A student recently reminded me of the power nap, which is a 15-30 minute nap which is claimed to increase alertness significantly. Combined with caffeine intake (caffeine nap) it gives the best effect, because the effect of caffeine takes more than 15 minutes and thus does not interfere with the nap. Caffeine, by the way inhibits adenosine receptors in the brain, which in turn increases the activity of dopamine and glutamate. Glutamate is important for learning and memory, whereas the increased dopamine activity can explain the pleasure (and potential addiction) that comes from drinking coffee.
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Rosenhan was not the first investigating life in mental institutions. In the late 1800s, the female journalist Nellie Bly faked mental illness and was admitted to a mental hospital (this is an example of a covert participant observation). She faked mental insanity (before she did she practiced making deranged expressions in front of the mirror) at a boarding house, was taken to court where she pretended to have amnesia, and was sentenced to spent 10 days in a mental asylum. Several doctors judged her to be insane. In the asylum she exposed the brutal treatment of patients (they were showered with cold water, beaten, and tied with ropes) and misdiagnosis (at the asylum there were foreigners who were sane but had been diagnosed with insanity simply because they could not speak English and also a completely sane woman who had been taken there because her husband believed her to be unfaithful.
If you are interested in learning more about Nellie Bly, here is a website about her: http://www.nellieblyonline.com/ And here is a link to her book about her experiences in a mental asylum: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html There are also other examples of faking insanity. A few years back a Swedish art student, Anna Odell, did an art project on insanity. She videotaped herself standing quietly by a bridge without saying anything. It looked like she was about to commit suicide, but many people passed by without doing anything (bystander effect) Finally someone called the police and she was forced into mental care (she had a hidden microphone to record what happened in the institution) Although she became quite famous in Sweden, she was fined in court, as I remember it. Here is a video showing part of her art video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUtF_gBt2Zg I have just read an interesting Swedish article on IQ, I will summarize it here. IQ, by the way, usually measures ability for language, logic and math.
1. Children with extraordinary IQ (as measured through testing) usually have strong and weak IQ abilities. For instance, they may be strong in math but weak in language. These children may sometimes be misdiagnosed with the Asperger's syndrome. 2. IQ is obviously not enough for academic success. In the 1920s, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman followed 1.500 children with an IQ of 150 over their lifespan. He excluded William Shockley and Luis Alvarez because they were considered to have an IQ that was too low. These two men later became nobel prize winners. 3. Men and women have equal levels of IQ (even though I have read somewhere that men have a larger variance than women). Women, however, tend to underestimate their IQ and men overestimate it. 4. The optimal manager has an IQ of 119. If his IQ is higher than that his decision making may be too complicated and he may have trouble connecting with the coworkers with lower IQ. A boss should be smart, but not too smart, that is. 5. Poets suffer more from the bipolar syndrome and depression than the average population. 6. The Flynn effect is the observed yearly increase in IQ. Every new year the performance of a year group on IQ tests is improved with 3 points on average. Therefore, IQ tests have to be restandardized annually, meaning that if a normal child born 100 years ago took the test today, he would perform on the same level as someone with mental retardation. We know that brain functions that are trained will develop, whereas those that are less used may be impaired or fade away. I speculate that some brain functions may be impossible to develop at the same level, partly because the processes may disturb each other, and partly because they may utilize the same areas of the brain.
As the brain processes information in parallell, I conjecture that different processes can interfere with each other. Because of learning and disposition, some brain processes may be more dominant and inhibit other processes. In most people, for instance, the left brain hemisphere's processes is more dominant than the right brain hemisphere's processes. This dominance of some brain processes over others may also be seen in cases of addiction, where the dopamine system is "hi-jacked" by the craving for a certain drug or activity so that nothing else matters. Obsessions or compulsions are similar to addiction in the way that a certain idea or behavior dominates a person's thinking or behavior. It also makes sense that inner attention (conscious thinking) will inhibit a person's body movements. For instance, if you think too much while playing sports, you will underperform. It is possible, that in order for some brain processes to be highly active, others need to be inhibited. This may explain why some highly intelligent people have had obvious problem making good decisions or have had problems in their social life. For instance, the economist Keynes had personal financial problems and it is suggested that the philosopher Plato was poor at playing the macchiavellian game of politics of his time (even though he knew a lot on politics). Savants are other examples; these are individuals with developmental disability who are highly talented in one area but have high impairment in other areas, usually for social and communicative skills. The brain system deciding which brain processes to inhibit and which to increase may be the executive functions. The executive functions are the common name for our attention, ability to multi-task, make decisions and monitor our own actions. In other words, it is our "free will". The executive system utilizes working memory to perform its' actions and it is usually what we refer to when we speak of consciousness. Damage to the executive functions can lead to poor decision making. It has been suggested that individuals with the ADHD syndrome have impaired executive functions. It is essential that the executive functions inhibit some brain processes and increase others while we are making decisions, otherwise we may be filled with a lot of doubt for any action we do or act paradoxically. We all know that it is impossible to both eat a cake and have it; once we have made a decision (or even before) we need to persuade ourselves that the action we are undertaking is the best option. We cannot be two-faced for long because of the cognitive conflict it will cause (compare with cognitive dissonance theory). Soon we will have to harmonize our thoughts, perhaps through an obsession. Psychoanalytic theory, however, suggests that repressed cognitive processes (ideas) may constantly struggle to find ways of being expressed. If this is true, inhibition of a brain process does not not necessarily have to mean the extinction of it. One theory is that humans evolved because of our complex social groups. Humans are particularly complex because of our strong learning capacity (our adaptibility and learning ability may well me our finest adaptation) which make us very different from each other. Because of our individual differences, it is very difficult to tell what we can expect from someone, his abilities, whether he can be trusted or not and whether he will return favors. In short, because of our learning capacity we became very different from each other. In order to make a group of individuals function well there was a demand for even greater brain power.
It is fairly established that many functions are localized in the brain. However, for a healthy brain those functions are strongly connected and work as a whole. These strong interrelations between the different areas of the brain is called connectivity. The higher and lower centres of the brain have strong connectivity and usually work together for different functions (for instance, the amygdala and the frontal cortex in regards to emotion)
The higher centres of the brain can be found in the cortex and are related to consciousness and volitional behavior. The higher centres always work together with the lower centres of the brain (such as the limbic system - which initially was evolved for smell), which are more automatic and nonconscious. Well trained actions have a tendency to become automatic/nonconscious (which can explain the Stroop effect). The processing of the higher centres of the brain is always a bit slower than the lower centres of the brain. It has even been claimed that our awareness migh lag 25 milliseconds behind events in the real world (see Libet's research). It is possible that the development of culture and literacy have led to a stronger division between the higher and lower centres of the brain and our experience of a distinction between mind and body. One example of the brain's strong connectivity is memory. Different memory functions are located in different areas of the brain and as with other functions, such as consciousness, these areas work together when performing the function. The hippocampus is believed to be important for spatial memory and consolidation of memory. The rhinal cortex, which is next to the limbic system, is believed to be very important for explicit and declarative memory. Attention is a mental process that can be directed either inwards (through imagination) or outwards and is a combination of bottom-up and top down processing. Whether a person is thinking or is focused can easily be spotted through his gaze. If he is attentive on his environment his gaze will be more fixated. Vision involves about 40 percent of our brain and thus more than the occipital lobes. What is interesting is that there is conscious vision and unconscious vision, as demonstrated in the peculiar blindsight disorder. People with blindsight have had their visual area V1 damaged and report seeing nothing. However, when performing visual tasks they are able to make correct guesses or judgment in most of the cases. If there are disturbances in the brain, such as chemical malfunctions, abnormal firing of neurons, our experience of a unified self or consciousness may break down. We may hallucinate, develop delusional thoughts, or hear voices, because we fail to distinguish between our inner imagination and outer reality, or our own inner (or outer) voice as belonging to ourselves. This is an old song that satirizes research. It is of course an exaggeration, but it is definitely true that it is very important on who publicizes first to reach fame. You might know that a certain Wallace was about to publish a theory of evolution before Darwin, which pushed Darwin to publish his paper sooner than he wanted. Who remembers Wallace nowadays? Also, all research (and art and music for that matter) is based on/inspired by or are modifications of previous research (Yes, Einstein's theory of relativity too). No theory is developed in a vacuum. We stand on shoulders of giants, as Newton once said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU_j5cQ2sfQ&feature=related Two behaviorists (Let's say it was Skinner and Watson) met each other at a party. One of the behaviorists says: "You're fine. How am I?)
You will only understand the joke if you know that behaviorists rejects introspection (knowing about the mind by observing your inner thoughts and experience) Mr Pettine has created an online newspaper through paper.li which automatically publishes articles on psychology from hash tags, rss feeds etcetera. I think it is worth checking out once in a while to get an idea of current psychological research:
http://paper.li/f-1308671010 Here are some recent reflections by me on the problem of consciousness. May I first point out that the problem of consciousness - how consciousness come about - is far from solved, if it every will. This view, that the problem of consciousness will never be solved, is called the mysterian view. Other views include the materialist view, the idealist view, the dualist view and the cognitive/functional/phenomenal view.
The materialist view equates consciousness with brain processes. It has its´ functional advantages but it also causes new issues. For instance, where does consciousness start? Why is a stone unconscious and a living brain not? The opposite view of materialism is idealism; the idea that everything is consciousness only, an equally logically consistent idea to materialism and difficult to argue against. Solipsism is an example of idealism; the idea that my mind is the only thing there is. Modern dualism is different from Cartesian dualism. Old dualism distinguished the soul from the body and it was believed that the soul could affect matter. Modern dualists usually do not believe it is possible, because that would go against the laws of nature and physics. From that point of view, the placebo effect must be an entirely physical process. Examples of modern dualism are property dualism and epiphenomenalism. A property dualist acknowledges that the brain consists of matter, but that consciousness is a distinct property of the brain. Epiphenomenalists also accept that consciousness is distinct from matter, but that consciousness it is causally impotent, meaning that it cannot exercise any influence on the material world. It is a passenger just tagging along. This of course threatens our everyday notion of a conscious free will (but not the idea of an "unconscious" free will) If the dualist view is drawn to its extreme, we may come to some extreme conclusions, if the view is to be consistent. For instance, if we believe that consciousness is a property of matter, we may come to believe that all matter has consciousness. An alternate view on consciousness is the cognitive/functional/ phenomenal one. This view holds that consciousness always is a representation of something else. This representation can be either conscious or unconscious. So, for instance, if I am feeling an itch, I am actually perceiving a representation of some disturbance in my body. Or if I am thinking on my last vacation in Paris, I am experiencing a mental representation or memory of my vacation in Paris. From this light, higher order thinking, so called metacognition, are actually higher order representations of thoughts. A representations of a representation of a representation, so to speak. Some philosophers even believe that consciousness emerged with the development of human culture; once we learned to represent the world in images and stories we also became conscious beings. Schema theory is related to the cognitive perspective. When it comes down to it, we may never be able to more than describe the properties of the mind, never explain its´ origins and emergence. On the other hand, this is also the case for other sciences, such as physics and biology, that tend to describe the world, but cannot explain why the phenomena being studying came about. Big bang, yes - but why and before that? Evolution, yes - but why? |
AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
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