psychobabble

poetry as tonic, #13

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:23:26 -0800

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people,

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.

- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

Loneliness is transmittable from person to person, study finds (Washington Post)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:07:16 -0800

Loneliness is transmittable from person to person, study finds (Washington Post):

Although it may sound counterintuitive, loneliness can spread from one person to another, according to research being released Tuesday that underscores the power of one person’s emotions to affect friends, family and neighbors.

The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate.

“Loneliness can be transmitted,” said John T. Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who led the study being published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Loneliness is not just the property of an individual. It can be transmitted across people — even people you don’t have direct contact with.”

Eight tips for knowing if you’re boring someone (Psychology Today)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:03:08 -0800

Eight tips for knowing if you’re boring someone (Psychology Today)

British Soldiers LSD Experiment: “Fifty minutes after...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:54:34 -0800

British Soldiers LSD Experiment:

“Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.”

"…less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with others, or..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:02:55 -0800

““…less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with others, or self-reflection. While life has become more manageable for many people, it has become commensurately less engaged.””

- Kirk Schneider, Rediscovery of Awe

Think You're Multitasking? Think Again (NPR)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:51:26 -0800

Think You're Multitasking? Think Again (NPR):

“People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, “The brain is very good at deluding itself.”

Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can’t focus on more than one thing at a time.

What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.

“Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not,” Miller said.

“You’re not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly.”

Miller said there are several reasons the brain has to switch among tasks. One is that similar tasks compete to use the same part of the brain.

“Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time,” he said.

“You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That’s because of what’s called interference between the two tasks,” Miller said. “They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there’s a lot of conflict between the two of them.”

Researchers say they can actually see the brain struggling. And now they’re trying to figure out the details of what’s going on.

Psychobabble turns ONE!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:33:44 -0800

In all the craziness that was November, I entirely forgot to note the passing of the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of this site, which was November 13th. In that time, it’s grown from a small little place where I collected things (quotes and articles mostly) that I wanted to remember (and have easy access to) for my own professional use, into this surprisingly popular (and thus, far more time-consuming!) place for all things psychology and/or psychotherapy related. I can’t say I expected that when I started, but it’s certainly nice to have a large and receptive audience wanting to know more and more about the field!

So, to all of you who read this site: thank you. You are the ones who keep it going and push me to find interesting things to post, and I appreciate even a single minute of your valuable time that you spend reading Psychobabble.

Here’s to another year!

(And for nostalgia’s sake, here’s a link to the very first post on this site, one of my favorite quotes, from one of my therapist heroes.)

Inside the mind of an actor (literally)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:21:33 -0800

Inside the mind of an actor (literally) :

How does an actor engage with the part they are playing? Fiona Shaw undergoes a brain scan while reciting TS Eliot to help shed some light on the mystery.

Patient Voices: O.C.D. (NYTimes.com)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:17:20 -0800

Patient Voices: O.C.D. (NYTimes.com):

Nagging doubts, compulsions, concerns of contamination, obsessive hoarding: the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder are numerous and varied. What is it like to live this way? How does one maintain a normal life? Six men and women speak about their battles with this disorder.

Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk (New York Times)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:11:58 -0800

Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk (New York Times):

The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.

In the last decade or so, more than 500 people have undergone brain surgery for problems like depression, anxiety, Tourette’s syndrome, even obesity, most as a part of medical studies. The results have been encouraging, and this year, for the first time since frontal lobotomy fell into disrepute in the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration approved one of the surgical techniques for some cases of O.C.D.

While no more than a few thousand people are impaired enough to meet the strict criteria for the surgery right now, millions more suffering from an array of severe conditions, from depression to obesity, could seek such operations as the techniques become less experimental…

“It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get...

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:10:00 -0800

“It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.”

- Michael Chabon

———————-

I’m going to be shutting down the site for a few days, in honor of the holidays.

So, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, try not to fight with your family too much, and remember all that you have to be thankful for in this world.

Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious (NYTimes.com)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:12:57 -0800

Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious (NYTimes.com):

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress…

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

Women Who Want to Want (New York Times Magazine)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:50:53 -0800

Women Who Want to Want (New York Times Magazine):

MORE THAN BY any other sexual problem — the elusiveness of orgasm, say, or pain during sex — women feel plagued by low desire. The problems often overlap, but above all the others that can thwart an erotic life, the remoteness of lust is what impels women to seek treatment. And as Brotto discusses the disorder, she is not talking about something physical…Brotto is dealing in the domain of the mind, or in the mind’s relationship to the body, not in a problem with the body itself.

Beneath Klimt’s couple, she opened yellow case folders and described the desolation and bewilderment recorded in her notes. She spoke about a woman in her 40s who, years ago, had sex with her husband as often as seven times in a day but who now, more than a decade into a marriage with this still-handsome man, cringes at the very same gesture, the very same touch to her back, that once electrified her. Two or three months might go by now without their having sex. “It’s fine for me not to have sex at all,” Brotto quoted the wife, and commented, “I hear that from a lot of women.” And yet, at the same time, the lack of libido isn’t fine at all. “What exactly is turning me off?”

Psychologists have been watching us on the subway. Here's what they've learned. (Slate)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:33:01 -0800

Psychologists have been watching us on the subway. Here's what they've learned. (Slate):

Spend enough time riding the New York City subway—or any big-city metro—and you’ll find yourself on the tenure-track to an honorary degree in transit psychology. The subway—which keeps random people together in a contained, observable setting—is a perfect rolling laboratory for the study of human behavior. As the sociologists M.L. Fried and V.J. De Fazio once noted, “The subway is one of the few places in a large urban center where all races and religions and most social classes are confronted with one another and the same situation.”

Or situations. The subway presents any number of discrete, and repeatable, moments of interaction, opportunities to test how “situational factors” affect outcomes. A pregnant woman appears: Who will give up his seat first? A blind man slips and falls. Who helps? Someone appears out of the blue and asks you to mail a letter. Will you? In all these scenarios much depends on the parties involved, their location on the train and the location of the train itself, and the number of other people present, among other variables. And rush-hour changes everything…

…as the authors of the essay “Subway Behavior,” (in the book People and Places: Sociology of the Familiar) put it, “subway behavior is regulated by certain societal rules and regulations that serve to protect personal rights and to sustain proper social distance between unacquainted people who are temporarily placed together in unfocused and focused interaction.”

What much subway psychology seeks to understand, however, is what holds these rules in place, and what happens when they are violated. In one of the most well-known studies, social psychologist Stanley Milgram had students spontaneously ask subway riders to give up their seats. As Thomas Blass recounts in The Man Who Shocked the World, this experiment arose from the seeming erosion of a subway norm. As Milgram’s mother-in-law had posed it to him: “Why don’t young people get up anymore in a bus or a subway train to give their seat to a gray-haired elderly woman?”

Milgram wanted to know: What if you simply asked them to? And so students in his experimental social psychology class took to the underground to ask for seats, under a number of conditions (either with no justification, or offering a rationale like “I can’t read my book standing up”). People were surprisingly compliant—a total of 68 percent either got up or moved over in the “no justification” condition. The more justification that was offered, however, the less likely people were to stand up. Curiously, Blass notes, the most striking thing for many of the participants was just how difficult it was to ask for the seat (“I actually felt as if I were going to perish,” recalled Milgram). It’s not hard to imagine why; asking for help on a subway exposes one to both the risk of a certain stigma—and to the possibility of rejection. When the New York Timesreplicated the Milgram study, less scientifically, compliance rates were higher.

"The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but..."

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:07:54 -0800

““The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help (the client) acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering. “”

- Carl Jung

'The Red Book': A Window Into Jung's Dreams (NPR)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:06:38 -0800

'The Red Book': A Window Into Jung's Dreams (NPR):

The first words of Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book are “The way of what is to come.”

What follows is 16 years of the psychoanalyst’s dive into the unconscious mind, a challenge to what he considered Sigmund Frued’s — his former mentor’s — isolated world view. Far from a simple narrative, the Red Book is Jung’s voyage of discovery into his deepest self.

The voyage began at age 11. “On my way to school,” Jung recalled in 1959, “I stepped out of a mist and I knew I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, ‘But what have I been before?’ And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things; I was just one thing among many things.”

Thirty years later, Jung had a bookbinder make an enormous volume covered in red leather into which he poured his explorations into himself. These explorations included some psychedelic drawings of mythical characters of his dreams and waking fantasies — explorations that Jung feared would make people think him mad.

It took Jungian scholar Dr. Sonu Shamdasani three years to convince Jung’s family to bring the book out of hiding. It took another 13 years to translate it.

And still, the Red Book remains incomplete. The last word Jung wrote in the Red Book is “moglichkeit,” or possibility.

From its hiding place in a Swiss bank vault, the original Red Book is now on display for the first time at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan, and the translation of the massive volume is at book stores for a hefty $200.

"Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint..."

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:57:56 -0800

“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”

- Graham Greene

Poets vs. Critics: using different brain systems (Psychology Today)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:56:33 -0800

Poets vs. Critics: using different brain systems (Psychology Today):

Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets, Jerry Maguire,convoked a group to read poems. Jerry’s idea was to bring poets and critics together in order to compare their readings.

What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group. It turned out that poets and critics read poems quite differently.

The critics concerned themselves with things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings. The poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns, and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems. To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.

Now, it turns out, they may have been using different systems in their brains. Kenneth Heilman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Florida, has a fine paper setting out the “information-processing approach” to the various aphasias. He lists eleven different aphasias, and his paper uses the kind of block diagrams computer programmers use to distinguish and interrelate them…

Detail of an illustration of a solar barge on page 55 of Carl...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:51:28 -0800

Detail of an illustration of a solar barge on page 55 of Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Translated, the complete text on the page reads: “One word that was never spoken. / One light that was never lit up. / An unparalleled confusion. / And a road without end.”

(via NPR)

What your Facebook page says about who you "really" are (Cognitive Daily)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:41:28 -0800

What your Facebook page says about who you "really" are (Cognitive Daily):

Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady asked 37 undergraduate volunteers to physically meet with another person and ask each other questions to try to get to know one and other. These brief meetings were videotaped, and, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the person they met with was not a real research participant, but one of six specially trained research assistants who took care to make sure that each volunteer was treated the same.

Immediately after the interview, the researchers obtained permission to download each volunteer’s Facebook page. Then their interviewer rated them for likability, and three undergraduate research assistants from a different university rated the videotaped behavior for cues indicating non-verbal expressivity, and for “verbal disclosure”—how willing they were to disclose personal details. A different set of ten undergraduates from a different university rated the volunteers’ Facebook pages for likability and expressivity, as well as the number of personal details revealed there.

The researchers found significant correlations between the behavior of the volunteers in person and online. “Liking” in person and online were moderately correlated (r = .33), as were verbal disclosure and online disclosure (r = .34). Non-verbal expressivity was also correlated with online expressivity (r = .41). But the relationship wasn’t perfect. While online expressivity was strongly correlated with online liking (r = .61), there was no significant correlation between online expressivity and liking in person.

So a Facebook page really can say a lot about what a person is like in real life—up to a point. The researchers also point out that their study can’t tell us much about the student’s spontaneous online behavior. A Facebook page might have been carefully crafted over many hours, but other online interactions like tweets and status updates can be much more spur-of-the-moment. It’s less clear whether this behavior is related to real-life spontaneity.