After having finished Kay Jamison’s memoir, An Unquiet Mind, we were discussing stigma and mental illness in Abnormal Psychology class. Mind Hacks pointed me toward a great article in the New York Times on the “Mad Pride” movement:
Just as gay-rights activists reclaimed the word queer as a badge of honor rather than a slur, these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.
RECENT mad pride activities include a Mad Pride Cabaret in Vancouver, British Columbia; a Mad Pride March in Accra, Ghana; and a Bonkersfest in London that drew 3,000 participants. (A follow-up Bonkersfest is planned next month at the site of the original Bedlam asylum.)
The article points to a website of a writer at the Philadelphia Weekly who chronicles her experience with bipolar disorder. Here’s a link.
In class, we have been discussing conformity and obedience. The always great Mind Hacks blog pointed me toward a first-person account of participation in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments:
With some trepidation on my part, we began the experiment. After a few shocks, the learner let out an “Ouch!” and I asked if he was okay. He said he was, but after the next shock, his complaint became louder. I said I would stop. The “professor” told me to continue, and the learner said he was ready to go on, too. I went on for two or three more shocks. With each, the learner’s cry of pain became louder — and then he asked to stop, and I refused to go any further. The professor became very authoritative. He said that I was costing them valuable time, it was essential for me to continue, I was ruining the experiment. He asserted that he was in charge, not me. He reminded me that I had been paid and insisted that I continue. I refused, offered to give him back the five dollars, and told him that I believed the experiment to be really about how far I would go, that the learner was an accomplice, and that I was determined not to continue.
Every semester, most of us see a few students commit certain basic mistakes, heartbreaking errors that bespeak a sad lack of preparation for higher education. And preparation, as we all know, is one of the keys, perhaps the key, to success in college. Even if we covered the information outlined below in a college-skills course (and as far as I know, no school does), not all students take such a course in time to avert a disastrous first semester. So I propose that we add the following item to all syllabi so that all first-semester students have some essential college skills.
Q. AS THE AUTHOR OF A BEST SELLER ABOUT HAPPINESS, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE ON HOW PEOPLE CAN ACHIEVE IT?
A. I’m not Dr. Phil.
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.
We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money. That’s what I mean when I say people should do “wise shopping” for happiness.
Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.
The New York Times has a short piece by Gary Marcus, author of a book on memory — Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind — which relates to social psychology and how our decisions are influenced by our memory systems.
The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.
Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.
When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.
Scientific American Mind has an article online about Stereotype Threat — the idea that we take on and act out the stereotypes we think others have of us.
As it turns out, research shows that such performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence. Although some have jumped to the highly controversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong. For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.
The same is true for any member of a group who is aware that his or her group is considered to be inferior to others in a given domain of performance—whether it is one that appears to tap intellectual and academic ability or one that is designed to establish athletic and sporting prowess.
Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.
I was watching TV tonight and saw a new ad. It’s for Altoids, and the slogan is “A slap to the cerebellum since 1780.” Hmmm… I think it meant to say cerebrum, not cerebellum. The implication in the ad is that eating the Altoid mint gave the young office maiden an inspiration for solving the printing problem. That would come from the higher, executive functions of the cerebrum, not the voluntary motor movement, and coordination functions that the cerebellum is associated with. This is reportedly the first in a series of commercials with this slogan, so they’ll be getting it wrong in all of them I suspect…Technorati Tags: neuroscience, psychology
In Abnormal Psychology, we’ll be discussing dissociative disorders next week. Mind Hacks has a good summary of dissociative disorders and trauma, including the role of hypnosis:
Dana’s online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has a fantastic article on trauma and dissociation - the splitting of consciousness that apparently makes some aspects of the mind inaccessible to others.
