psycho killer

 Evolutionary psychologists say women are mostly attracted to men who are killers. It’s their nature. Brute strength with little conscience is a trait that has survival value in the wild. May explain the emotions expressed by the fans of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Their love is not an anomaly.

The English teacher

16 year-old Johnny enjoyed a 2-year relationship with his High School English teacher, Laura. She was pretty and young-looking and he was in love. He fathered her child and wanted to marry her when she got out of jail. Now they share an apartment and custody of a two-year old boy …and they’ve found means of support. Quite a feat for a fry-cook and an unemployed teacher. He successfully sued the school district for allowing this to happen. As twisted as this may sound, it does illustrate an example of healthy psychological development: 1) He successfully resolved the age-old conflict between sexual readiness and social/cultural prohibitions. 2) He overcame financial hardship posed by limited employment opportunities.

Hannah

Psychopathy: patient exhibits complete disregard for what other members of the asylum think and feel ..including what she thinks and feels herself .

Living in the Past

Change underlies nature. Rainstorms don’t last forever, they pass and leave room for a new cycle of growth to begin. Not so with man-made products. They may pass from view but they never go away. Waste products often don’t breakdown ..they become part of the landscape ..entering landfills, the food chain and water supply. What defies nature becomes toxic. The same with information. Digital records never go away. They follow us around. Without change, information becomes stagnant and obsolete. In the brain, rumination creates like whirlpools where information circles but is not allowed to escape. When this happens we become stuck and live in a time that doesn’t exist anymore.

Affirmative Consent

In response to 'Affirmative Consent'  by Dr. Paul R. Abramson (x)

"..a person's approach to sexual behavior and relationships is often already firmly established by the time he or she reaches college ..ameliorative measures at the college level might come years too late. If we want to get it right, we must begin educating them in junior high school about the necessity of affirmative consent. The [best way] to do that is to make it part of the mandatory sex education curriculum."  - Dr. Paul R. Abramson

I agree. Our approach to sexual relationships is established well before college, however, I'm not sure classroom instruction is the answer. We're reared in a culture of 'intoxicated sex'. There are few opportunities for young people to meet without ingesting intoxicants to help ease the anxiety of social interaction. I think the Boy's and Girl's club is a better place than sex ed class .. and could be greatly expanded. It's a place where young people can go to meet while doing something other than drinking. I mean activities like video games, dance ..and even ping-pong are far less stressful than High School parties. Classroom instruction often goes out the window in the face of social anxiety. Engaging with others in a more natural setting while learning first-hand the consequences of disrespect and offensive behavior is, in my opinion, a step toward healthier relations ..and possibly away from a culture of intoxicated sex.

hemispheres

a case of false resonance

Psychologists say we often blame things on the most sensational events in recent memory. Vivid as they may be ..they are often suspect. Many people believe that the police framed OJ Simpson for the murder of his wife. After he was acquitted, jury members said things like “..reminded me of how the cops pulled-over and harassed my cousin Charlie.” A high school student shoots and kills his teacher and another student ..and people say “..have you seen the computer games kids play these days?” Our neighbor’s teenage daughter is committed to a mental institution and my sister goes “..no wonder, you should have seen how OCD her mother was.” I have to agree with Psychologists ..real life is not so easy to explain. Violent computer games don’t necessarily escalate into high school shootings. A brutal cop at a traffic stop is not the same as a police conspiracy. And I don’t think there’s any evidence that strict child rearing practices cause insanity ..although my sister says the neighbor drove her crazy as well.

Boundaries

“Teenagers with mental distress come mostly from families near the boundaries between socio-economic classes ..not families who live squarely in one class or another.”   [Center for Disease Control]

This report caught my attention. I grew up in a fairly affluent, upper-middle class neighborhood ..but belonged to an income class that was closer to the bottom of the socio-economic scale. The result of a divorce settlement that kept us in a nice place but with just enough money to eat ..if we stuck with Taco Bell and beef jerky. We basically relied on the charity of sympathetic neighbors to get by. We we’re definitely living near the vicinity of different class boundaries. I was forbidden from hanging out with kids in families from my income class (according to my mom it didn’t reflect well in the neighborhood I was in) while kids in my neighborhood were discouraged from hanging out with me by their parents ..out of fear I'd become another  ‘dependent’. Now I’m not looking to assign blame here or anything. There are more than enough reasons for the ‘distress’ I felt. I was definitely a major contributor. But this article resonates. It wasn’t until I got the hell out of Dodge that my depression cleared. Economic class is a largely unspoken source of discrimination in the U.S.

psychology of memory

It's a construction-site; revising the past based on present and future (predicted) things [link].

Online Comments

This morning I ran across a study that says inflammatory online comments are better at changing someone’s mind than civil comments [ link ]. Sounds intuitive enough. Provocation is more commanding than reason. However I’d like to see a study that shows how relevant these online comments really are. Most of the one’s I’ve read have little to do with the topic they’re commenting on and more to do with broadcasting whatever’s on someone’s mind. For instance, I bet comments on an article about Ben Affleck wining the Oscars will mention Jennifer Lopez almost as often as they mention the movie Argo.

Adaptability

I’m sitting on the deck sipping coffee and scanning the paper for items of interest. I see where they’re accusing Gov. Jan Brewer of ‘flip flopping’ and zero-in. I cringe at this term. Apparently she changed her position on an issue. Ordinarily politics doesn’t interest me much but when politicians start making claims about the psyche .. I take notice. To me, the ability to focus and shift perspective with equal ease is an admirable quality [ link ]. Others call it a sign of inconsistency and weakness. Flip-flopping is not a flattering term. However, sticking to a single position must mean tuning-out a lot of information that doesn’t conform. I think Greek Philosophers call this a Procrustean solution ..the practice of tailoring data to fit a preconceived idea [ link ]. During periods of rapid change ..it doesn’t sound like much of an asset. Probably the reason Senator Russell Pearce was recalled in 2011.

Somatic awareness

Psychologists say that yoga and breathing exercises improve ‘somatic awareness’ ..and that somatic awareness replaces anticipation and rumination. I have a tendency to look forward and backwards a lot. They say it can be a source of anxiety and depression. Somatic awareness helps me better sense when my mind wanders from the here and now [ link ].

Buddhist parable

“I am going to give you big secret of the fountain of youth that will save you much money on cosmetics and plastic surgery: In stillness we do not age as quickly as those whose minds are constantly battling to hold their personalities together.”  ◊  Wing

Psychologists have reached the same conclusion. A large amount of mental activity is devoted to making sure what we say conforms to our personality. In a study titled Cognitive demand and self-presentation [link] they asked participants about a specific event. Participants often answered with general or average cases that best represented the image they were trying to maintain. Far easier to report an actual experience than figure an average.

Lifespan development

Why some kids handle pressure and others fall apart ..

Declining memory

I don’t think I’m losing my memory. No ..it’s more like I’m blurring the lines that separate memories. I’m connecting people and events that never occurred together in the first place. For instance, the other night I was watching the movie ‘Time Travelers Wife’ ..and Jen came to mind, the person who originally recommended it. That’s OK. However later on I was thinking about someone else, Andrea ..and suddenly I’m sensing the presence of ‘Time Traveler’s Wife’ as though she were the one who recommended it. In fact we never talked about it. It took me a moment to realize that the only connection between her and the film is that she works at the same place as Jen, which is really no connection at all. I wonder if there’s a word for this type of condition. Hyper connectivity ..? Perforated boundaries ..? The older I get ..the more loosely organized memory becomes. Am I losing memories ..? No ..it’s more like I’m losing my mind.

Decision making

Decisions are mostly intuitive, logical explanations
catch-up milliseconds later ~ Robert Sapolsky [ link ]

proprioceptive entry

Cleansing my palate by sucking on a lemony-flavored ricola and washing it down with warm water. Asking myself what’s worth writing about ..weighing the alternatives like I usually do ..obsessing about what others might think. What sounds cool is the big question. Like the characters in a Tom Wolfe novel ..constantly imagining the impression I leave with others ..and like those characters ..getting it wrong most of the time. When I think I look cool I probably come across more like an egotistical jerk. Now I’m reminding myself to behave in a more yielding manner, which is a topic for another time. Stop. Now I’m struggling with a short list of topics to write about ..rehab ..people of interest to me ..my own ‘explanatory style’ ..what do I mean by explanatory style ..? Looking at the narrative I use to explain what’s been happening in my life. Like when I blow off practice or a social event ..is it because I’m lazy, timid, neurotic? Slack by nature? Are these the reasons I have this gnawing feeling of discontentment ..? And are these the reasons I’ll be forever doomed to feelings of discontentment ..?

Proprioceptive writing is a practice I learned at an Esalen workshop~> [ link ]

Pathways

“The cerebral cortex, of all parts of the central nervous system, must be regarded as the most plastic in recent evolution, reflecting new behavioral requirements of niches carved out by increasingly complex relations between predator and prey, and the increasing demands for more subtle relationships within the species.” Harting (1973)

I have a theory. I believe present-day verbal abilities are an extension of our sense of tracking in the wild. Our female ancestors must have found a way to code and convey this experience before their young hit the road on their own and either got lost or devoured. A test of concept would be to see if a short course in wilderness tracking offered by Outward Bound significantly improves verbal skills. I don’t expect it will do much for phonics or vocabulary but it may help students track and comprehend discourse better as well as improve their ability to speak and write coherently. Although these skills may seem dissimilar on the surface ..they do share some common components of cognition. They both require attention, orientation and ‘signal detection’ .. or the ability to focus and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant/distracting information. Granted outdoor tracking is largely ‘spatial’ and ‘visual’ while language is ‘conceptual’ and ‘auditory’ .. the cerebral cortex responsible for conceptual thought did evolve from the sensory areas of the brain, which in humans is largely visual. Anyway, it’s just a theory.

Flickering memory

I’ve discovered that I can remember movies I watched prior to 1995 almost verbatim, however, any movie released after that, I can watch repeatedly and it’s almost like seeing it for the first time. I admit that I sometimes sit halfway through a film before realizing I’ve seen it before ..maybe even more than once. For instance, I saw ‘Body Double’ last night ...not having seen it since way back in 1985. I could remember the ending quite clearly and anticipate just about every scene ..and almost every line. However, I’ve been watching ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ over and over again with equal surprise and I’m never quite sure how it’s going to end. Go figure. Could be early onset Alzheimer’s. Could be the primacy effect where movies I saw closer to the onset of video were just more novel ..until about 1995 when the novelty wore off and I became accustomed to watching hundreds of videos a week with little recollection. In either case ..I’m having a lot less difficulty picking out videos to see for the first time these days.

Grounding

Someone told me about ‘grounding exercises’ the other day. I think they may be useful as a memory aid. I guess another term for it would be ‘focusing’. She said the way to hold a moment in your head for more than a fraction of an instant is to list a few details that you see and a few details that you hear, smell and feel. She hikes so she gave me this example. Watch the trail moving beneath your feet ..notice the flowers that grow on the side. Listen to the sound your boot makes hitting the ground ..even notice the silence in between. Notice the smell of the trees and the dust. Feel of the sun on your skin and the passing shade of trees. Or, if you’re like me .. notice the feeling of the ground on the soles of your boots (or running shoes) .. which is something I’ve been working on in outpatient. Don’t know any studies that back this up but it  sounds credible enough.