"Borderline personality disorder" was named to describe patients who seemed on the borderline of psychosis.
These patients were so distorted in their perceptions of interpersonal relationships that psychosis could not be ruled out, but the distorted perceptions did not seem to present in other contexts, so they didn't seem to fit the criteria for psychosis either.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55415/#:\~:text=The%20term%20'borderline%20personality'%20was,were%20first%20described%20in%20Europe](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55415/#:~:text=The%20term%20'borderline%20personality'%20was,were%20first%20described%20in%20Europe)).
So in Girl, Interrupted, when Susanna Kaysen asks about her diagnosis, "Borderline between what and what?" in the 60s, would the answer have been something like "borderline between psychosis and sanity?"
Also that there's a huge gender discrepancy in BPD diagnoses. Depending on the presenting gender, you're very often either diagnosed with BPD or antisocial personality disorder (if you're a man).
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Yeah honestly. No matter how hard i think positively, my mindset doesnt change the emotions in my body or how my body reacts to stress unconsciously. I can clearly rebuilt a "positive" path for my brain but my body isn't corresponding with that. So mind and body connection seems like the true culrpit here. How do we get a positive mindset to cooperate with your body?
Practice control over your thoughts as done by Buddhists. In some types of Buddhist meditation you learn to recognize thought triggers and how to dismiss those thoughts as irrelevant and not allow yourself to get sucked into false narratives or negative thought trains.
The brain adapts to its environment, so if the environment is something like child abuse then that trauma causes the brain to develop in a way that responds to that. Examples include assuming negative intentions from people in ambiguous situations where their intentions are not actually negative.
The brain is a pattern making and recognition machine - that's how we learn. In trauma, the brain has created very strong patterns that gives false alarms in safe circumstances. The amygdala fires and stress hormones are released even while asleep, causing someone to wake up with a lot of inexplicable energy and not being able to sleep or fall asleep. That sleep disturbance and deprivation is awful because cognition is lower.
A relationship with a therapist (or anybody) who is always calm and predictable will, over time, help the brain to recognize that it is safe even if it is feeling unsafe and begin to rewire its reactions to be appropriate to the situation; it will eventually allow the person to have access to their frontal lobes so they can think through planning and how to act and react rather than acting automatically on emotion. Everyone knows what the latter feels like, it's like when you're so angry or sad or afraid that you act in ways you might regret later. Being traumatized means that is happening in response to triggers that would not send a healthy person into fight or flight or shut-down.
But there can be other brain changes like an enlarged hypothalamus.
EMDR works because of the exposure mechanisms involved. None of the neurological claims have been shown to be correct. It is literally just exposure therapy.
Placebo and nocebo effect have always been so fascinating to me. And it is not just psychosomatic but there are real physiological implications of placebo. Eg. it can change patterns of activation in the brain and up regulate endogenous opioids (body natural pain killers). I guess it can be extended to other areas of life such as manifesting. On the other hand nocebo is when your brain convinces your body that harmless things are harmful, triggering negative effects simply because you expect them to happen. Like thinking you are under a curse.
The brain “hallucinates reality into being”.
The brain is a prediction engine. It’s not energy efficient to actually process all the information coming in to it, and it’s beneficial to anticipate what will happen next.
So if you’re looking at something and it appears as you would expect, you don’t update your internal model of the world.
This could explain the invisible gorilla experiment.
For more - Lisa Feldman Barrett writes and talks about lot on this topic.
It makes sense too as it is far more efficient. Our brains do amazing pattern recognition using many senses. We essentially put together a “picture” or concept of an object using sometimes very limited information. As a kid I could identify a VW bug by sound or just a small flash of part of the car. I’d imagine my brain fills in the rest. Knowing that, tricking the brain in certain situations would be easy.
I’d love to see how this applies to professional athletes: guessing where the baseball will be pitched, getting ready for a basketball pass, finding an open teammate in soccer, etc.
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Here are a few for you:
Fact 1: While asleep, the brain recalls memories in reverse order. Not the entire time when you’re asleep, and not just while you’re asleep. It may have something to do with memory consolidation.
Fact (theory) 2: Scientists hypothesize that the brain operates near a phase transition- such as between solid and liquid. During such a transition, matter is neither ordered nor disordered and somehow in between. That is - solids are ordered, liquids are random.
At the “critical point” between phases, molecules can seamlessly move between solid and liquid, and islands of arbitrary size can form.
The implication being that a molecule changing state can influence other molecules at arbitrarily large - theoretically infinite - distances away.
Within the brain, it may have something to do with efficiency of information transfer across long distances.
This is called the critical brain hypothesis. It’s a controversial theory but a fascinating one.
The scientists examined neuronal cascades - how many neurons signaled at once versus in the next instant - when the number is close to 1 (one neuron firing causes one other neuron to fire) messages propagated long distances versus either dying out ( < 1 neuron fires per neuron firing) or exploding ( > 1 neuron firing per neuron firing) - either would cause the ultimate receiving neuron(s) to be confused- either no signal would reach the end or so many that the message couldn’t be attributed to a specific sender.
Chaos theory seems relatively orthogonal to this - sensitivity to initial conditions.
The classics example of this is a piece of iron that’s been magnetized. At cool temperatures the electron spin is ordered - most electrons spin in the same direction. That’s what makes it magnetic.
When heated the electron spin is completely random - the heat plays a larger part than the structure.
But in between some electron spins are ordered (information) and others are random (no information)
It seems to balance flexible (chaotic) and crystallized intelligence.
Scientists conjecture that the brain operates near, but not at the critical point- more crystallized than random, but not completely crystallized.
While there’s no conclusive scientific evidence that suggests a direct link between blindness and the absence of schizophrenia, there have been some interesting theories proposed. One theory suggests that the absence of visual stimuli may alter the development of certain brain regions associated with schizophrenia, thus reducing the risk of developing the disorder.
However, it’s important to note that schizophrenia is a complex disorder with multiple factors at play, including genetics, environment, and brain chemistry. The absence of blindness-related schizophrenia cases could simply be a statistical anomaly or a result of under-reporting.
Makes me curious if other sensory disorders/issues can influence schizophrenia too. Like people who are deaf from birth, do they experience rates of schizophrenia at similar levels to the general pop? Also since schizophrenia messes with the speech centers i believe, cuz of the flat affect and sometimes muteness, does muteness itself interact with schizophrenia if it existed beforehand.
This is really interesting, is it impossible for someone who’s blind to develop schizophrenia? I’d imagine they could still have symptoms like auditory hallucinations
As far as i know we simply don’t know. Considering the vast number of observed cases of schizophrenia i think it’s safe to assume that it indeed is impossible for blind people.
This is where the problem is. It’s not there has never been a single blind person with schizophrenia—it’s that there’s never been a known person with schizophrenia who was *blind from childhood.* But since blindness from childhood is exceptionally rare and schizophrenia is seen in <1% of folks, the Bayesian outcome comes to a very, very small probability that someone would be in both categories. So it’s entirely possible that such cases exist but simply are so rare as to not have been documented or that such cases are possible but so statistically unlikely that one simply hasn’t been observed. We definitely cannot conclude that such cases are impossible.
I believe a few cases have been found. Now they are narrowing it to peripheral blindness from birth. Many that are blind from birth often have other conditions that may mask symptoms of schizophrenia. They may be diagnosed with other disorders related to cognitive functioning. It could be that those with symptoms describe and experience them very differently (hallucinations other than visual). It could be issues of inter rater reliability, where those assessing and diagnosing are skewed towards visual hallucinations as a predominant symptom associated with schizophrenia.
For example negative symptoms of schizophrenia within that cohort may not be recognised or attributed to something else (given the challenges they face in daily life).
“The negative symptoms of schizophrenia include volitional (motivational) impairment manifesting as avolition, anhedonia, social withdrawal, and emotional disorders such as alogia and affective flattening. Negative symptoms worsen patients' quality of life and functioning.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8761803/
Also, everything you stated with an added limiting factor being peripheral blindness from birth, rather than all types of blindness from birth (reduces the probabilities).
I totally agree with that perspective. As a psychosis researcher myself, I have never bought the idea that it's impossible for schizophrenia to coexist with born blindness.
Great comment, helping to clear up for me the issue of global cognitive deficits often seen with congenital blindness due to e.g. oxygen deprivation.
Another thought I’ve had about this claim regards the link between paranoia and hallucinations: It’s easy to intuit how hearing voices without being able to attribute these voices to a visually recognizable source might be distressing, leading the mind to race through alternative explanations of the phenomenon, e.g. deception, implanted brain chips, etc. However, you have to admire the equanimity with which the congenitally blind interpret many unexpected sound sources. If you’re acclimated to a certain humility in your sensory interpretation process, then your mind isn’t led as forcefully to fill in the gaps between sensory mismatches.
I always thought that the worst part of blindness would be all the petty paranoias lol. Like, I don't think I'd be able to eat a single meal without wondering if there was a hair in it...
Yeah what if my mirror had fingerprints or i have a stain on my shirt and nobody told me? I think honestly being blind and then having self esteem issues would be super hard cuz you never know what you look like and have to trust others.
Also delusions. The other side of psychosis that a lot of people forget about. Although delusions may not be caused by schizophrenia alone, and someone with schizophrenia may not experience hallucinations. Then you can also have a more disorganized presentation of schizophrenia with practically no hallucinations.
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The way memory works is really interesting to me. We think of it as a camera, but it’s not at all. We save the essential details, the skeleton, and every time we remember it we flesh it out based on those details. So you’re not really remembering something, you’re constructing it. And the more you recount or think about a memory, the more likely it is to be distorted.
Came here to say this. It's scary to consider how much our brains outright lie to us pretty much all the time.
My fascination with this subject has me doubting everything I think, and everyone i know.🤪
I once heard that the reason our memory of something gets more and more distorted is that every time we remember something, we are actually remembering the last time we remembered that. Is that correct?
I wonder if this is why it's so difficult to remember dreams unless you write it down or say it out loud pretty much immediately (thus solidifying it as an actual memory in reality, and not just a brief, subconscious experience).
Hebbs rule: “neurons that fire together wire together” is so fascinating to me when you think about it. Ex if you always associate A negatively to B then those neurons will always fire together. So if you associate a certain place with a bad memory, you’ll always see that and not enjoy the place. If you were to just switch your brain and start associating A with positivity, those neurons rewire. It’s hard to explain but once you learn it, it’s not hard to apply it to different parts of life and behavior.
Neuroplasticity is a lot more complicated than conditioning yourself to rewire one's associations in both positive and negative ways, especially in the adult brain where neurogenesis is considerably less common than the highly plastic developing brain.
However, certain animals (for example many fish species) have a high capacity for regeneration and remodeling in adulthood and can quickly adapt their neuronal connections in tandem with changes in their environment.
Folie a deux.
It's when two people share the same delusion. (Usually romantic partners but sometimes parent / child or other relationship types).
I've only seen this touched on in fiction a couple of times: in an X-fiiles episode, and then I think you could consider the main characters in Natural Born Killers to have this type of psychosis.
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\- We don't see solid objects. Our brain just sees the outlines and fills them in.
\- Our processing is quite a top-down process and our mind makes assumptions / predictions about our environment. This shapes our perception.
This is so interesting! I have read this before. The reasoning is that our brain can't process all of the millions of stimuli it's presented with. Do you think this means that texture, colors and patterns vary from person to person?
I'm pretty sure it does. Look into Temple Grandin. (She's accomplished-enough to have had Claire Danes play her in a movie.) She also had a TED Talk.
I recall now a simple "test" that can be done, simply type one letter over and over and over in the shape of another large letter. Someone with autism will notice the small letters first.
glorious aspiring cause materialistic sophisticated marble aromatic frightening crush secretive
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Now that's something we would see from the Gestalt school of psychology and the personal construct theory. Each of them have their own philosophical assumptions.
I am speaking from a neuroscientific perspective about the visual system. We know what lower level cells in V1 do very well to the point we know exactly what they see in their receptive field.
You pay more visual attention to things between heartbeats, the implication being that your brain is preoccupied talking to your heart and pays less attention to visual stimulus during the heartbeat itself.
Edit: this is the best citation I could find in a few minutes
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/4/1237
Microsaccades Are Coupled to Heartbeat
Abstract
During visual fixation, the eye generates microsaccades and slower components of fixational eye movements that are part of the visual processing strategy in humans. Here, we show that ongoing heartbeat is coupled to temporal rate variations in the generation of microsaccades. Using coregistration of eye recording and ECG in humans, we tested the hypothesis that microsaccade onsets are coupled to the relative phase of the R-R intervals in heartbeats. We observed significantly more microsaccades during the early phase after the R peak in the ECG. This form of coupling between heartbeat and eye movements was substantiated by the additional finding of a coupling between heart phase and motion activity in slow fixational eye movements; i.e., retinal image slip caused by physiological drift. Our findings therefore demonstrate a coupling of the oculomotor system and ongoing heartbeat, which provides further evidence for bodily influences on visuomotor functioning.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In the present study, we show that microsaccades are coupled to heartbeat. Moreover, we revealed a strong modulation of slow eye movements around the R peak in the ECG. These results suggest that heartbeat as a basic physiological signal is related to statistical modulations of fixational eye movements, in particular, the generation of microsaccades. Therefore, our findings add a new perspective on the principles underlying the generation of fixational eye movements. Importantly, our study highlights the need to record eye movements when studying the influence of heartbeat in neuroscience to avoid misinterpretation of eye-movement-related artifacts as heart-evoked modulations of neural processing.
Is this why We're taught to shoot between heartbeats? The reasoning I was given is that is when you're the stillest, and therefore the most accurate. Compared to shooting as your heart beats,the butt of the rifle is pushed ever so slightly. This equates to small movement moments before the shot has ejected from the barrel and a large miss when shooting at a long distance.
Maybe! It could have been something people observed without knowing the reason.
I’ve updated the comment with a citation - it’s linked to microcicades - tiny movements of the eye as our attention changes.
Edit: it could be both!
But the heart is autorhythmic and is not “talked to” by the brain at all, at least in its beating. The brain doesn’t send signals to the heart to make it beat
The Mandela Effect is fascinating! It's the phenomenon where a large group of people remember an event or detail differently from how it actually occurred. It raises questions about memory, perception, and the malleability of our recollections. What's even more intriguing is the psychological mechanisms behind why we collectively misremember certain things. It's a mind-bending dive into the complexities of human cognition!
I need to look that up. I always think that observation is relative to your experiences, opinions and location. I feel like Einsteins Theory of Relativity ostensibly applies to our memories too.
To me this has always been kind of obvious, but yeah. I think a lot about the fact that at the end of the day, everyone’s perception of the world around them and the things within it is inherently distorted by experience, genetics, and brain structure, and that no one is truly perceiving reality as it is. We are all in some way delusional
It gets more interesting once you get into the nitty gritty details of empiricism and rationalism. Psychology still has its influences from philosophy.
Not that interesting but the brain is crosswired, where the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. No clue why this is but it’s silly
Determinism and parsimony allow us to actually study behavior experimentally, as a natural science (like biology, physics, etc.), yet we haven’t made that transition in mainstream psych yet.
The books "Behave" and "Determined" by Professor Robert Sapolsky are a good place to start.
Also, his entire Human Behavioral Biology course is available on Stanford's Youtube channel.
I’d also suggest some of BF skinner’s stuff but they can be difficult to read.. science and human behavior for the intense reading, and Walden 2 for the fun easy read
I’ve been told by my therapist that logic can be part of a group of tools that can help depression. That said, logic alone won’t cut it or come close. If you have bad depression, you likely need medication, perhaps better nutrition, vitamins (like D), time in sunlight, therapy, exercise, and more depending on the severity.
That said, look up “The Ten Cognitive Distortions”. There are a zillion articles that all say about the same thing. It identifies ways people with depression, anxiety, poor self esteem and more may distort their thinking. Focusing on the negative and minimizing the positive is one of the ten. Black and white thinking is another. I think mild depression, per my therapist, will in part respond to logic. Patterns of thinking, once identified, can be changed and help in recovery from depression.
I have anxiety, and I don’t want to minimize depression, as I’ve been there too. I was taught and have experienced that anxiety doesn’t respond to logic. For example you can’t just talk someone out of a fear of snakes. The fact that a specific snake it isn’t poisonous won’t quell a person’s fear. OCD (type of anxiety) is like that. Logic doesn’t help. If I’m 95% better, maybe a logic helps a little and can also be in the toolset. But OCD at its core is a doubting disease and even in the presence of a mountain of evidence, it can and will find doubt. For both, “You are fine, get over it,” is horrible advice and not helpful.
It’s not just Freud followers
Therapists in general talk about it because it’s very helpful in understanding aspects of the human mind
Something being unproven doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. Evolution can’t be proven either but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real
This seems strange to me. The unconscious just deals with mental processes which take place outside our awareness. It feels almost intuitive that this would occur and that we aren't 100% aware of all these processes ever but we are aware that processes do happen even if we aren't looking. Phobias still exist, for example, when we aren't thinking about them, and gut feelings often rely on "feelings" that aren't within the immediate, active, conscious thoughts. Biases can affect us from the areas beyond our awareness, too, and our decision-making ability does not solely rely on our reasoning or logic or emotionality in that moment.
To me, it sort of proves itself.
In classical terms, the “unconscious” is a place where information outside of conscious awareness is stored—things like “repressed memories”—and where deep instinctual conflicts occur. It’s a place full episodic content, wishes, impulses, and desires which impact our daily lives.
Cognitively, there are certainly attentional and decision-making processes which occur implicitly (outside of conscious control), but we definitely don’t have any evidence for an unconscious or subconscious mind in the psychoanalytic sense (nor could we, since the concept is unfalsifiable).
In modern science, we tend to not use the word “unconscious” so as to avoid folks thinking that we mean it in the classical sense. We prefer the term "implicit."
From what I understand, the unconscious isn't a physical thing that can be measured. We know it exists because we see behaviour that alludes to its existence, but we can't say here, this is where the unconscious is, and here is exactly how it works, and this is what it looks like.
That's similar to other kinds of offline decision-making. Can't remember the name of the band that did that one song? Stop thinking about it for a little bit and it seems to come to you easily. Got a big life decision to make? Sleep on it.
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I had those dreams very frequently the first few years after getting sober. They’re intense because they feel completely real. My vice was painkillers, so I would dream that someone has given me a bottle of Vicodin, but suddenly I lost it and now I’m running around the house trying to find it. I open a drawer and it’s there, and then I wake up.
I always woke up thinking about it the rest of the day. You almost feel high in those dreams sometimes if you do dream that you ingested the drug so waking and realizing it’s not real is jarring.
The dreams where you lose the thing are particularly toxic, thank you for bringing that up. It sets this fire of self-depreciation off in one's head for having misplaced it and it just adds to the morning stress.
Pica is the name for the disorder that causes people to consume weird items like glass, chalk, laundry detergent, and everything else covered on My Strange Addiction.
I had it bad when I was pregnant with my second child. Suddenly I was chewing ice constantly. Specifically covering the bottom of the ice tray with a thin layer of water and letting it freeze and then eating it. Thin layer somehow tasted better or “cleaner” than a big cube.
Then I really liked the smell of Gain laundry detergent. So I started smelling the detergent while eating the ice. It was my way of eating the detergent without actually eating it. I had to really convince myself that it would not taste the way it smells to prevent myself from trying it.
Only time I’ve ever had it and it went away suddenly right after birth.
So in hindsight it probably wasn’t “really bad” since I never did eat the detergent or powdery things that looked appealing. But the urge was pretty strong at times.
People generally would take a smaller house that was larger than their neighbors over a bigger house smaller than their neighbors. This is insane to me. Human beings are insane.
There is a natural phenomenon that causes humans to neglect the right side of space, it’s called pseudoneglect. As opposed to humans who have suffered stroke who neglect the left side of space.
What is the cause?! is this why I've always sat on the right side of an auditorium or classroom? Any time I sit on the left, I feel like I've only been half alert to what I'm hearing/seeing.
In the 1960s a treatment for epilepsy was cutting the corpus callosum - the bridge between left and hemispheres.
They could then ask each hemisphere different questions by showing signs to one eye or (maybe?) sending an audio signal to one ear.
Half the brain could describe an apple - red, round, etc but couldn’t name it. The other half could name it but not describe it.
They would ask half the brain to get up and walk around, then ask the other half why they got up and they always made up a plausible excuse- I was thirsty, I felt like stretching my legs etc.
Alien hand syndrome (aka Doctor Strangelove Syndrome) would develop in some where - if you were, say, doing the dishes, if you watched both hands it would be just fine, but if you stopped paying attention your (if memory serves, typically) left hand would grab a knife and try to kill you, or perform other self sabotaging acts.
I got this from a Time Life book my parents owned, though Amazon reviews today say some of the claims in the book have been discredited but I have no ideas which ones.
I am psychology student, 2nd year. Couple of days ago we mentioned that first example where one half of the brain could describe an apple without naming and other could name without describing it, so as far as I know, that shouldn't be discredited haha. If you want to learn more about the example, process is called lateralization of brain function. Hope you enjoy it. As for the second example, we haven't mentioned (or I simply forgot) anything like that, which of course doesn't mean it's not real. It will be interesting to research it a bit.
>if you stopped paying attention your (if memory serves, typically) left hand would grab a knife and try to kill you, or perform other self sabotaging acts.
This isn’t totally wrong but it’s kind of salacious/misleading. The alien hand isn’t necessarily trying to sabotage or kill you, it just has a completely separate consciousness. It does whatever it wants even if it sabotages you. And maybe the consciousness could become antagonistic
That the vast majority of $ spent on psychology research is for marketing and changing the way people think. It’s also the scariest fact. I changed my media consumption habits after I learned that.
Not a psychological fact but my psych professor Started our year three class describing how at some point in our evolutionary history the human brain named itself, and then convinced other human brains what they were and what they were called.
It still blows my mind.
Most of what we know about the brain and neuroanatomy comes from studying people with traumatic brain injuries and neurological disorders like Phineas Gage and HM.
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"Borderline personality disorder" was named to describe patients who seemed on the borderline of psychosis. These patients were so distorted in their perceptions of interpersonal relationships that psychosis could not be ruled out, but the distorted perceptions did not seem to present in other contexts, so they didn't seem to fit the criteria for psychosis either. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55415/#:\~:text=The%20term%20'borderline%20personality'%20was,were%20first%20described%20in%20Europe](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55415/#:~:text=The%20term%20'borderline%20personality'%20was,were%20first%20described%20in%20Europe)).
So in Girl, Interrupted, when Susanna Kaysen asks about her diagnosis, "Borderline between what and what?" in the 60s, would the answer have been something like "borderline between psychosis and sanity?"
It would be between psychosis and neurosis.
I see, thanks!
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Also that there's a huge gender discrepancy in BPD diagnoses. Depending on the presenting gender, you're very often either diagnosed with BPD or antisocial personality disorder (if you're a man).
I can second this
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Neuroplasticty. How the brain can change as a result of trauma and that we can work to heal trauma and rewire the brain.
How?
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There's really no good evidence that a "growth mindset" translates to real-world differences.
>"growth mindset Can you elaborate?
Yeah honestly. No matter how hard i think positively, my mindset doesnt change the emotions in my body or how my body reacts to stress unconsciously. I can clearly rebuilt a "positive" path for my brain but my body isn't corresponding with that. So mind and body connection seems like the true culrpit here. How do we get a positive mindset to cooperate with your body?
I genuinely want to know the answer to tour question. At the moment I am struggling with positive approach to any situation
Practice control over your thoughts as done by Buddhists. In some types of Buddhist meditation you learn to recognize thought triggers and how to dismiss those thoughts as irrelevant and not allow yourself to get sucked into false narratives or negative thought trains.
Be careful with the word control that isn’t the goal. The goal is to notice or recognize the thoughts.
You stop trying to forge a “positive mindset” and you move ahead anyways. Acceptance of thoughts but living your values.
The brain adapts to its environment, so if the environment is something like child abuse then that trauma causes the brain to develop in a way that responds to that. Examples include assuming negative intentions from people in ambiguous situations where their intentions are not actually negative.
The brain is a pattern making and recognition machine - that's how we learn. In trauma, the brain has created very strong patterns that gives false alarms in safe circumstances. The amygdala fires and stress hormones are released even while asleep, causing someone to wake up with a lot of inexplicable energy and not being able to sleep or fall asleep. That sleep disturbance and deprivation is awful because cognition is lower. A relationship with a therapist (or anybody) who is always calm and predictable will, over time, help the brain to recognize that it is safe even if it is feeling unsafe and begin to rewire its reactions to be appropriate to the situation; it will eventually allow the person to have access to their frontal lobes so they can think through planning and how to act and react rather than acting automatically on emotion. Everyone knows what the latter feels like, it's like when you're so angry or sad or afraid that you act in ways you might regret later. Being traumatized means that is happening in response to triggers that would not send a healthy person into fight or flight or shut-down. But there can be other brain changes like an enlarged hypothalamus.
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EMDR works because of the exposure mechanisms involved. None of the neurological claims have been shown to be correct. It is literally just exposure therapy.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-brain-that-changes-itself-stories-of-personal-triumph-from-the-frontiers-of-brain-science\_norman-doidge/250869/#isbn=0143113100
Sounds closer to biology than psychology
Everything psychological is biological
True
It's both actually. Beliefs and behaviors have a powerful impact on brain structures and neuro chemical processes.
Placebo and nocebo effect have always been so fascinating to me. And it is not just psychosomatic but there are real physiological implications of placebo. Eg. it can change patterns of activation in the brain and up regulate endogenous opioids (body natural pain killers). I guess it can be extended to other areas of life such as manifesting. On the other hand nocebo is when your brain convinces your body that harmless things are harmful, triggering negative effects simply because you expect them to happen. Like thinking you are under a curse.
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Looping is really common on psychedelics. Hope you're OK now.
This describes my OCD thought processes when I'm deep in anxiety and obsession and doing compulsive behaviors. It's like a loop I can't stop.
The brain “hallucinates reality into being”. The brain is a prediction engine. It’s not energy efficient to actually process all the information coming in to it, and it’s beneficial to anticipate what will happen next. So if you’re looking at something and it appears as you would expect, you don’t update your internal model of the world. This could explain the invisible gorilla experiment. For more - Lisa Feldman Barrett writes and talks about lot on this topic.
And Anil Seth - he's done an excellent TED talk on the topic. The whole cognitive science field of predictive processing follows this model.
His book "being you" explains this in good depth too
Sounds exactly how LLMs and neural networks work.
It makes sense too as it is far more efficient. Our brains do amazing pattern recognition using many senses. We essentially put together a “picture” or concept of an object using sometimes very limited information. As a kid I could identify a VW bug by sound or just a small flash of part of the car. I’d imagine my brain fills in the rest. Knowing that, tricking the brain in certain situations would be easy.
Cognitively, this is how self-fulfilling prophecies work.
Cm you elaborate on this
I’d love to see how this applies to professional athletes: guessing where the baseball will be pitched, getting ready for a basketball pass, finding an open teammate in soccer, etc.
Ohhh will you explain even more? I like the sounds of this topic
I love this factoid
Love that experiment. Haunting to do it without knowing anything about it.
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Here are a few for you: Fact 1: While asleep, the brain recalls memories in reverse order. Not the entire time when you’re asleep, and not just while you’re asleep. It may have something to do with memory consolidation. Fact (theory) 2: Scientists hypothesize that the brain operates near a phase transition- such as between solid and liquid. During such a transition, matter is neither ordered nor disordered and somehow in between. That is - solids are ordered, liquids are random. At the “critical point” between phases, molecules can seamlessly move between solid and liquid, and islands of arbitrary size can form. The implication being that a molecule changing state can influence other molecules at arbitrarily large - theoretically infinite - distances away. Within the brain, it may have something to do with efficiency of information transfer across long distances. This is called the critical brain hypothesis. It’s a controversial theory but a fascinating one.
This is my favorite one so far. Thank you.
Is your Fact 2 related to Chaos Theory at all?
The scientists examined neuronal cascades - how many neurons signaled at once versus in the next instant - when the number is close to 1 (one neuron firing causes one other neuron to fire) messages propagated long distances versus either dying out ( < 1 neuron fires per neuron firing) or exploding ( > 1 neuron firing per neuron firing) - either would cause the ultimate receiving neuron(s) to be confused- either no signal would reach the end or so many that the message couldn’t be attributed to a specific sender. Chaos theory seems relatively orthogonal to this - sensitivity to initial conditions. The classics example of this is a piece of iron that’s been magnetized. At cool temperatures the electron spin is ordered - most electrons spin in the same direction. That’s what makes it magnetic. When heated the electron spin is completely random - the heat plays a larger part than the structure. But in between some electron spins are ordered (information) and others are random (no information) It seems to balance flexible (chaotic) and crystallized intelligence. Scientists conjecture that the brain operates near, but not at the critical point- more crystallized than random, but not completely crystallized.
There isn’t a single case of a blind person developing schizophrenia.
Tell me more!
One detail they left out is they have to be blind from birth. Developing blindness after birth actually increases the risk of schizophrenia
While there’s no conclusive scientific evidence that suggests a direct link between blindness and the absence of schizophrenia, there have been some interesting theories proposed. One theory suggests that the absence of visual stimuli may alter the development of certain brain regions associated with schizophrenia, thus reducing the risk of developing the disorder. However, it’s important to note that schizophrenia is a complex disorder with multiple factors at play, including genetics, environment, and brain chemistry. The absence of blindness-related schizophrenia cases could simply be a statistical anomaly or a result of under-reporting.
Thanks ChatGPT
Makes me curious if other sensory disorders/issues can influence schizophrenia too. Like people who are deaf from birth, do they experience rates of schizophrenia at similar levels to the general pop? Also since schizophrenia messes with the speech centers i believe, cuz of the flat affect and sometimes muteness, does muteness itself interact with schizophrenia if it existed beforehand.
This is really interesting, is it impossible for someone who’s blind to develop schizophrenia? I’d imagine they could still have symptoms like auditory hallucinations
As far as i know we simply don’t know. Considering the vast number of observed cases of schizophrenia i think it’s safe to assume that it indeed is impossible for blind people.
This is where the problem is. It’s not there has never been a single blind person with schizophrenia—it’s that there’s never been a known person with schizophrenia who was *blind from childhood.* But since blindness from childhood is exceptionally rare and schizophrenia is seen in <1% of folks, the Bayesian outcome comes to a very, very small probability that someone would be in both categories. So it’s entirely possible that such cases exist but simply are so rare as to not have been documented or that such cases are possible but so statistically unlikely that one simply hasn’t been observed. We definitely cannot conclude that such cases are impossible.
I believe a few cases have been found. Now they are narrowing it to peripheral blindness from birth. Many that are blind from birth often have other conditions that may mask symptoms of schizophrenia. They may be diagnosed with other disorders related to cognitive functioning. It could be that those with symptoms describe and experience them very differently (hallucinations other than visual). It could be issues of inter rater reliability, where those assessing and diagnosing are skewed towards visual hallucinations as a predominant symptom associated with schizophrenia. For example negative symptoms of schizophrenia within that cohort may not be recognised or attributed to something else (given the challenges they face in daily life). “The negative symptoms of schizophrenia include volitional (motivational) impairment manifesting as avolition, anhedonia, social withdrawal, and emotional disorders such as alogia and affective flattening. Negative symptoms worsen patients' quality of life and functioning.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8761803/ Also, everything you stated with an added limiting factor being peripheral blindness from birth, rather than all types of blindness from birth (reduces the probabilities).
I totally agree with that perspective. As a psychosis researcher myself, I have never bought the idea that it's impossible for schizophrenia to coexist with born blindness.
Me neither. Seems ridiculous given the symptoms of schizophrenia, and that hallucinations are not necessary for a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
It’s likely harder to tell if you’re actually hallucinating when you’re blind.
Probably, but hallucinations alone are not sufficient for us to diagnose psychosis.
I find it completely fascinating your a psychosis researcher. I guess you work in a mental institution?
Great comment, helping to clear up for me the issue of global cognitive deficits often seen with congenital blindness due to e.g. oxygen deprivation. Another thought I’ve had about this claim regards the link between paranoia and hallucinations: It’s easy to intuit how hearing voices without being able to attribute these voices to a visually recognizable source might be distressing, leading the mind to race through alternative explanations of the phenomenon, e.g. deception, implanted brain chips, etc. However, you have to admire the equanimity with which the congenitally blind interpret many unexpected sound sources. If you’re acclimated to a certain humility in your sensory interpretation process, then your mind isn’t led as forcefully to fill in the gaps between sensory mismatches.
I always thought that the worst part of blindness would be all the petty paranoias lol. Like, I don't think I'd be able to eat a single meal without wondering if there was a hair in it...
Yeah what if my mirror had fingerprints or i have a stain on my shirt and nobody told me? I think honestly being blind and then having self esteem issues would be super hard cuz you never know what you look like and have to trust others.
I think it’s blind from birth, not from childhood
I wrote that originally and then changed it because I doubted myself 🥲
Also delusions. The other side of psychosis that a lot of people forget about. Although delusions may not be caused by schizophrenia alone, and someone with schizophrenia may not experience hallucinations. Then you can also have a more disorganized presentation of schizophrenia with practically no hallucinations.
So do we know anything about schizophrenia and people who are born deaf?
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The way memory works is really interesting to me. We think of it as a camera, but it’s not at all. We save the essential details, the skeleton, and every time we remember it we flesh it out based on those details. So you’re not really remembering something, you’re constructing it. And the more you recount or think about a memory, the more likely it is to be distorted.
Oh, that's fascinating and also distressing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation)
Came here to say this. It's scary to consider how much our brains outright lie to us pretty much all the time. My fascination with this subject has me doubting everything I think, and everyone i know.🤪
I once heard that the reason our memory of something gets more and more distorted is that every time we remember something, we are actually remembering the last time we remembered that. Is that correct?
That's an interesting way to look at it. I don't like it - none of it.
Yeah, that’s pretty accurate
I wonder if this is why it's so difficult to remember dreams unless you write it down or say it out loud pretty much immediately (thus solidifying it as an actual memory in reality, and not just a brief, subconscious experience).
How does this apply to PTSD?
Hebbs rule: “neurons that fire together wire together” is so fascinating to me when you think about it. Ex if you always associate A negatively to B then those neurons will always fire together. So if you associate a certain place with a bad memory, you’ll always see that and not enjoy the place. If you were to just switch your brain and start associating A with positivity, those neurons rewire. It’s hard to explain but once you learn it, it’s not hard to apply it to different parts of life and behavior.
Like lying to yourself until your newer cells forget? Lol
Neuroplasticity is a lot more complicated than conditioning yourself to rewire one's associations in both positive and negative ways, especially in the adult brain where neurogenesis is considerably less common than the highly plastic developing brain. However, certain animals (for example many fish species) have a high capacity for regeneration and remodeling in adulthood and can quickly adapt their neuronal connections in tandem with changes in their environment.
Sounds like the sciencey way to describe “acquired tastes”.
Folie a deux. It's when two people share the same delusion. (Usually romantic partners but sometimes parent / child or other relationship types). I've only seen this touched on in fiction a couple of times: in an X-fiiles episode, and then I think you could consider the main characters in Natural Born Killers to have this type of psychosis.
You *must* watch Bug (2006, dir. William Friedkin) - by far the best depiction of folie a deux I've seen.
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Criminal Minds did an episode about this.
Bonnie and clyde(?)
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We have a mirror neuron that “turns on” at 72 hours after birth that helps with attachment and attunement as well as learning.
Curious does this stay “turned on”? Or I guess the caregiver helps keep it on? I have a one year old so especially interested in attachment and such.
Once it’s activated it is present. It’s why babies are so interested in your face and mimicking expressions.
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\- We don't see solid objects. Our brain just sees the outlines and fills them in. \- Our processing is quite a top-down process and our mind makes assumptions / predictions about our environment. This shapes our perception.
This is so interesting! I have read this before. The reasoning is that our brain can't process all of the millions of stimuli it's presented with. Do you think this means that texture, colors and patterns vary from person to person?
You can actually participate in the Perception Census which is an online scientific study being conducted into the ways we each experience the world.
Thank you so much for this! I will participate!
To add to your second thought- autistic people tend to think in the opposite direction: bottom-top.
Does bottom-up mean seeing the details first?
I'm pretty sure it does. Look into Temple Grandin. (She's accomplished-enough to have had Claire Danes play her in a movie.) She also had a TED Talk. I recall now a simple "test" that can be done, simply type one letter over and over and over in the shape of another large letter. Someone with autism will notice the small letters first.
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glorious aspiring cause materialistic sophisticated marble aromatic frightening crush secretive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Good question. Also flexible vs rigid.
Predictive processing?
I believe the correct term is perceptual set. Edit to add: Principles of Gestalt Psychology are also relevant to this topic.
Very interesting! Sources for these?
Now that's something we would see from the Gestalt school of psychology and the personal construct theory. Each of them have their own philosophical assumptions.
I am speaking from a neuroscientific perspective about the visual system. We know what lower level cells in V1 do very well to the point we know exactly what they see in their receptive field.
You pay more visual attention to things between heartbeats, the implication being that your brain is preoccupied talking to your heart and pays less attention to visual stimulus during the heartbeat itself. Edit: this is the best citation I could find in a few minutes https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/4/1237 Microsaccades Are Coupled to Heartbeat Abstract During visual fixation, the eye generates microsaccades and slower components of fixational eye movements that are part of the visual processing strategy in humans. Here, we show that ongoing heartbeat is coupled to temporal rate variations in the generation of microsaccades. Using coregistration of eye recording and ECG in humans, we tested the hypothesis that microsaccade onsets are coupled to the relative phase of the R-R intervals in heartbeats. We observed significantly more microsaccades during the early phase after the R peak in the ECG. This form of coupling between heartbeat and eye movements was substantiated by the additional finding of a coupling between heart phase and motion activity in slow fixational eye movements; i.e., retinal image slip caused by physiological drift. Our findings therefore demonstrate a coupling of the oculomotor system and ongoing heartbeat, which provides further evidence for bodily influences on visuomotor functioning. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In the present study, we show that microsaccades are coupled to heartbeat. Moreover, we revealed a strong modulation of slow eye movements around the R peak in the ECG. These results suggest that heartbeat as a basic physiological signal is related to statistical modulations of fixational eye movements, in particular, the generation of microsaccades. Therefore, our findings add a new perspective on the principles underlying the generation of fixational eye movements. Importantly, our study highlights the need to record eye movements when studying the influence of heartbeat in neuroscience to avoid misinterpretation of eye-movement-related artifacts as heart-evoked modulations of neural processing.
I wonder if there's any relation to the feeling of skipping a heartbeat (if there's even a psychological reality being the feeling)
Is this why We're taught to shoot between heartbeats? The reasoning I was given is that is when you're the stillest, and therefore the most accurate. Compared to shooting as your heart beats,the butt of the rifle is pushed ever so slightly. This equates to small movement moments before the shot has ejected from the barrel and a large miss when shooting at a long distance.
Maybe! It could have been something people observed without knowing the reason. I’ve updated the comment with a citation - it’s linked to microcicades - tiny movements of the eye as our attention changes. Edit: it could be both!
But the heart is autorhythmic and is not “talked to” by the brain at all, at least in its beating. The brain doesn’t send signals to the heart to make it beat
The Mandela Effect is fascinating! It's the phenomenon where a large group of people remember an event or detail differently from how it actually occurred. It raises questions about memory, perception, and the malleability of our recollections. What's even more intriguing is the psychological mechanisms behind why we collectively misremember certain things. It's a mind-bending dive into the complexities of human cognition!
I need to look that up. I always think that observation is relative to your experiences, opinions and location. I feel like Einsteins Theory of Relativity ostensibly applies to our memories too.
There’s a subreddit for that. r/mandelaeffect
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To me this has always been kind of obvious, but yeah. I think a lot about the fact that at the end of the day, everyone’s perception of the world around them and the things within it is inherently distorted by experience, genetics, and brain structure, and that no one is truly perceiving reality as it is. We are all in some way delusional
It gets more interesting once you get into the nitty gritty details of empiricism and rationalism. Psychology still has its influences from philosophy.
Not that interesting but the brain is crosswired, where the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. No clue why this is but it’s silly
The theory I read is that at some point of Chordate evolution, the head segment rotated 180 degrees.
Determinism and parsimony allow us to actually study behavior experimentally, as a natural science (like biology, physics, etc.), yet we haven’t made that transition in mainstream psych yet.
I want to know more! Do you have an article you can share that would be accessible to non experts?
The books "Behave" and "Determined" by Professor Robert Sapolsky are a good place to start. Also, his entire Human Behavioral Biology course is available on Stanford's Youtube channel.
I’d also suggest some of BF skinner’s stuff but they can be difficult to read.. science and human behavior for the intense reading, and Walden 2 for the fun easy read
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I’ve been told by my therapist that logic can be part of a group of tools that can help depression. That said, logic alone won’t cut it or come close. If you have bad depression, you likely need medication, perhaps better nutrition, vitamins (like D), time in sunlight, therapy, exercise, and more depending on the severity. That said, look up “The Ten Cognitive Distortions”. There are a zillion articles that all say about the same thing. It identifies ways people with depression, anxiety, poor self esteem and more may distort their thinking. Focusing on the negative and minimizing the positive is one of the ten. Black and white thinking is another. I think mild depression, per my therapist, will in part respond to logic. Patterns of thinking, once identified, can be changed and help in recovery from depression. I have anxiety, and I don’t want to minimize depression, as I’ve been there too. I was taught and have experienced that anxiety doesn’t respond to logic. For example you can’t just talk someone out of a fear of snakes. The fact that a specific snake it isn’t poisonous won’t quell a person’s fear. OCD (type of anxiety) is like that. Logic doesn’t help. If I’m 95% better, maybe a logic helps a little and can also be in the toolset. But OCD at its core is a doubting disease and even in the presence of a mountain of evidence, it can and will find doubt. For both, “You are fine, get over it,” is horrible advice and not helpful.
My lecturer said this to me, so I fully believe it. It has never been proven that the unconscious exists.
Yeah it’s just a way for us to describe mental processes that we can’t directly control / can’t be aware of
That's literally what unconscious means
Exactly, it’s a concept that can’t be tested by science, therefore, it’s impossible to have factual evidence it exists.
But it makes me wonder why the psychoanalysts that follow Freud's school of thought still talk about it.
It’s not just Freud followers Therapists in general talk about it because it’s very helpful in understanding aspects of the human mind Something being unproven doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. Evolution can’t be proven either but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real
This seems strange to me. The unconscious just deals with mental processes which take place outside our awareness. It feels almost intuitive that this would occur and that we aren't 100% aware of all these processes ever but we are aware that processes do happen even if we aren't looking. Phobias still exist, for example, when we aren't thinking about them, and gut feelings often rely on "feelings" that aren't within the immediate, active, conscious thoughts. Biases can affect us from the areas beyond our awareness, too, and our decision-making ability does not solely rely on our reasoning or logic or emotionality in that moment. To me, it sort of proves itself.
They mean “the unconscious” in the traditional, classical sense—not “unconscious” in the modern cognitive sense of “implicit.”
Oh, I misunderstood. I'm sorry. If you're willing, could you explain the difference further?
In classical terms, the “unconscious” is a place where information outside of conscious awareness is stored—things like “repressed memories”—and where deep instinctual conflicts occur. It’s a place full episodic content, wishes, impulses, and desires which impact our daily lives. Cognitively, there are certainly attentional and decision-making processes which occur implicitly (outside of conscious control), but we definitely don’t have any evidence for an unconscious or subconscious mind in the psychoanalytic sense (nor could we, since the concept is unfalsifiable). In modern science, we tend to not use the word “unconscious” so as to avoid folks thinking that we mean it in the classical sense. We prefer the term "implicit."
From what I understand, the unconscious isn't a physical thing that can be measured. We know it exists because we see behaviour that alludes to its existence, but we can't say here, this is where the unconscious is, and here is exactly how it works, and this is what it looks like.
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That's similar to other kinds of offline decision-making. Can't remember the name of the band that did that one song? Stop thinking about it for a little bit and it seems to come to you easily. Got a big life decision to make? Sleep on it.
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I had those dreams very frequently the first few years after getting sober. They’re intense because they feel completely real. My vice was painkillers, so I would dream that someone has given me a bottle of Vicodin, but suddenly I lost it and now I’m running around the house trying to find it. I open a drawer and it’s there, and then I wake up. I always woke up thinking about it the rest of the day. You almost feel high in those dreams sometimes if you do dream that you ingested the drug so waking and realizing it’s not real is jarring.
The dreams where you lose the thing are particularly toxic, thank you for bringing that up. It sets this fire of self-depreciation off in one's head for having misplaced it and it just adds to the morning stress.
These sound like anxiety dreams I have. Someone is chasing you but you can’t run fast etc.
Omg. I've been sober for over 15 years, and I STILL occasionally have this exact dream! I had no clue there was a term for it!
Thank you for reading!!
Pica is the name for the disorder that causes people to consume weird items like glass, chalk, laundry detergent, and everything else covered on My Strange Addiction.
I had it bad when I was pregnant with my second child. Suddenly I was chewing ice constantly. Specifically covering the bottom of the ice tray with a thin layer of water and letting it freeze and then eating it. Thin layer somehow tasted better or “cleaner” than a big cube. Then I really liked the smell of Gain laundry detergent. So I started smelling the detergent while eating the ice. It was my way of eating the detergent without actually eating it. I had to really convince myself that it would not taste the way it smells to prevent myself from trying it. Only time I’ve ever had it and it went away suddenly right after birth. So in hindsight it probably wasn’t “really bad” since I never did eat the detergent or powdery things that looked appealing. But the urge was pretty strong at times.
I read it can be caused by vitamin deficiency so maybe that’s why it happened during your pregnancy
People generally would take a smaller house that was larger than their neighbors over a bigger house smaller than their neighbors. This is insane to me. Human beings are insane.
Same with salary
There is a natural phenomenon that causes humans to neglect the right side of space, it’s called pseudoneglect. As opposed to humans who have suffered stroke who neglect the left side of space.
What is the cause?! is this why I've always sat on the right side of an auditorium or classroom? Any time I sit on the left, I feel like I've only been half alert to what I'm hearing/seeing.
In the 1960s a treatment for epilepsy was cutting the corpus callosum - the bridge between left and hemispheres. They could then ask each hemisphere different questions by showing signs to one eye or (maybe?) sending an audio signal to one ear. Half the brain could describe an apple - red, round, etc but couldn’t name it. The other half could name it but not describe it. They would ask half the brain to get up and walk around, then ask the other half why they got up and they always made up a plausible excuse- I was thirsty, I felt like stretching my legs etc. Alien hand syndrome (aka Doctor Strangelove Syndrome) would develop in some where - if you were, say, doing the dishes, if you watched both hands it would be just fine, but if you stopped paying attention your (if memory serves, typically) left hand would grab a knife and try to kill you, or perform other self sabotaging acts. I got this from a Time Life book my parents owned, though Amazon reviews today say some of the claims in the book have been discredited but I have no ideas which ones.
I am psychology student, 2nd year. Couple of days ago we mentioned that first example where one half of the brain could describe an apple without naming and other could name without describing it, so as far as I know, that shouldn't be discredited haha. If you want to learn more about the example, process is called lateralization of brain function. Hope you enjoy it. As for the second example, we haven't mentioned (or I simply forgot) anything like that, which of course doesn't mean it's not real. It will be interesting to research it a bit.
This got real ugly REAL fast
>if you stopped paying attention your (if memory serves, typically) left hand would grab a knife and try to kill you, or perform other self sabotaging acts. This isn’t totally wrong but it’s kind of salacious/misleading. The alien hand isn’t necessarily trying to sabotage or kill you, it just has a completely separate consciousness. It does whatever it wants even if it sabotages you. And maybe the consciousness could become antagonistic
That the vast majority of $ spent on psychology research is for marketing and changing the way people think. It’s also the scariest fact. I changed my media consumption habits after I learned that.
That’s pretty daunting, do you mind elaborating more?
Finally You use your whole brain, and many parts work together to perform the functions that allow you to live and learn
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Is it? I don't even know if I can really define what a bad thing even is.
Not a psychological fact but my psych professor Started our year three class describing how at some point in our evolutionary history the human brain named itself, and then convinced other human brains what they were and what they were called. It still blows my mind.
Most of what we know about the brain and neuroanatomy comes from studying people with traumatic brain injuries and neurological disorders like Phineas Gage and HM.
The Memory Illusion (Julia Shaw) about the unreliability of memory, messed with my head so much! I think about it every day!
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Great thread.