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maaarine · 6 months
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When the human tendency to detect patterns goes too far (Shayla Love, Psyche, Sep 19 2023)
"Nabokov was describing an extreme case of apophenia, or the tendency to experience events as meaningful, even when they shouldn’t be.
Also called patternicity, ‘it refers to essentially anytime that you are seeing patterns in the world that don’t exist,’ says Colin DeYoung, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. (…)
The word ‘apophenia’ comes from a German neurologist, Klaus Conrad, and his 1958 book about the symptoms of schizophrenia.
While an epiphany is a sudden realisation of a true connection or meaning, an ‘apophany’ is the false realisation of one.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung used what is perhaps a better-known term, ‘synchronicity’, to describe instances of apparent connection between co-occurring events with no clear causal relationship.
More than just coincidences, they take on powerful meaning in a person’s mind and appear to be a result of more than chance.
In one example, Jung’s patient dreamt of a golden scarab and, as she described the beetle, Jung heard a tapping on the window of his office.
There, he found a live scarab beetle, which he grabbed and handed to her.
Psychologists have found an association between apophenia and openness to experience, one of the ‘big five’ personality traits.
Openness to experience reflects a general tendency to be curious about the world.
As a 2020 paper by DeYoung and colleagues explained, one aspect of openness to experience ‘encompasses fantasy-proneness and aesthetic interests’, whereas another aspect, sometimes called ‘intellect’, reflects ‘intellectual confidence and intellectual engagement’.
In many contexts, openness is beneficial and can contribute to creativity.
But the component of the trait related to aesthetic and fantasy engagement also seems to be associated with increased risk of some of the symptoms of the psychosis spectrum, such as unusual perceptual experiences, DeYoung and colleagues have found.
They report evidence that apophenia could be ‘an important cognitive mechanism at the core of what is shared between openness and risk for psychosis.’
Seeing connections all around you can also be predictive of belief in conspiracy theories and the supernatural, a study from 2017 suggested. (…)
There is always a trade-off.
People need to be able to detect important connections in the world, rather than missing them, and being sensitive to patterns helps with that.
People who are high in openness and more prone to perceiving patterns ‘might see things that other people might not notice’, DeYoung says.
But sometimes, a sensitivity to patterns can fool us. Minimising the risk of the false positives would inevitably lead to more false negatives, DeYoung notes: ‘You’re always stuck with some kind of balance.’"
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maaarine · 2 months
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neuroclastic.com
"If you only check one or two boxes, then they don’t call it autism– they call it something else.
For example, if you ONLY struggle with communication, then they call that social communication disorder.
If you ONLY have problems with body movement/control then that is called dyspraxia or developmental coordination disorder.
If you ONLY have sensory processing issues then that is sensory processing disorder.
But if you have all of the above and more, they call it autism.
You can see how ridiculous it seems, therefore, when someone says “we’re all a little autistic” because they also hate fluorescent lights or because they also feel awkward in social situations.
That’s like saying that you are dressed “a little rainbowy” when you are only wearing red. (…)
Each autistic person is affected strongly enough in one or more categories for it to be disabling in some way. But each person’s dominant colour palette may look different."
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maaarine · 3 months
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The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Stephen Porges, 2017)
"If you have severe gastric pain, can you function well on high-level cognitive tasks?
In the case of gastric pain, the feedback from our viscera limits our ability to think and solve complex problems.
Our culture really doesn’t have a place for that, so it tries to deal with this by suggesting, “If you feel pain, take medication so you don’t feel the pain.”
But what if pain is your body’s attempt to help you or to inform you?
In my world, interoception blends into another construct that I frequently use, which I call neuroception.
Neuroception is the nervous system’s evaluation of risk in the environment without conscious awareness.
When neuroception occurs, we try to generate a narrative to explain why we have the feelings that were triggered.
Interestingly, although we are not aware of the cues that trigger neuroception, we are frequently aware, via interoception, of the physiological reactions that were elicited by neuroception.
Neuroception can be illustrated in the following example: You meet someone; the person appears to be bright and physically attractive, but you are not attracted to the person because the person’s voice lacks prosody and their facial affect is flat.
You don’t understand why, but through the process of neuroception, your body has responded, “This is a predator or a person who is not safe,” so you develop a personal narrative to make it fit. (…)
We get the signals, but we do not respect them. I think this strategy of denying our bodily reactions has much to with our culture.
This point is related to my introductory comment on Descartes, which emphasized a subjugation of bodily feelings to cognitive functions.
Our culture’s interdependence on religious views has contributed to dispelling the importance of bodily feelings.
Specifically, bodily feelings were conceptualized as being associated with animals, while cognitions were an attribution more closely linked to spirit."
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maaarine · 4 months
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Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Kevin Mitchell, 2023)
"If traits like extraversion and neuroticism really reflected some singular factor in the brain (such as “positive emotionality” or “negative emotionality,” for instance), one might expect to find some brain measure that consistently correlates with them—
say, a bigger amygdala or higher levels of serotonin or more dopaminergic connections with the striatum, or really an infinite range of other possibilities.
Researchers have looked for many years for these kinds of correlates and effectively come up empty.
There are reports of positive correlations but none has been robustly replicated.
A reasonable conclusion, at some point, is that a trait like extraversion is not in fact a singular “thing in the brain.”
Rather, it is a construct reflecting multiple neural parameters.
We already encountered in our discussion of the circuits controlling decision making and action selection what some of these parameters could be.
An animal navigating through its environment has to monitor its own internal state to generate motivations; assess opportunities and threats;
anticipate rewards and punishments; weigh multiple, often conflicting short- and long-term goals against each other;
assess the reliability of different kinds of perceptual evidence; attach some measure of certainty to its various beliefs;
weigh the confidence level required to act versus the urgency for action;
consider how much effort it is willing to expend or how long it is willing to wait or how much risk it is willing to accept for a given reward of a given probability; and so on. (…)
That means that the tunings of factors like reward sensitivity, threat sensitivity, novelty salience, confidence thresholds, delay discounting (how long you are willing to wait for a reward), and risk aversion naturally—innately—vary among people.
Those kinds of parameters are things we do “find in the brain,” in the sense that neuroscientists have identified at least some of the circuits that seem to mediate these different signals and feed into the processes of belief formation, goal prioritization, and action selection.
Indeed, new technologies in animals are allowing researchers to observe these separable functions and to correlate levels of activity in specific circuits with, say, confidence levels, assessed threat levels, or anticipated reward;
scientists are even able to experimentally tweak the tuning of these parameters to alter decision making and behavior in real time."
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maaarine · 3 months
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Longitudinal Associations Between Parenting and Child Big Five Personality Traits (University of California Press, Nov 18 2021)
"We expected that positive parenting practices would be associated with the positive development of child extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotionality stability, and openness to experience, whereas negative parenting practices would be related to negative trait development.
Controlling for child age, gender, socioeconomic status, and parents Big Five personality traits, along with corrections for multiple testing, we found several interesting findings regarding the longitudinal associations between parenting and child personality.
First, parenting changed across time, which is consistent with results of previous studies (e.g., van den Akker et al., 2010).
The general trend was a decrease in parenting behaviors.
As children entered adolescence, parents became less involved in their children’s academic lives and provided less structure.
It is understandable that parents’ roles change during this period because adolescence is characterized by children’s striving for autonomy and independence.
The strongest decrease was in parental involvement in their child’s academics. (…)
Second, child personality also changed across time.
Children perceived themselves as less conscientious and less open to experience.
The decrease in child conscientiousness shows that adolescents were not developing in the direction of maturation, which is consistent with findings of previous research.
Another thing to note is that the rates of change and variability in change were modest, which is also consistent with past studies.
Third, surprisingly, there was a preponderance of statistically non-significant results when examining the associations among parenting practices and child personality.
After adjusting the alpha level using the conservative Bonferroni’s adjustment, only four correlations were statistically significant. (…)
Following their recommendations, it becomes clear that correlations between parenting and child personality are comparable to associations found between other environmental factors and child personality such as parental socioeconomic status and birth order, which are also small in magnitude.
On a related note, the fact that the cumulative evidence appears to point to a preponderance of small associations between different environmental factors and personality trait development should modify our thinking about how personality development comes about.
Instead of searching for a few large environmental factors that make or break our personalities, whether it is parenting, peers, or birth order, we should acknowledge that such factors with large effects probably do not exist.
Rather, evidence points to the fact that personality development is influenced by a large number of environmental factors, each of which makes a small contribution to children’s personality development.
This framework of personality development parallels the infinitesimal model in genetics, which is currently widely used in behavior genetics research.
Consensus is growing in genetics that phenotypes are influenced by a very large number of genes, that each has an infinitesimal contribution, rather than “candidate genes” that explain large amount of variance in the phenotype.
It appears that an analogous situation holds for personality development in childhood and adolescence.
Much like the threads of a tapestry, environmental factors combine in an intricate and complex way to drive personality development, and each factor is an essential, yet small thread that contributes to the tapestry that is personality."
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maaarine · 10 months
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Unmasking Autism (Devon Price, 2022)
"Despite what people believe, Autism is not defined by rudeness, masculinity, or having any kind of mathematical skill.
In the scientific literature, it’s arguable whether the disability should even be defined by the presence of clear behavioral signs, such as trouble reading social cues or hesitating to initiate contact with other people.
Instead of looking to the external signals of Autism that others might pick up on, it’s important that we instead focus on the neurobiological markers of the neurotype, and the internal experiences and challenges that Autistic people themselves report.
Autism is neurological. Autism is a developmental disability that runs in families and appears to be largely genetically heritable.
However, it is also multiply determined, meaning it has no single cause: a whole host of different genes appear to be associated with Autism, and every Autistic person’s brain is unique and exhibits its own distinct patterns of connectivity. (…)
Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are.
To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a “nuisance variable” that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room).
This means we can both be easily distracted by a small stimulus and miss a large meaningful one."
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maaarine · 10 months
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Autism and The Predictive Brain: Absolute Thinking in a Relative World (Peter Vermeulen, 2022)
"Your brain is not a fan of (too many) surprises.
Instead, it prefers to deal as economically as possible with the energy management of the body for which it is responsible, which means not wasting any effort on information that is not necessary for our effective functioning and survival.
As a result, it blocks out anything that it doesn’t need. It only lets through what is essential.
In this way, for example, Japanese people cannot hear the difference between the letter R and the letter L, because that is not a useful distinction in their own language. (…)
In short, the whole idea of the computer metaphor – input - processing - output – simply does not hold water.
So how do things really work?
The basic idea is simple: the brain does not like surprises and therefore wants to anticipate what will happen to the maximum possible extent.
For this reason, the brain does not wait for the senses to provide information about the outside world, but prefers instead to make predictions about that world.
This is something that has only recently been discovered by brain scientists working at the start of the 21st century.
What makes this discovery so Copernican and therefore so revolutionary is the conclusion that perception does not begin as a result of a stimulus in the exterior world, but actually starts inside your head, in your own brain. (…)
When you see a piece of chocolate, you already know (unconsciously, without thinking) what it will taste like before you pick it up and pop it into your mouth.
The brain does not ask the senses for new information or input, but wants feedback on the information that it already has about the world.
With this in mind, your brain will check to see whether the texture and flavour of the chocolate matches your (and its) expectations.
In other words, what we used to call the feedforward of information (the bottom-up flow) is actually feedback, and vice versa!
The brain uses the senses to check the continuing usefulness and survival value of its own predictions about the world.
In neuroscience, this is known as the theory of the predictive brain or predictive coding."
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maaarine · 9 months
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BFI: In conversation with... The Bridge creators and stars on the fourth and final season
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maaarine · 3 months
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Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Kevin Mitchell, 2023)
"Any information that leads you to prioritize one action over others is, in fact, a constraint—a useful one but still one that reduces your options for action.
And if you’re interpreting such information in the context of your memories and knowledge and understanding of the world and your motivations and goals, then those form another set of constraints—internal ones—that guide your behavior toward some purpose.
To be free of such constraints would be to act randomly, pointlessly, on a whim, for no reason.
You would, in fact, cease to be yourself; indeed, you would cease to be a self at all.
Selfhood is defined by continuity through time—by maintaining a certain dynamic pattern of processes in the face of the thermodynamic pressure to take on any of the other, almost infinite sets of disordered arrangements those processes could adopt.
Selfhood thus entails constraint. It is only constraint.
The freedom to be you involves constraining the elements that make you up from becoming not you.
In humans, this activity includes maintaining the continuity of our psychological, biographical selves: all the memories and experiences and relationships; all the learnings, the habits and heuristics and policies; the commitments and projects and long-term goals; and all the dispositions that go with them.
It means using the hard-won knowledge accumulated by your past self to guide action in the present moment in the service of your future self.
If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing you.
For these reasons, I take the absolutist definition of freedom to be incoherent in the context of the question whether we have free will.
If you take “free” to mean absolutely free from any prior causes whatsoever, then you can have “free” or you can have “we,” but not both."
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maaarine · 2 years
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Seeing grieving as learning explains why the process takes time (Saren H Seeley and Mary-Frances O’Connor, Psyche, May 25 2022)
“For humans, too, the expectation that someone we love will be there for us – whether it’s a caregiver, a romantic partner, a child, or someone else – is a fundamental part of our bond. 
And just like prairie voles, humans have a neurobiological stress response that unleashes a cascade of cardiovascular, hormonal and immune changes when social bonds are threatened. 
That distress can be a useful alarm signal, even critical for survival. It motivates us to seek out someone, or make enough of a fuss that they come to find us. 
But those alarm bells are useful only if the one you are seeking can ultimately be found. 
The death of a loved one is the rare experience in which that resolution is no longer possible. (…)
It takes time and experience for the brain to integrate new episodic memories of the person’s death with the semantic belief in their everlasting presence. 
Through experience, the brain can develop new predictions. 
They no longer come home from work at 6 o’clock; their clothes stop showing up in the laundry; the plants they used to water go untended. 
Eventually, the brain comes to more fully understand that the loved one’s absence is not a temporary state. 
There are good reasons why it takes time to update one’s sense of the world following a disruption such as the loss of a loved one. 
The mind maintains relatively stable models of both the external and internal worlds. 
Neuroscientists theorise that the brain builds these models from previous experiences. 
The brain then uses its knowledge of how the world works to predict the likelihood of future outcomes. 
As we move through the world, the brain registers whether an actual outcome was better or worse than expected via neural prediction error signals, which are used to update the mental model and inform future predictions. 
In learning from prediction error, we need a balance of flexibility and stability, so that our mental models can be updated as needed without being too easily swayed by limited information.
For someone who is grieving, actions (eg, seeking out a loved one) that once predictably resulted in reward (reunion) now end with the absence of reward, generating a negative prediction error (accompanied by frustration, distress and grief). 
A mental model that is too inflexible – adamantly deflecting new information about the absence of a loved one – will lead to the repetition of actions that no longer have the desired outcome. 
Repeated efforts by the brain to squeeze such new information into an unchanged old model could help explain why some bereaved people experience a longer trajectory of acute physical and emotional dysregulation.
In contrast, healthy adaptation after loss includes developing – as prediction errors accumulate over time – an updated mental model that comfortably accommodates both past and present. 
This balanced, adapted state is reflected in concepts such as ‘continuing bonds’ (maintaining an enduring sense of caring and connection with the person who died) and ‘integrated grief’ (grief that has found, as one author puts it, ‘a resting place in [one’s] heart and memories’). 
Neither the relationship nor the grief ever disappear, but they take a different form that can exist side by side with the recognition that one has to find a way to live in the world as it is now.”
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maaarine · 4 months
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Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Kevin Mitchell, 2023)
"The distinction between personality and character is a tricky one, especially because the two terms are used in overlapping fashion in common parlance.
Here, I intend personality traits to refer to underlying psychological predispositions of the kind we have been discussing.
These denote differences between individuals that are more or less neutral; that is, it is not necessarily better to be higher or lower in extraversion or openness to experience or even conscientiousness or neuroticism or agreeableness.
There is not a particular level of each of these traits or a single combination of levels that is optimal in all scenarios; it may, for example, be quite adaptive to be high in neuroticism in circumstances where threats abound. (…)
Character traits, by contrast, are essentially defined as morally better or worse; in fact, they are typically categorized as virtues or vices.
The virtues include things like honesty, fairness, courage, humility, generosity, steadfastness, loyalty, integrity, prudence, patience, forbearance, temperance, selflessness, and so on (and the vices their opposites). (…)
Overall then, the idea that our innate personality traits determine our behavior is frankly simplistic.
In essence, this view sees people as passively driven by their biological predispositions, on a moment-to-moment basis, like robots that are tuned one way or another.
The character viewpoint, by contrast, puts people as agents at the center of a process of engagement and coevolution with the world, actively developing the habits, attitudes, policies, and mature tendencies that make us all who we are.
These views can be reconciled by recognizing that there will be an interplay between our innate traits and the trajectory of development of our character."
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maaarine · 1 year
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How to trust your body (Saga Briggs, Psyche, Nov 23 2022)
“Four years ago, while recovering from an alcohol dependence, I heard the following words from a psychologist: ‘Your problem isn’t anxiety. It’s trusting yourself.’ 
At the time, I interpreted that phrase – ‘trusting yourself’ – philosophically: trusting yourself to get the job done, come to the right decision, make your friends laugh, defend a viewpoint, let the neighbour’s wily dog off its leash without a major disaster. 
Today, after learning more about self-regulation than I thought possible, I no longer see it that way. 
Trusting myself is, first and foremost, a visceral experience, less like adopting a new set of beliefs and more like a trust fall into the inner landscape of my heart, lungs, abdomen and gut. 
Each moment, interaction, relationship becomes a unique experience informed and guided by how my body receives it, not by the grand unifying way I’ve figured out how to live. 
What my psychologist really meant, whether either of us knew it or not, was: you don’t trust your body. 
Most of us are familiar with what it means to ‘go with your gut’ or ‘follow your instincts’. 
And many of us have ignored red flags or nagging sensations from time to time, leading to consequences we later regret. 
Trusting your body includes these ideas but it also means more than that. 
When it comes to decision-making and health, people differ in how much importance they place on bodily sensations – from hunger and fatigue to anger and joy. 
Some of us might dismiss or suppress sensations, talk ourselves out of a strong feeling (or let others talk us out of it), or simply place more importance on logic and rationality than on feeling. 
People also differ in how well they can sense these signals, which affects their ability to make use of them. 
For example, people with alexithymia, a condition marked by difficulty identifying and articulating feelings, often don’t know they’re hungry until they’re in pain, or that they’re angry until they feel their pulse. 
On the other end of the spectrum are those people who arguably feel too much, leading them to become easily overwhelmed by – and therefore distrustful of – their bodily signals. 
Body trust is not just a folk concept – it’s also a scientific construct. 
It’s used to measure ‘interoception’, which is the process of sensing the body from within. 
Poor interoception is associated with a wide range of mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, depression and anxiety. 
Alongside questions about body trust, researchers measure people’s interoception by tapping seven further features, from ‘noticing’ to ‘attention regulation’ to ‘body listening’. 
Of these features, ‘low body trust’ has emerged as particularly relevant to mental health. 
People who suffer from suicide ideation, eating disorders, loneliness, and depression often report feeling ‘unsafe’ or ‘not at home’ in their bodies, in addition to mistrusting their bodily signals. 
The reason for this connection isn’t yet clear, but one might speculate that if these people did feel safe enough to trust their bodily signals, doing so might lead to adaptive behaviour change and symptom reduction. 
Whatever the explanation, these findings suggest that body trust is crucial for wellbeing.”
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maaarine · 10 months
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Autism as Context Blindness (Peter Vermeulen, 2009)
"Rhonda Booth found that global perception (seeing the bigger picture), on one hand, and local perception (focus on details), on the other, are not opposite processes.
On the contrary, a person who is good with details is usually also good at seeing the connections.
This conclusion delivers a considerable blow to the common belief that people with autism are good with details and people without autism, in contrast, are good with the big picture.
Moreover, two recent studies did not support the idea that people with autism are superior at attending to and recalling details. (…)
What is important is that you focus your attention on details that are important and ignore the unimportant details.
That is what is difficult for people with autism: identifying what is important and what is not.
For that reason, they sometimes notice details that people without autism are blind to, because these details are less important.
And precisely because we did not notice those details, it strikes us that people with autism did.
Hence, the impression that people with autism have a good eye for details.
However, to conclude from this that people with autism notice more details than people without autism is presumptuous.
The only thing that we can say is that they notice details that others do not see.
In contrast, they do not notice (or do not notice as quickly) other details noticed by individuals who do not have autism."
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maaarine · 5 months
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"Il peut s'agir d'une hypersensibilité aux émotions, ou une hypersensibilité sensorielle.
En tout cas, tout ce qui va se traduire par une augmentation ou un haut niveau de sensibilité aux mouvements émotionnels internes, ou alors aux sons, aux stimulations visuelles, qui peuvent survenir dans l'environnement.
Il s'agit vraiment d'une augmentation quantitative des émotions, de la perception des stimulations.
Et également l'hypersensibilité peut inclure ce qu'on appelle un traitement cognitif: une manière de traiter les émotions et sensations par le cerveau qui est plus profonde, intense, détaillée.
Selon l'étude anglo-saxonne dont je parlais en début d'épisode, il existe trois grands niveaux de sensibilité dans la population:
Le niveau très sensible: 30% des personnes interrogées. Elles ressentent avec plus d'intensité les émotions positives et négatives. Ce sont aussi des personnes plus introverties. Là se situent les hypersensibles.
Le niveau peu sensible: 30% des personnes interrogées. Elles ressentent moins fort les émotions aussi bien positives que négatives. Elles seront généralement les plus extraverties et les moins anxieuses.
Le niveau moyennement sensible: 40% des personnes des répondants. Elles se situent entre les deux autres groupes. Ni très introverties, ni très extraverties. (…)
Les causes génétiques (à l'hypersensibilité) sont des causes qui sont présentes dès le stade fœtal, dès la naissance, ce sont des causes qui sont héritées. Ou acquises, mais très précocement.
On a découvert qu'il y avait certaines variations de récepteurs dans le cerveau.
Des récepteurs qui reçoivent de l'adrénaline, de la dopamine, de la noradrénaline, de la sérotonine.
Ils font faire fonctionner le cerveau d'une certaine manière."
Source: Emotions: Hypersensibilité : comment survivre face à l'intensité du monde ?
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maaarine · 1 year
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Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (Abeba Birhanei, Aeon, April 07 2017)
“According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. 
People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. 
So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. (…) 
Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. 
The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self-sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. 
While Descartes didn’t single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours. (…)
Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? 
The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. 
We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. 
Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. 
Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. 
By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ 
Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book. So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. 
‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929). 
Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world. (…)
A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. 
The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner’s thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen.
A perfect policy for the reform of Cartesian individuals. But, in fact, studies of such prisoners suggest that their sense of self dissolves if they are punished this way for long enough. 
Prisoners tend to suffer profound physical and psychological difficulties, such as confusion, anxiety, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy, and a distorted sense of time. 
Deprived of contact and interaction – the external perspective needed to consummate and sustain a coherent self-image – a person risks disappearing into non-existence.”
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maaarine · 11 months
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Andy Clark:
"When you think about perception as being structured by prediction, perception of our own body is structured exactly in the same way.
So the way my body feels, my pain, my tingles, they're all just percepts that are constructed in exactly the same way as all the other percepts.
They're constructed by bringing predictions, most of them unconscious, together with sensory information, in a way that's balanced by precision weighting.
For instance, I quite often get phantom phone vibrations, where I feel my phone going off in my trousers, and actually it isn't.
What seems to be going on there is that overactive expectations are kind of swamping bits of otherwise innocent sensory information.
So under the strong expectation that my phone might ring, small fluctuations in my bodily state can be treated as good evidence of an incoming call, so I sense a buzzing.
This is predictive processing 101: if your expectations are strong enough, then that's how you're going to experience the world. (…)
Something like this seems to be going on in different degrees in chronic pains.
In nearly all cases of chronic pain, what seems to have gone wrong is in the pain signaling system.
The bodily problem is no longer sufficient to account for the pain, the pain is just persisting.
A sort of over-weighted expectation of pain can become ingrained is that kind of way.
So you move really quickly into stuff that looks much more like psychiatric issues.
If you think about that balance enacted in other domains, imagine that you constantly over-weigh the incoming sensory evidence.
Now ask yourself what your life might be like.
Under the predictive processing framework, you can see that that could easily be one aspect of autism spectrum condition: sensory information is over-weighted, at least by neurotypical standards.
So that makes it hard to spot certain kinds of patterns in noisy environments.
Subtle patterns might involve how other people are feeling right here, right now.
The primary issue is an enhanced sensory world. They're seeing the world brighter than we are, if you like.
What's the right balance between sensory information and expectation? There's no good answer.
It's easy to imagine worlds where having the balance one way is better, other worlds where having the balance another way is better.
If you happen to be in a world structured by people who have their balance one way, then you're inhabiting an artificial world where your balance might not be useful, or might be problematic.
There are systematic attempts to look at different psychiatric ways of being, like having PTSD for example, that try to make sense of them by thinking about these different checks and balances in a predictive system.
Maybe if that works out, we'll end up with a kind of taxonomy of different ways of experiencing our world, where we can slot things in according to the level of precision weighting.
That would certainly be a step on the road to having the causal picture that might enable one day better intervention."
Source: Converging Dialogues: #224 - Brains As Prediction Machines: A Dialogue with Andy Clark
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