Psy-Phi Psychological Philosophy

Relaxation, Dysphoria, And The New Psychology

2009-11-18T23:17:00.003-06:00

One minute she is in an elevated state of euphoria, while the next minute she is feeling to be in a personal hell. I'll be completely honest with you about it. If I were sending out the typical self-help tape on this blog, you would hear a pleasant and easy to listen to English voice which will guide you into a deeply relaxed state of mind and body. But that's not what I'm doing here. I'm trying to speak the truth to power.

It shouldn't be anything fancy—new research actually shows that the promise of big rewards tends to reduce productivity. Never set goals that are high above your reach, give yourself some depression help by not being too hard on yourself, believe that you are good and strong enough to achieve your goals but only one step at a time. That is way we have the obligation not to surrender in stressful situations and to go fighting for the joy of living. This fearless awareness of fear suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. Another reason why we need to relax, aside from lowering blood pressure in people and decreasing the chances of a stroke or a heart attack, is because stress produces hormones that suppress the immune system, relaxation gives the immune system time to recover and in doing so function more efficiently. None of these are things you will probably ever be able to do without special training.

Anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications require doctor prescriptions and can only be used under careful supervision. This should fan the flames. When an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety and depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. Ain't is a popular tool to deal with non. Be weary of sudden weight loss or weight gain in those around you. There are many factors that cause a an that levels background for a indicate. This is a bit of info about making less of does. Clinical depression may not pose as much as a threat as the other types of depression, but it is best to leave it to the hands of professionals who can safely attend to and cure this disorder.

It can be a song, a movie, even a person or animal. Again, this method requires professional support, and so may not be viable for those with limited healthcare options.. This past year I have been fortunate with it. You can't believe it, but I have to buy into this idea. Also the dosages of depression medication can actually be increased or lowered depending on what the doctor finds to be the most effective. Furthermore, fear is, now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.

I'm going to change the subject entirely now but also I got rid of them. And, to answer your question, psychotherapy is a very effective treatment for both depression and anxiety. Seasonal Affective Disorder is characterized by falling in a rut only during specific seasons (i.e. It can last for a year or longer, depending upon the program administrator.

So where do you begin. It's one of those things that go bump in the night. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. The good news is that human consciousness is extremely flexible, and you can use that to your advantage. Why would you seek a expensive it that jacks into it. The difficulty comes when the situation changes. Emotions love to dominate our actions and reactions, even though we do not want it to happen sometimes. I may be right, but you don't want to skim over this. All of these items could determine if you are capable of working with it.

Does ADHD Interfere with Weight Loss Journaling?

2008-07-15T22:04:00.001-05:00

Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder is a psychological condition characterized by a dysregulation of an individual's capacity to modulate their attention. It may be extremely difficult for a person with this condition to focus on certain things, but difficult to avoid complete absorption in others.

Many times the dysregulation of attention has a connection to motivational factors. Pleasurable activities may be focused on intently and productively while unpleasurable ones become impossible to maintain focus on. Dana Blankenhorn suggests that new research attributing a powerful weight loss benefit to the practice of diet journaling may be lost on him and other ADHD sufferers like him.

He also suggests, perhaps in jest, that OCD could make you thin. As a matter of fact, clinicians have long noted a similarity in the personality styles between individuals suffering obsessive-compulsive disorders and those suffering from eating disorders. The behaviors surrounding an eating disorder tend to be highly ritualistic, and often feel involuntary.

However, the real trouble with weight loss may be the proliferation of conflicting information regarding how one ought to go about it. It is difficult for just about anyone to become determined to carry out a goal when they are uncertain that the relatively unpleasant behavior they are carrying out will lead to desired results. It will be important in the coming years for researchers to come to clear agreement on the nutritional and lifestyle causes of obesity and to make this information available to the public in an unambiguous way.

The psychological functions of dreams

2008-04-26T15:29:00.001-05:00

There is a great deal of speculation about what kinds of functions dreams generally serve and even about the meaning behind dreams. Psychologically, this is a very interesting question because we spend such a large portion of our lives involved in dream activity and if we don't get enough sleep we suffer all kinds of negative health effects and increases in stress. The fact that we have dreams means that there is some kind of general function that they must be serving so that our minds and bodies can be refreshed and rejuvenated by morning.

I can tell you that when I have a lot of wild dreams during the night, I feel much different in the morning even if the dreams I had were not exactly very pleasant, psychologically I still feel more refreshed. When I lose contact with the dreams I'm having I always feel much more tense and less focused than if I can remember a strange tense or even sleazy dream.

One thing I notice also is that when I wake up directly out of a dream I can sometimes feel as though I'm still dreaming. Sometimes this effect lasts as much as a half hour for me, I walk around in a daze feeling like nothing is really quite real, and sometimes my mind will be preoccupied with the events of the dream that I just woke up from. I realize that I was asleep and am now awake, and that the dream was only a dream, but part of my mind still lives there in the dream world.

What causes dreams?

There are lots of different ideas about why people dream. In ancient times they used to believe that dreams were messages from the underworld, that dreaming was like dying and visiting "death's dream world" (as T.S. Eliot wrote). More recently, Carl Jung wrote about dreams in a way that agrees with this ancient idea much more than a lot of newer ideas about what dreams are for, when he said that dreaming is a way of making contact with the collective unconscious and that the images and personas we encounter in the dreamworld are actually representations of timeless figures that are embedded in our genes and in our culture. This means that dreams are a way of reconnecting to the underlying reality that we all share, as opposed to being always caught up in the individual reality of our daily lives when we imagine that we are individuals.

There are other theories about what makes us dream that to me seem like they each have their own relevance to different types of dreams. Like for example you could think of wet dreams or flying dreams as what Sigmund Freud would have referred to as wish fulfillment, so that the dream satisfies an unconscious impulse. Of course, for Freud, many more parts os dreams were wish fulfillment than just what is obvious; in fact, a major part of his theory (which he wrote about in The Interpretation of Dreams) is that dreams are a way of allowing ourselves to experience the fulfillment of wishes that are not acceptable to our conscious minds.

A more cognitive explanation of dreams would hold that they actually are a way for our brains to consolidate and solidify our memory, and to allow ourselves to test out what we would do in a variety of situations without having to deal with the actual real-world repercussions of the situations or our responses to them. There have actually been studies about the neurological effects of dreaming and they have supported the idea that when you don't get enough REM-sleep you are unable to remember things that you learn as well.

Christian Interpretation of Dreams

This is something that a lot of people wonder about because so many people today are Christians and there is such a rich tradition of dream interpretation in the Christian religious tradition. All over the Bible you can see examples of biblical figures interpreting their dreams to be messages from angels or to be signs and symbols of God's will. This is a powerful way for people to interpret their dreams because it jives with so many different psychological schools of dreaming such as the Adlerian interpretive method which hold that dreams are our way of solving our problems by exploring them without concern for external demands and instead allowing ourselves to play around with the potential solutions that we overlook because of all the things.

Also, as I mentioned the Freudian and Jungian interpretation methods both involve contact with unconscious parts of ourselves or even of our culture or species, so these can definitely be seen as providing messages from a higher self, which in the Christian tradition could be reworded to mean that dreams are messages from God. This way of looking at things is truer to the more ancient and even tribal ways of interpreting dreams, which almost always saw dreams as important messages and omens from an ethereal world that exists in between and through the spaces that we occupy but we just don't get to see them because we live on a different frequency. So the purpose of dreams from this perspective is that you should be making contact with higher powers that are well-aligned with your God or gods so you can be strong against any evil entities that you might come in contact with without ever knowing it.

There are actually all kinds of dream products that you can buy these days to wear and use to try to enhance the quality of your dreams or the quality of your connection to the dreamworld. Psychologically, these could serve the purpose of allowing your conscious mind to come to terms with the taboo dream content that it would otherwise never remember. From a cognitive perspective, it may be that dream products would act as an anchor to help you remember dream events in such a way as to trigger real-life memories that have been solidified during REM sleep.

Anyway, these are just one man's thoughts about the psychological functions of dreams--what are your thoughts?

British company saves a mil by getting staff to work slower

2005-08-18T13:06:00.000-05:00

Brian from Anxiety Culture pointed me to this article:

British company saves (GBP) 1 million by getting staff to work slower: "after just two weeks at the factory, the consultants came to the conclusion that efficiency would improve if staff worked more slowly". (A real story, not satire)

I'm adding my slow working-speed onto my resume as a benefit now.

On Intelligence

2005-08-11T20:57:00.000-05:00

A psychologist/philosopher named Robert Anton Wilson once wrote that we are all giants, raised by midgets, all walking with a perpetual mental crouch.

I think of intelligence as the general capacity for ingesting and processing information and adapting to the info-space that one finds at each step of the process. What we think of as "reality" is only really a tiny subset of the ambient information; no two realities are alike, and if we play the game at full capacity, our individual reality changes every moment.

I do not believe that intelligence is static, and the research I've seen seems to support this hypothesis. Intelligence test scores can be manipulated through environmental factors, external and internal expectations, and experience. I think intelligence itself, as I define it, is malleable. I think the majority of people have the capacity to become geniuses but don't know how: they are giants raised by midgets; we all are.

For this reason, I feel that intelligence tests can be fine indicators of a person's present state of equipment, and utterly worthless as predictors of potential. Saving extreme neurological damage, I think the potential to accomplish nearly any feat of mentation is always there for each of us, waiting to be unlocked. I think each of us has the capacity to be dangerously intelligent, and beautifully so.

On Personality

2005-08-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

I think of personality as the set of generalized tendencies that come, over time, to describe a consistency in an individual's manner of relating to self and other.

I don't think of personality as necessarily unchanging or unchangeable, but there does seem to be a tendency in people to gradually realize an essentialism of self, a core set of patterns that underlies the endless ebbs and flows of personhood, which sets the individual apart from its surroundings in both the integralness and separateness of conscious existence.

When one is an adolescent, it is traditional to experience a crisis of personality: after a decade or two of being in constant flux, you find you are nothing but change, without a rock to stand on. For me, the slow process of recognizing the subtle consistency—even symmetry?—of myself through the various phases seems to be something that may continue for the rest of my life. At every turn you meet yourself for the first time!

For the purposes of assessment, personality becomes much less fluid. If you're administering a test to determine characteristics of a personality, you are looking for something specific: whether it be a powerful antisocial characteristic for the purposes of forensic study, a degree of loyalty and obedience for the purposes of a job interview, or any number of other things, you know what tendencies you are looking for and can measure them.

I think that personality assessment is both the wrong word and the wrong paradigm for this type of indicator, however. These types of assessment seem more like measurements of the present status of the persona. Estimating the underlying tendencies is more like trying to predict the stock market: it takes a sort of commitment, even a sort of love.

Is it a cosmic string or are we seeing double?

2005-08-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

"The case for the existence of cosmic strings has just been boosted," according to New Scientist. "If confirmed, these one-dimensional threads of energy that can span millions of light years could be the first sign of extra dimensions in the universe."

A cosmic string is a hypothetical 1-dimensional topological defect in the fabric of spacetime. Cosmic strings are hypothesized to form when different regions of spacetime undergo phase changes, resulting in domain boundaries between the two regions when they meet. This is somewhat analogous to the boundaries that form between crystal grains in solidifying liquids, or the cracks that form when water freezes into ice, according to Wikipedia. The description goes on:

Cosmic strings, if they exist, would be extremely thin with diameters on the same order as a proton. They would have immense density, however, and so would represent significant gravitational sources. A cosmic string 1.6 kilometers in length would exert more gravity than the Earth. Cosmic strings would form a network of loops in the early universe, and their gravity could have been responsible for the original clumping of matter into galactic superclusters.

"The immense energy of a cosmic string", says New Scientist, "would warp the space-time around it. If one existed somewhere between us and a distant galaxy, say, the warped space-time would create two possible paths for the light from the galaxy to reach Earth. This would result in two identical images of the galaxy in our sky, just a whisker apart. Last year, that's exactly what Mikhail Sazhin of Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples, Italy, and the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, Russia, and his colleagues found. They named the pair CSL-1 (New Scientist, 18 December 2004, p 30).

"Many astronomers were sceptical of Sazhin's claim that a string was creating the images. Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that CSL-1 is merely two very similar galaxies that happen to be close together. Now, Sazhin's team has presented more evidence that the two images are of the same galaxy. In March, the team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, to record detailed spectra of the two galaxies and found that they are identical (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0506400). This adds further weight to the possibility that CSL-1 is an artefact of a string, he says."

Hot Water on Saturn's Moon

2005-08-03T22:05:00.000-05:00

Cassini Finds an Active, Watery World at Saturn's Enceladus

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found a huge cloud of water vapor over the moon's south pole, and warm fractures where evaporating ice probably supplies the vapor cloud. Cassini has also confirmed Enceladus is the major source of Saturn's largest ring, the E-ring.

"Enceladus is the smallest body so far found that seems to have active volcanism," said Dr. Torrence Johnson, Cassini imaging-team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Enceladus' localized water vapor atmosphere is reminiscent of comets. 'Warm spots' in its icy and cracked surface are probably the result of heat from tidal energy like the volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. And its geologically young surface of water ice, softened by heat from below, resembles areas on Jupiter's moons, Europa and Ganymede," Johnson added.

Remember all the hype about trace amounts of water ice on Mars? How extremophile bacteria can live damn near anywhere? How where there's water there's life?

The south pole of Enceladus is hot and wet, and even has a nice balmy atmosphere. This sounds like a pretty good candidate for extraterrestrial life.

Update: I was right about the diet soda

2005-08-03T21:50:00.000-05:00

A new study has found that female rats who consumed small amounts of aspartame every day have a higher chance of developing leukemia and lymphoma

A new study of rats links low doses of aspartame -- the sweetener in NutraSweet, Equal, and thousands of consumer products -- to increased incidence of leukemia and lymphoma. The doses administered were equivalent to about three or four cans of diet soda a day for a person of average weight.

Better off getting on a nice healthy diet and finding a diet pill that works along with it.

[Link]

Soda Makes You Fat

2005-08-01T23:47:00.000-05:00

CBS News is reporting on a new study suggests that fructose may alter the body's metabolism in a way that prompts it to store body fat.

"Our study shows how fat mass increases as a direct consequence of soft drink consumption," says researcher Matthias Tschöp, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, in a news release.
....
The mice that drank the fructose-sweetened water gained significantly more body fat than the others, even though they decreased the amount of calories they ate from solid food.

"We were surprised to see that mice actually ate less when exposed to fructose-sweetened beverages, and therefore didn't consume more overall calories," says Tschöp. "Nevertheless, they gained significantly more body fat within a few weeks."

And don't think this is an excuse to switch to diet soda. It's great excuse to go out and find some used spin bikes for sale and start trying to burn off all that sugar.

Global Warming and the Hidden Hunger

2005-07-26T10:06:00.000-05:00

Glenn Scherer has written a very interesting article regarding the effects of global warming and modern agriculture on crop nutrition. From the article:

Gaseous CO2 fertilization does cause remarkable growth spurts in many plants, and could create a greener planet with beefier tomatoes and faster-growing, bigger trees. But there's a catch: The insects, mammals, and impoverished people in developing countries who feed on this bounty may end up malnourished, or even starving.

A small but growing body of research is finding that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, while increasing crop yield, decrease the nutritional value of plants. More than a hundred studies, for example, have found that when CO2 from fossil-fuel burning builds up in plant tissues, nitrogen (essential for making protein) declines.

A smaller number of studies hint at another troubling impact: As atmospheric CO2 levels go up, trace elements in plants (such as zinc and iron, which are vital to animal and human life) go down, potentially malnourishing all those that subsist on the plants. This preliminary research has given scientists reason to worry about bigger unknowns: Virtually no studies have been done on the effects of elevated CO2 on other essential trace elements, such as selenium, an important antioxidant, or chromium, which is believed to regulate blood-sugar levels.

This is the latest of a million reasons why we need to think about developing and implementing renewable energy technologies about a century ago.

Wonka's Pharmaceuticals

2005-07-26T09:19:00.000-05:00

For years I've been complaining about the lack of a cocoa extract suitable for club-drug-style consumption, but at least soon we'll be able to use it for diabetes, strokes and vascular disease, according to this Reuters article.

Mars, the company that made its fortune satisfying chocolate cravings, unveiled plans on Monday to develop medications that use a component of cocoa to help treat diabetes, strokes and vascular disease.
The privately held U.S. company that produces M&Ms and Mars bars said it hoped to make medications based on flavanols -- plant chemicals with health benefits found in cocoa, as well as red wine and green tea.
It is now in talks with several large pharmaceutical companies for a licensing or joint venture agreement to develop medicinal products based on its research.

The flavanols in question are apparently mostly destroyed in typical cocoa processing, and the drugs in there are probably not as good as urban legend would have it (although some of their chemical cousins most assuredly are.)

In fact, some critics doubt Mars' assertions entirely. “This is about selling chocolate. Mars is only doing this because it wants people to eat more and more M&Ms,” asserted the ironically-named Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition, food studies and public health, dismissed the idea of cocoa-based medicines. She has no relation to the European chocolate maker of the same name. She is quoted in the Washington Post.

The War On Genitals

2005-07-25T14:53:00.000-05:00

In harmony with the United States' warped religious rights' ongoing War on Genitals, notorious dickweed Jack Thompson is jumping on the opportunity provided by the 'Hot Coffeegate' scandal to attack... The Sims, referring to the game as a "pedophile's paradise."

In his caffeinated frenzy, Thompson berzerked: “The sex and the nudity are in the game. That's the point. The blur [over Sims’ nonexistent genitalia] is an admission that even the ‘Ken and Barbie’ features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse.” Which, of course, leads us to wonder why he's not simply going after Mattel, manufacturer of Ken and Barbie dolls.

It also leads me to wonder, 'who are all these fucked up people, and what the hell happened to their poor genitals?' I don't think there's any way around it: these people had to have endured some serious childhood trauma to turn out like this, deathly afraid of something as basic as human genitalia.

As usual, the safe money's on blaming religion.

What is Consciousness For?

2005-07-25T13:32:00.000-05:00

Dr. Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout have published a fascinating paper entitled “What is Consciousness For?” Their primary hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible.

Volition is a tricky business. According to the authors, "Without an understanding of volition, the function of consciousness cannot properly be understood." Volition—will or choice—ranks alongside consciousness as among the most disputed concepts in the psy-phi cannon. From the paper's conclusion:

A broad outline of the argument for our main hypothesis runs as follows: if consciousness has any biologically adaptive function, it must ultimately be for some type of movement. On the one hand, there are good theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that volitional movement requires consciousness. On the other hand, we know of no good theoretical arguments or empirical evidence that automatic movement requires consciousness. There is also empirical evidence that conscious experience varies concomitantly with volition. Volitional movement is adaptive because it adds a fundamental flexibility that is not possible with deterministic, automatic movements, which are controlled entirely by neural processes.

If our hypothesis is correct, it puts to rest a variety of assertions, including: 1) Claims by eliminative materialists/behaviorists/identity theorists that consciousness has no function, either because it does not exist or because it reduces to physical brain processes. 2) Epiphenomenalist claims that acknowledge the existence of consciousness, but deny that it has causal efficacy (e.g., claims that consciousness is a “causally impotent” “side-effect,” “by-product,” “dangler” or “spandrel”). 3) Assertions that acknowledge the existence and causal efficacy of consciousness by ascribing various functions to it but that fail to adequately answer the Key Question, i.e., claims that consciousness can somehow function as a substitute for neural processes. In addition to putting these assertions to rest, our hypothesis adds specificity to assertions that are true but vague, e.g., claims that consciousness provides flexibility, promotes survival and reproduction, perceives reality, obtains knowledge, guides movement, handles novel situations, or plans future actions.

“If our basic hypothesis is correct,” write the authors, “the failure to take volition seriously has been and still is the greatest impediment to progress in psychology and consciousness studies generally.” The full text is available online at Cogprints [PDF;].

High-Protein Diet Can Make You Wealthy

2005-07-22T23:53:00.000-05:00

Psy-Phi Exclusive!The results of two new scientific studies indicate that increasing the amount of protein you eat can result in an increase in your net worth.

First, a study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology this week demonstrates a correlation between wealth and body mass index for most people. This study “investigates obesity’s relationship to individuals’ wealth by analyzing data from a large U.S. longitudinal socio-economic survey,” finding a large negative association between BMI and net worth, particularly for white females. From the abstract:

Weight changes and dieting also appear associated with wealth changes. Individuals who lose small amounts of weight experience little change in net worth, but those who lose large amounts of weight have a dramatically improved financial position, with Whites showing larger changes than Blacks.

Also this week, an unrelated study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a high-protein diet induces sustained reductions in appetite, spontaneous caloric intake, and body weight on the whole. The study concludes that:

An increase in dietary protein from 15% to 30% of energy at a constant carbohydrate intake produces a sustained decrease in ad libitum caloric intake that may be mediated by increased central nervous system leptin sensitivity and results in significant weight loss. This anorexic effect of protein may contribute to the weight loss produced by low-carbohydrate diets.

These results suggest that it's not necessary for people to cut back carbohydrates to lose weight, according to Dr. Arne Astrup of the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, who wrote an accompanying editorial. Protein appears to encourage people to eat fewer calories overall, Astrup noted, so if people simply increase their intake of protein, that should help them lose weight without diet pills. "You can just eat a little more lean meat and low-fat dairy products," Astrup recommended.

Because increasing your consumption of protein can help to secure a desirable body mass index, and because attaining a BMI within that desirable subset is associated with an increase of net worth for most Americans, we can safely surmise that most Americans stand to benefit financially from an increase in protein intake.

Certain cautions, however, are in order in light of these recommendations. Increasing the amount of red or processed meats you eat, for example, can increase your risk of a number of fat, cholesterol, and sodium-related health problems. You should therefore try improving your overall protein consumption by eating more whole grains and hearty—rather than starchy—side dishes, as well as by adding nutritious, high-protein vegetable foods such as nigari tofu to your meals. Many people don't like tofu due largely to its typically squishy texture and its characteristic blandness; buying marinated nigari tofu solves both of these problems. Its firm, meaty texture makes it wonderful to eat, and it can be served over salads cold, right out of the package, or microwaved and snacked on with a sauce for dipping.

You can also supplement your protein intake through the addition of high-protein nutritional shakes, powders, or bars that contain no artificial sweeteners. I also want to add that an herbal supplement has emerged in the medical literature that might have the potential to produce this same effect, or to enhance this effect. It is garcinia cambogia extract, or HCA. It has some pretty remarkable properties; give that link a once over to see summaries of some of the clinical research on it.

Shrink Arrested for Doing Whipits in Grocery Store

2005-07-22T21:31:00.000-05:00

This is funny: A prominent eating disorder expert was arrested after allegedly inhaling the nitrous oxide from three cans of whipped cream and collapsing in a Connecticut supermarket. I guess she didn't realize you can buy that stuff on the internet and enjoy it in the comfort of your own home.

Lisa G. Berzins, 49, was found bleeding profusely about the head and shoulders on the floor of the dairy aisle at the Farmington Avenue Stop & Shop in West Hartford, Connecticut on May 29th. She has applied for a special type of probation reserved for first-time offenders. If a judge grants her this accelerated rehabilitation, her criminal record will be cleared upon completion of the program.

Prior to this incident, she has gained prominence as an expert on eating disorders and has appeared at schools and on television wearing a fat-suit to deliver messages about self-image. According to her American Psychological Association biography she has written and lectured on eating disorders, female development, sex roles and self-esteem.

New correlation between health and optimism

2005-07-20T20:31:00.000-05:00

The APA's Health Psychology has published the results of a new study demonstrating a positive correlation between optimism and health in times of familial crisis. From the press release:

In the first large-scale prospective study, researchers demonstrate the protective effects of an optimistic life orientation on health after experiencing a specific life stress situation. This effect was found to occur independently of a person’s actions compared to other life events that can be caused by a person’s actions, like some accidents. Furthermore, this study assessed a person’s level of optimism and pessimism before the event, which lessens the possibility of the event actually changing a person’s level of optimism.
....
The authors conclude that optimism may reduce the risk of health problems and may actually help a person recover after experiencing a serious life-changing event.

The full report: Optimism and Pessimism as Predictors of Change in Health After Death or Onset of Severe Illness in Family (PDF; 120 KB)

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If you live in the Chicago area, you can experience applied positive psychology with a Chicago Happiness Coach who can help you build up your own optimism and positivity.

The Return of LSD-25 to Clinical Research?

2005-07-20T14:30:00.000-05:00

Pravda is reporting on a “special initiative group of scientists forming the Russian Psychedelic Society,” with the primary purpose of legalizing psychedelic drugs for scientific and medical use. Their first target: d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25. According to the article, “prominent US scientist, Stanislav Grof, is expected to participate in the first congress of the new organization, which is slated to take place in November 2005.”

Stanislav Grof, a Czechoslovakian by birth, is one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, a major influence on the development of integral theory, and a pioneering researcher into the use of altered states of consciousness for psychological healing and insight. His early studies of LSD are widely known; he constructed a theoretical framework for pre- and perinatal psychology and transpersonal psychology in which powerfully emotional experiences such as LSD trips were mapped onto one's early fetal and neonatal experiences. Over time, this theory developed into an in-depth cartography of the deep human psyche.

Following the legal suppression of LSD use in the late 1960s, Grof went on to discover that many of these states of mind could be explored without drugs and instead by using certain breathing techniques in a supportive environment, a technique he calls Holotropic Breathwork. Today, Grof is in semi-retirement, although he still teaches some modules at his residential Grof Transpersonal Training program.

Some of Grof's works include:

Special two-DVD set Transpersonal Conversations
The Adventure of Self-Discovery
The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transendence in Psychotherapy
Beyond Death: The Gates of Consciousness
Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research
Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

According to Anton Chuppin, a spokeman for the initiative group, “A group of American scientists and cultural figures addressed to the US Surgeon General last year with a request to legalize LSD-25 to use it in medicine.” Actress Barbara Streisand was among these, claiming that therapeutic usage of LSD had helped her survive a nervous breakdown after the discovery that her only son was a homosexual.

E-mail forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange

2005-07-18T15:41:00.000-05:00

University of Illinois doctoral student Ben Gross made big press last week when this New Scientist article unveiled “his and his colleagues’” (Jeff Ubois) theory that e-mail forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange:

Forwarding a genuinely amusing or interesting link to a friend, for example, shows that you are thinking of them and are aware of the sort of content they like, Gross says. But passing an irrelevant or out-of-date link on to contacts can be annoying, thus lowering the sender's social status in the recipient’s eyes.

I've got a big soft spot for these manifestations of the instinctive gift economy anyway, but there's something else about this. The article goes on to talk about viral marketing campaigns, how they intuitively rely on this social gifting mechanism.

The idea of viral marketing feels dirty to me. It has the same almost-alluring greasiness that you get when a friend tries to sell you Amway—they get that vacant, over-motivated Tony-Robbins-meets-Smigel gleam in their eye; it's like they're showing you their precious and offering to let you build up an empire of preciousness all your own for just one small startup fee and the cost of inventory, plus they'll include their expert guidance for free just because they like you. See? It's like a gift.

There is, however, a sort of self-limiting quality to these viral marketing schemes: so far they only seem to be successful in as far as they actually are pretty cool or at least pretty funny. The coolness of the thing drops out right away when the corporate shit-eater comes out to play, in which case the propaganda fails to be forwarded and no one ever hears about it.

What I want to know is this: how long before some evil marketing genius discovers the next great chain-letter, and convinces my girlfriend's aunt from Nebraska to forward me adverts for diet pills a few dozen times?

Statement of Purpose

2005-07-18T10:34:00.000-05:00

This blog exists for the purpose of tracking and discussing important developments in the sciences, specifically as they are relevant to positive psychology, human potential, and post-civilizational arrangments.

My professional background is in psychology, and I am a current student and the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, where I am studying Clinical Psychology in preparation for private practice. I am planning on a career in psychology that is not centered around pathology, but around potential and growth.

Toward these ends I am particularly interested in Jungian Analysis--especially some of Ira Progoff's examinations of synchronicity and his intensive journaling method, as well as certain intellectual cousins in the field of ritual magic--and hypnotic phenomena, specifically Ericksonian language patterns and the later work of NLP developers John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Some more traditional shamanic and spiritual approaches interest me as well.

The reason this is important is because this is the perspective that I would like to bring to the table regarding these issues, and it is a perspective that I feel often doesn't get a lot of press. Often I feel like the psychiatrists just want to dope you up, the psychologists just want to talk about your problems, the doctors want to cut you open, and hardly anybody seems to understand the true implications of the biopsychosocial reality: there is a relationship between the type of culture that has developed in the industrial and post-industrial age, the mindset associated with that culture, and the ailments of the individuals in that culture and of the culture as a whole that are initiated or exacerbated by the prevailing biological conditions. The mindset that focuses on what is wrong and incomplete may itself be a key factor in promoting those conditions. If someone comes to me in therapeutic setting complaining of being depressed, my first question is, "When do you feel better than that?" I think traditional physiological medicine stands to benefit from a move toward that approach, as well.

In a previous life I was a web programmer (PHP, mostly), and in several concurrent lives I am a literary poet.

From that starting point, I hope to offer here a commentary and juxtaposition that is of some redeeming value. Your readership, comments, feedback, links, and moral support are greatly appreciated.