plants, rock and bubbles. What did the students recall? The Japanese spontaneously remembered 60% more background elements than did the Americans. They also referred twice as often to relationships involving background objects ("the little frog was above the pink rock").[more>]

art and madness

17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: "Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally'd."

Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces -- many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness -- is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.

Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it's being billed as the world's largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]

Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I'm one of those people. Here's why:

1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention-- but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.

related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.

a scent of wonder

Two artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris approached me with their Wellcome-sponsored "On the Scent" project, which is an installation/performance project to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions. . . . There will be four chambers: reminiscence, false scents, making scents and on the scent. "Reminiscence" will be a sort of olfactory museum of smells from different times and cultures, designed so that people will encounter a range of familiar and new odours depending upon their age, ethnicity and place they grew up in. [more>]

INTJ

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.[more>]

Random thoughts on this article:
1) I rarely get lonely, and so call myself an introvert. But I think loneliness is the healthy impulse to spend time with people. The more time I spend with people, the less depressed I am; my inability to feel loneliness is faulty wiring.
2) When I was younger, I felt I lost my "authenticity" by spending too much time with people. What was important were my thoughts regarding myself; these thoughts were my stability, and by putting myself in social situations, I threatened this stability by spending too little time self-reflecting. (Self-reflection had to feel totalizing; too much action and my reflection couldn't contain it.)
3) People will hate me for saying this, but I think introversion may be an intellectual justification for (the, okay, yeah, normative idea of) social anxiety.

Jesus, another stupid study

University of Michigan researchers asked 900 high school students which Breakfast Club character they best identified with, and tracked the students into their early 20s. "As it happened, these thumbnail descriptions were remarkably helpful in charting their lives after high school and college, Eccles reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research." I assume the study's point is that people enact the type they've assigned themselves, rather than that people are smart enough to pick their right type.
The types, if you haven't seen the Breakfast Club recently, are 'Jock,' 'Princess,' 'Basket Case,' 'Brain' and 'Criminal.' The study proudly reports that "One in four [of self-identified] Basket Cases said they had gone to a psychologist by age 24, compared with only 6 percent of the Jocks." Because, as we know in the Midwest, only basket cases go to shrinks.
Related entry: High School Reunion

truth at 24 frames per second

FACS (my requested birthday present) prefigures the next generation of lie detector tests: "A team at Manchester Metropolitan University spent five years developing the device, which detects and analyses thousands of tiny facial movements, many imperceptible to the naked eye."

and also, everyone likes sunsets

The BBC quotes a study reporting that 1/6 of Brits are happy 100% of the time. And readers respond with what makes them happy: Cuddle the cat, being on the internet, babies--"the younger the better," good pipe tobacco, and family.

synthetic beauties

Do we prefer fake faces?

(evil demon, fish-monster, or orb-holding alien)

Take an inkblot test.
Click below to read my results.

Nathalie, your unconscious mind is driven most by Imagination
This means you have a deep desire to use innovative ideas to enhance your life and influence the world around you. This drive influences you far more than you may realize on a conscious level.
Your need to be innovative drives how you look at new opportunities and the kinds of experiences in life you choose to have. On an unconscious level, the reason you may be so driven by imagination is your fear of destruction, the opposite of creation. When you are unable to create due to restrictions imposed by your environment or even ones you unwittingly impose on yourself, do you feel trapped or confined? You may find these feelings of unease only get better when you find another outlet for your imagination.
With such a strong creative orientation, you are willing to entertain a broad spectrum of ideas at any given time. The world is a fuller, richer place because you can contribute new ideas to any experience. Your natural curiosity inspires those around you and encourages them to come up with ideas they wouldn't have thought of without your help.

your eyes don't lie

According to my face perception test results, I prefer extroverted men. Wtf? But the test is fun; I'm going to pretend I'm a male and take it again.

can anti-depressants cause depression?

Healy had designed his "healthy volunteer study" to compare the psychological experience of being on a serotonin antidepressant versus a non-serotonin antidepressant, but before he knew it, two of his volunteers became dangerously agitated and suicidal. Both were taking the SSRI drug. The adverse reactions couldn't easily be blamed on psychological instability – these were healthy volunteers. And the rate of 10 percent made it clear that such results were not so rare as to be incidental. [more>]

This website stops me cold. A couple months ago, on my normal dosage of Effexor and Zyprexa, I became dangerously impulsive. I wanted the throw myself in front of cars, or jump out of windows. I hung up in the middle of phone conversations with people, for no good reason other than impulse. I was completely unlike myself, and eventually, it passed.
But I also remember my depression before the meds: a pain as real, omnipresent and hot as sunlight. Nothing could give me comfort. No one could soothe me. It felt like life had rejected me, and was booting me out of existence by witholding pleasure.
The article continues,

Two Harvard psychiatrists and a registered nurse described cases in which patients developed serious preoccupations with suicide soon after being given Prozac. "We were especially surprised to witness the emergence of intense, obsessive, and violent suicidal thoughts in these patients," they commented. "It was also remarkable how violent these thoughts were. Two patients fantasized, for the first time, about killing themselves with a gun, and one patient actually placed a loaded gun to her head. One patient needed to be physically restrained to prevent self-mutilation."

It's hard to know what to make of this. In a state of deep depression, most people lack the energy to commit suicide; during recovery, they finally have the will and stamina to carry through. So, recovery can, for many, be a period of danger. Why doesn't the article mention this?

the calculations say. . .

. . .I'm 65% happy.

lucky-go-happy

These two women were lucky to be born with a joyous temperament, which in its most extreme forms is called hyperthymia. Cheerful despite life's misfortunes, energetic and productive, they are often the envy of all who know them because they don't even have to work at it.

In a sense, they are the psychiatric mirror image of people who suffer from a chronic, often lifelong, mild depression called dysthymia, which affects about 3 percent of American adults. Always down, dysthymics experience little pleasure and battle through life with a dreary pessimism. Despite whatever fortune comes their way, they remain glum.[more>]

math is hard when you've got a wedgie

From ABC News—

    
     Five years after the talking doll caused a stir with her politically incorrect complaints about math class, a group of psychologists has found that the more women worry about how they look, the less mental energy they have for other things—like math.
     And that’s true whether you consider yourself hopelessly dumpy or the next Naomi Campbell. “Even if you think you’re meeting the ideals, just being concerned with the ideals takes your energy away from other things,” says social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson of the University of Michigan. “Anytime you’re interrupting your own stream of thinking to think about how you look, it has that effect.” [more>]

This article's extremely popular on the net right now, which means computer geeks are again trying to explain why they don't have cute female co-workers.
The study mentioned in the article had men and women take a math test while wearing bathing suits. Women scored much lower while wearing bathing suits than they did while wearing sweaters. "Even though the women were in the dressing room alone, they were seeing themselves as others might see them, and being distracted by it." But couldn't any of the scientists deduce that women's swimsuits are much tighter, itchier, i.e. uncomfortable than men's trunks--and more likely to distract women from math problems?
But I do think value systems/systems of rewards can preclude each other---if we're rewarded for our looks, we don't need to be awarded for our history papers. (This wisdom--yes, from personal experience. I think I switch between four value systems-- based on 1. appearance, 2. intellect, 3. honesty/emotional purity, and 4. immediate gratification. I've been switching between 3 and 4 for the past month.)
[link found on daypop]

"wet people"

In a recent global survey, Curtis asked people in five places—India, the Netherlands, Britain, the West African country of Burkina Faso, and Athens International Airport—to describe what disgusts them. The results revealed some regional variations: "Lower castes" and "kissing in public" aroused disgust in India, whereas the British were particularly repulsed by dead sparrows and cruelty to horses; politicians and dog saliva revolted the Dutch, while airport travelers named everything from "wet people" to being eaten alive by insects.[more>]

From the ny times—

"Tito is a window into autism such as the world has never seen."

"When I was 4 or 5 years old," he wrote while living in India, "I hardly realized that I had a body except when I was hungry or when I realized that I was standing under the shower and my body got wet. I needed constant movement, which made me get the feeling of my body. The movement can be of a rotating type or just flapping of my hands. Every movement is a proof that I exist. I exist because I can move."

Tito seems to lack a sense of his own body, the kind of internal map, Dr. Merzenich said, that normal children develop in their first few years. The maps involve brain regions that specialize in the sense of touch and movement and are widely connected to other areas, and they are highly dynamic throughout life, changing in response to everyday experience. [more>]

WHO ARE MY FRIENDS?

Test our compatibility.

I tested my compatibility to myself, and it's not very high. Maybe someone out there can do better.

SimilarMinds.com Compatibility Test

Your match with Nathalie you are 94% similar you are 74% complementary

How Compatible are You with me?

Life is Horrible.

"The noise from nearby airports impairs children's reading ability and long-term memory, a new study has revealed."

Nothing is ever free

"Wegner argues that 'the feeling of will is our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.'" [from the null device]

Somebody Had a Bad Time in High School.

"Nerve activity in the teenaged brain is so intense that they find it hard to process basic information, researchers say, rendering the teenagers emotionally and socially inept."

Das Not Guten

Das Experiment is supposedly based on the Stanford Prison Experiment, a barbaric reenactment of prison life by a psychologist in the Stanford area. Off Metafilter, there's also a link to the Milgram experiment, "a lesson in depravity, peer pressure, and the power of authority."

Another Article that Loves Provigil.

Provigil does shit for me. That's unfair.

Discovery Could Mean the End of Shrooms

LONDON (Reuters) - Swiss scientists think they have pinpointed the area of the brain where out-of-body experiences are triggered.

damage control.

Anti-depressants aren't candy. "In fact, the withdrawals were so intense that during the entire month of January 1998, I never left my house. Over the next six to eight months, these symptoms gradually subsided, but I was terrified that I would never fully recover from the withdrawal experience. The memory loss, cognitive deficits, light and sound sensitivity, and word retrieval problems persist to this day. Never in my life have I been through such hell." [from counterpunch]
Andrew Solomon, author of the great Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, argues that depressed people should never, ever go off their drugs. From his book: [According to John Greden,] "People with recurrent depression must stay on medication permanently, not cycle on and off it, because beyond the unpleasentness of having to survive multiple painful depressive episodes, such people are actually ravaging their own neuronal tissue."

You don't drink TheraDate.

"Depression feeds on itself. Every time someone has a single episode of depression, their likelihood of a subsequent episode increases by 50%. If they have two episodes, there's approximately 70% chance of a third episode. After three episodes, one is almost surely going to have a [long-term] course." Awesome. Long-term course. Can't wait.
But at least I'll still get dates.

In contrast to standard, self-composed dating pitches ó "great sense of humor, loves the outdoors" ó clients of TheraDate will be assessed on such factors as obsessiveness, defense mechanisms and nervous tics.

For many ages, wise men have asked:

Why are the stupid kids the ones that talk in class?

Stupidest study ever: psychological problems

Stupidest study ever: psychological problems may play a role in the prediction of psychological problems. Excerpt:

Using a logistic regression analysis, the researchers found several factors most closely associated with the development of the new depressive episode. They were the recognition that the patient is a psychiatric case by the general practitioner, repeated suicidal thoughts, previous depressive episodes, the number of chronic organic diseases, poor general health, and a full or subthreshold ICD-10 disorder.

Earth Girls are Easy

Even evolutionary psychologists, stout defenders of the meat-for-fidelity model, are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of women's "slutty" behavior.

Check the FACS

My birthday is in November. This is what I want for it.

The Facial Action Coding System (© Ekman and Friesen, 1978) FACS objectively describes and measures facial expressions and movements. Based on an anatomical analysis of facial action, it offers a comprehensive method for describing all facial movements, those related to emotion and those that are not.

This Test Could Save Your Life

A psychological test, copped from girl detective:

This is the story of a girl. While at the funeral of her own mother, she met this guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be, that she fell in love with him there and then... A few days later the girl killed her own sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister?

My thinking: he was her brother-in-law.
Or she had a twin whom he was more attracted to.
Think about your answer before you scroll down.
Also, if you have friends nearby, ask them for a conjecture.
................................
......................
...........
......
..

Answer: She was hoping that the guy would appear at the funeral again. If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American psychologist used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer. Many arrested serial killers took part in this test and answered it correctly. If you didn't answer correctly, good for you. If your friends hit the jackpot, keep your distance.

SADNESS

Emotion. An unpleasant visceral feeling of sorrow, unhappiness, depression, or gloom.

Usage: Sadness shows a. in bowing postures of the body wall; b. in the cry face and lip-pout; c. in gazing-down; d. in a slumped (i.e., flexed-forward) posture of the shoulders; and e. in the audible sigh.

just say maybe.

This is what your brain really looks like on drugs.

sure, some reposts, but…

Would you read these blogs? I would.

Thoughts on Depression.

Even supposing that society is more inhuman than in the past, when socialised medicine and unemployment benefits didn't yet exist, why would this give rise to depression rather than anxiety, fatigue, 'nervous breakdown' or just plain anger?

Alain Ehrenberg, a sociologist, attempts to answer this question in La Fatigue d'Ítre soi. Retracing in detail the history of depression since the 1950s (mainly in France), he shows very well how it ceased to be defined in terms of psychic pain, and came to be perceived more and more as a pathology of action. The new 'dÈprimÈ' lacks energy, is unable to 'perform', is inhibited in his work and his relationships with others. He suffers, the psychiatrists say, from 'psychomotor retardation'. And this new pathology emerges, as if by chance, in a society which values individual responsibility and initiative above all else. Just as Freudian neuroses were the pathology of a subject defined by prohibition and internal conflict, so contemporary depression is "the reverse of the sovereign individual, of the man who believes himself to be the author of his own life". In that sense, depression is not directly provoked or caused by contemporary society. Rather, Ehrenberg suggests, it is the negative 'counterpart' to the subjectivity created and so highly valued in this society. [more]

Mental hospitals running out of space? Usher the patients towards death. Or maybe not.

When VR doesn't sound fun: Pyshciatrists plan to treat schizophrenia with virtual hallucinations.

Love isn't the magic we think it to be, he says.

Geoff, in response to your modafinal post, that's what I've been taking for months and it does shit for me.

Can
you
guess
what
this
is?

If this is true, why are all my dreams based on video games?

midnight snacks

Sleep Eaters: "Patients may complain of fatigue or recent illnesses but have no recollection of their nighttime forays into the kitchen, where they may wolf down high-calorie foods such as milkshakes and butter." Better than handfuls of mayonaise, eh, Josh?

What if Van Gogh took Paxil? Well, you're not Van Gogh.

another article on depression and its causal relationship to art.

After several months of feeling depressed, she changed her mind and restarted the antidepressant. It sounds heretical coming from a psychiatrist, but a little depression probably was good for her art, even if the personal cost was too high. In the end, she opted for happiness.

As for me, depression produces better observations, smart "impromptu" sentences in my journal, but also deep anxiety that I have no memories, nothing to write about. And if I do sit myself in front of my computer and force myself to write, my sentences are plodding and dull (see yesterday's entries).

And, still not Van Gogh.

This article is one of the week's most linked-to. Stanford Researchers Establish Link Between Creative Genius and Mental Illness.
"My hunch is that emotional range, having an emotional broadband, is the bipolar patientís advantage," said Strong. "It isnít the only thing going on, but something gives people with manic depression an edge, and I think itís emotional range." I think they have the causality right: mental illness--> creativity. But how often is art heralded for its extreme emotional range? I'm suprised the researchers didn't suggest something along the lines of an immature ego defense. (Immature ego defenses: projection, passive aggression, acting out, fantasy. Mature ego defenses: suppression, sublimation, altruism.) But I guess I'm shifting the terms: why artists are bipolar is different from why bipolars are artists.

Well, we know sex isn't keeping them up.

Lonely People Don't Get Enough Sleep

An interactive computer program designed to understand, alleviate, and prevent depression. Click on "About the program" and read the chat transcript. I'd have a gun to my head in no time.
Among its advantages to real-life psychotherapy:
ï"You can divulge your deepest inner thoughts and feelings to the program that you might not be able to disclose to a human, and receive a non-judgmental response. "
ï"The program will not involve you in sexual relations or exploit you financially. "

For Geoff: What is dÈjý vu?

Irony on a platter: Posted by nchicha at May 12, 2002, 03:14 AM | Comments (0)