Sunday, September 29, 2024
Friday, September 27, 2024
Is it true that hurt people hurt people? Why?
[Answered on Quora.com by Dushka Zapata]
If someone hurts me, it affects the way I perceive the world. My sense of safety and my sense of trust have been impacted. I become increasingly uncertain, anxious and angry.
Now, my anger and my anxiety run my life. I feel I need to manage everything around me to avoid being hurt again.
I do things in an attempt to keep myself safe: I am controlling, exacting, demanding, afraid, defensive. I find it hard to trust. I often perceive things as a threat, even when they are not.
I become suspicious of kindness, of happiness, of peace.
Blame keeps me trapped. “It’s not my fault. I hurt people because others hurt me”.
Self-awareness is the first step out. “I think I am hurting others with my pain.”
Taking responsibility is freedom. “I need to figure out how to work on myself so that I learn how to create healthy relationships, so I can stop hurting others and so I can learn how to stop hurting myself”.
If someone hurts me, it affects the way I perceive the world. My sense of safety and my sense of trust have been impacted. I become increasingly uncertain, anxious and angry.
Now, my anger and my anxiety run my life. I feel I need to manage everything around me to avoid being hurt again.
I do things in an attempt to keep myself safe: I am controlling, exacting, demanding, afraid, defensive. I find it hard to trust. I often perceive things as a threat, even when they are not.
I become suspicious of kindness, of happiness, of peace.
Blame keeps me trapped. “It’s not my fault. I hurt people because others hurt me”.
Self-awareness is the first step out. “I think I am hurting others with my pain.”
Taking responsibility is freedom. “I need to figure out how to work on myself so that I learn how to create healthy relationships, so I can stop hurting others and so I can learn how to stop hurting myself”.
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Why can schizophrenic people pick out psychopathic people so easily?
[Answered on Quora.com by Franklin Veaux]
There’s a fascinating experiment I learned about in one of my cognitive science classes in uni. It went like this:
Start with a big wheel that has a whole bunch of buttons around the edge, and a button in the center. The buttons around the edge are all numbered, but not necessarily in any particular order; the numbers might look random, like 22, 6, 108, 49, 3 ... whatever.
Anyway, in addition to the buttons, there are also two lights, a red light and a green light.
This does have to do with your question, I promise. I’m getting to that.
The experimenter brings a test volunteer into the room with the wheel and says “this is a test of learning and mathematical reasoning.” That’s a lie, of course.[1] It’s actually an experiment about how people form internal models of the real world.
The experimenter says “There is a pattern to the numbers on the wheel. Your job is to figure out the pattern. Press any two buttons with numbers on them, then press the button in the middle. If those two numbers are related, the green light will come on, if they’re not, the red light will come on. We want to see if you can figure out the pattern.”
Now here’s the sneaky part:
The numbered buttons? They’re fake. They don’t do anything. There is no pattern. When you push the button in the middle, the red light and green light come on randomly.
It’s set up so that you do the experiment in four trials.
The first trial: The green light comes on 20% of the time, chosen at random.
The second trial: The green light comes on 50% of the time, chosen at random.
The third trial: Disaster! The green light never comes on. No matter what numbers you push you always get red.
The fourth trial: Triumph! The green light always comes on, no matter what buttons you push.
Now here’s the interesting thing:
After the experiment is over, you explain that there is no pattern. The buttons with the numbers are fake. They don’t do anything. They aren’t even hooked up.
And the weird part is, almost every test volunteer you do this to will refuse to believe you. They’ll call you a liar. They’ll say you’re lying because they outsmarted you and figured out the pattern, so you’re lying to them because you’re angry that they ruined your experiment.[2] They’ll get angry at you. They’ll run out of the room. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you take the wheel apart and show them that the numbered buttons are fake. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you push the middle button over and over and show them the pattern of lights.
Once our brains have learned something through trial and error, we will hang onto that pattern we’ve deduced even in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence that we are wrong.
Okay, so what does this have to do with your question?
Most people who go through this experiment refuse to accept the truth. They become so fixated on their own cleverness, so obsessed with their own skill, so proud of having figured out the pattern, that they cannot accept they were fooled.
They will actually believe the experimenter is lying to them before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out. They will actually reject the evidence of their own eyes, seeing fake buttons that aren’t attached to anything, before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out.
There is one group of people, however, who do not do this:
Paranoid schizophrenics.
Paranoid schizophrenics, as a group, almost always figure out there is no pattern and the numbers don’t mean anything before the experimenter explains it to them. They go through the trials, and at the end, when the green light always comes on, they say “this is bullshit, you’re fucking with me, the numbers don’t mean diddly, those buttons don’t do anything.”
Paranoia is the hypertuned hypothesis that everyone you encounter has an agenda against you and is trying to deceive you.
So. Why can people with paranoid schizophrenia pick out psychopaths so easily?
I’m not actually convinced that they can. It might simply be that a stopped watch is right twice a day. If you believe that everyone is a psychopath, you’ll have a 100% success rate identifying psychopaths…and a 100% false positive rate on non-psychopaths.
However, having said that ...
There is one difference. Most people who believe they have figured out a pattern will keep trying the pattern over and over, and each green light becomes more “proof” that they are right.
A person who believes everyone is trying to trick or deceive them doesn’t do this.
A normal person who thinks that the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 22, then when the green light comes on, say “Aha! I was right!”
A paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 87, looking for a red light ... because they want to see if you’re pulling a fast one on them, so if the green light comes on, they’ll know that the experiment is a lie.
So they press 101 and 87, sure enough the green light comes on, and aha! They’ve got you. They’ve figured out you’re deceiving them.
In other words, they aren’t testing the hypothesis “there is a pattern to the numbers and I’ve figured it out.” They’re testing the hypothesis “this whole experiment is a setup and you’re trying to deceive me.”
This goes to a core part of the scientific method: falsifiability.
Why did it take so long in human history for science as a formal system to be invented?
Because human beings are wired, for evolutionary reasons outside the scope of this answer, to look for evidence that the things we believe are right, not that the things we believe are wrong.
But not even a thousand positive results can “prove” something is right, whereas it only takes one negative result to prove something is wrong. The best way to be sure is to try as hard as you can to prove that the things you believe are false, to throw everything you can into finding evidence that what you believe is wrong.
The more your ideas resist being proven wrong, the more confidence you can put in them.
Most people won’t do this. Most people can’t do this. If they think they’ve spotted a pattern, most people will only look at positive correlations that seem to confirm the pattern. (This is the classic mistake conspiracy theorists make.) People don’t want to be proven wrong.
But if you start with the idea that everyone you meet is trying to deceive you, you look for deception everywhere, even in what the experimenter, or the experiment, is telling you.
If you believe everyone is a psychopath, you see psychopaths everywhere.
[1] In many, many psychological experiments, the description of the experiment given to the test subject is a lie. Often, you’re trying to study behaviors that people do unknowingly. The description you give people can’t tell them what you’re looking for if you try to study something people do unconsciously, so you give them some other description as a smokescreen.
[2] Most of the time, most experimental ethics review boards require experimenters to disclose the real purpose of the test. It is very, very common for people who’ve volunteered for a psychological study to come away from it believing “I ruined the experiment because of my cleverness.” If you ever talk to anyone who volunteered for a psychology experiment and they say “yeah, I ruined the experiment,” what they mean was “I don’t know what the experiment was about and when the experimenter told me, I refused to believe it.”
There’s a fascinating experiment I learned about in one of my cognitive science classes in uni. It went like this:
Start with a big wheel that has a whole bunch of buttons around the edge, and a button in the center. The buttons around the edge are all numbered, but not necessarily in any particular order; the numbers might look random, like 22, 6, 108, 49, 3 ... whatever.
Anyway, in addition to the buttons, there are also two lights, a red light and a green light.
This does have to do with your question, I promise. I’m getting to that.
The experimenter brings a test volunteer into the room with the wheel and says “this is a test of learning and mathematical reasoning.” That’s a lie, of course.[1] It’s actually an experiment about how people form internal models of the real world.
The experimenter says “There is a pattern to the numbers on the wheel. Your job is to figure out the pattern. Press any two buttons with numbers on them, then press the button in the middle. If those two numbers are related, the green light will come on, if they’re not, the red light will come on. We want to see if you can figure out the pattern.”
Now here’s the sneaky part:
The numbered buttons? They’re fake. They don’t do anything. There is no pattern. When you push the button in the middle, the red light and green light come on randomly.
It’s set up so that you do the experiment in four trials.
The first trial: The green light comes on 20% of the time, chosen at random.
The second trial: The green light comes on 50% of the time, chosen at random.
The third trial: Disaster! The green light never comes on. No matter what numbers you push you always get red.
The fourth trial: Triumph! The green light always comes on, no matter what buttons you push.
Now here’s the interesting thing:
After the experiment is over, you explain that there is no pattern. The buttons with the numbers are fake. They don’t do anything. They aren’t even hooked up.
And the weird part is, almost every test volunteer you do this to will refuse to believe you. They’ll call you a liar. They’ll say you’re lying because they outsmarted you and figured out the pattern, so you’re lying to them because you’re angry that they ruined your experiment.[2] They’ll get angry at you. They’ll run out of the room. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you take the wheel apart and show them that the numbered buttons are fake. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you push the middle button over and over and show them the pattern of lights.
Once our brains have learned something through trial and error, we will hang onto that pattern we’ve deduced even in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence that we are wrong.
Okay, so what does this have to do with your question?
Most people who go through this experiment refuse to accept the truth. They become so fixated on their own cleverness, so obsessed with their own skill, so proud of having figured out the pattern, that they cannot accept they were fooled.
They will actually believe the experimenter is lying to them before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out. They will actually reject the evidence of their own eyes, seeing fake buttons that aren’t attached to anything, before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out.
There is one group of people, however, who do not do this:
Paranoid schizophrenics.
Paranoid schizophrenics, as a group, almost always figure out there is no pattern and the numbers don’t mean anything before the experimenter explains it to them. They go through the trials, and at the end, when the green light always comes on, they say “this is bullshit, you’re fucking with me, the numbers don’t mean diddly, those buttons don’t do anything.”
Paranoia is the hypertuned hypothesis that everyone you encounter has an agenda against you and is trying to deceive you.
So. Why can people with paranoid schizophrenia pick out psychopaths so easily?
I’m not actually convinced that they can. It might simply be that a stopped watch is right twice a day. If you believe that everyone is a psychopath, you’ll have a 100% success rate identifying psychopaths…and a 100% false positive rate on non-psychopaths.
However, having said that ...
There is one difference. Most people who believe they have figured out a pattern will keep trying the pattern over and over, and each green light becomes more “proof” that they are right.
A person who believes everyone is trying to trick or deceive them doesn’t do this.
A normal person who thinks that the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 22, then when the green light comes on, say “Aha! I was right!”
A paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 87, looking for a red light ... because they want to see if you’re pulling a fast one on them, so if the green light comes on, they’ll know that the experiment is a lie.
So they press 101 and 87, sure enough the green light comes on, and aha! They’ve got you. They’ve figured out you’re deceiving them.
In other words, they aren’t testing the hypothesis “there is a pattern to the numbers and I’ve figured it out.” They’re testing the hypothesis “this whole experiment is a setup and you’re trying to deceive me.”
This goes to a core part of the scientific method: falsifiability.
Why did it take so long in human history for science as a formal system to be invented?
Because human beings are wired, for evolutionary reasons outside the scope of this answer, to look for evidence that the things we believe are right, not that the things we believe are wrong.
But not even a thousand positive results can “prove” something is right, whereas it only takes one negative result to prove something is wrong. The best way to be sure is to try as hard as you can to prove that the things you believe are false, to throw everything you can into finding evidence that what you believe is wrong.
The more your ideas resist being proven wrong, the more confidence you can put in them.
Most people won’t do this. Most people can’t do this. If they think they’ve spotted a pattern, most people will only look at positive correlations that seem to confirm the pattern. (This is the classic mistake conspiracy theorists make.) People don’t want to be proven wrong.
But if you start with the idea that everyone you meet is trying to deceive you, you look for deception everywhere, even in what the experimenter, or the experiment, is telling you.
If you believe everyone is a psychopath, you see psychopaths everywhere.
[1] In many, many psychological experiments, the description of the experiment given to the test subject is a lie. Often, you’re trying to study behaviors that people do unknowingly. The description you give people can’t tell them what you’re looking for if you try to study something people do unconsciously, so you give them some other description as a smokescreen.
[2] Most of the time, most experimental ethics review boards require experimenters to disclose the real purpose of the test. It is very, very common for people who’ve volunteered for a psychological study to come away from it believing “I ruined the experiment because of my cleverness.” If you ever talk to anyone who volunteered for a psychology experiment and they say “yeah, I ruined the experiment,” what they mean was “I don’t know what the experiment was about and when the experimenter told me, I refused to believe it.”
Friday, September 6, 2024
Are high-functioning autistic individuals more likely to take things personally?
[Answered on Quora.com by Dr. Natalie Engebrecht]
Than whom? I assume that it means ‘take things more personally than NTs.’
One mistaken understanding about people with ASD in general is that we are low in emotions. But the truth is that we are INCREDIBLY sensitive. Furthermore our sensory issues result in a greater capacity to get dramatically hurt and upset. One way that our nervous system copes is to become alexithymic, which makes it difficult at times for us to know that we are having an emotion to even though we are. A good example is last weekend when I was upset, my mind did not feel upset but I had the symptoms of a heart attack (I was having a physical panic attack).
Another—perhaps more dramatic—example was at Christmas time when my older son made a joke. I have two Buddha statues at my work as part of the decorations for my meditation classes. He said: “I though Buddhists were one with everything, not have one of everything”. He had told the joke to my younger son who has a greater tendency to understand me, and my younger son said: “Don’t say that to mom, she won’t find it funny”. Nonetheless my older son could not resist. I remember sitting at the table and him saying it. My younger son told me later he knew that trouble was coming because the left side of my mouth twitched and my fingers moved briefly. At the time I did not get upset. But I started obsessing, and feeling really upset. I felt that it was an unfair statement. I am very very minimalistic. I have four sets of clothes, one lipstick etc. So my brain could not make sense of it. By the evening I had taken a number of my things and put them in garbage bags (20 in total) and had a fire in a garbage bin burning other things in the backyard.
So yes, I would say that I am more sensitive than most people in certain circumstances. If it is not a personal comment about me, I have far more resilience and less emotional reactivity than other people. I am able to listen to devastating trauma histories my patients share with deep empathy for them, without getting dysregulated. Basically I do not like things that feel unfair to me. If a comment makes sense then I am not overly sensitive, but fairness and logic are very important to me regarding myself. I am also sensitive about people who know me well saying things that are untrue about me. For example I don’t lie, I approach the world and people in a kind and caring way, and I am non-judgemental. If a person that knows me well accuses me of one of those things then I can get very agitated.
Recent research by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency but, rather, a hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response[1]. Known as Intense World Syndrome, it is suggested that the core challenge in ASD is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of neuronal circuits which leads to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory. This results in the world being painfully intense when the neocortex is affected, and aversive when the amygdala is affected, resulting in social and environmental withdrawal. Due to the fact that the brain is plastic and the brain of people with ASD is believed to be very rapid at learning it is believed that this hypersensitivity results in the individual creating a small repertoire of secure behavioural routines which they obsessively repeat in order to feel safe.
Instead of people with AS or HFA lacking in empathy we empathize too much. What looks like a lack of empathy or coldness to the outside world is actually a response to being overwhelmed by emotion. We have an excess not a lack. People who live with or are friends with people with AS will attest to this. This theory suggests that the social difficulties of this with AS/HFA result from an attempt to cope with the world where the volume on all of our senses and feelings have been turned up to 10++.
My mirror-emotion synesthesia makes things more intense for me. I feel what other people are feeling. it is really helpful for my work, but can really be too much when being around people. Furthermore, things my autistic friends get upset about make sense to me. They are logical. But things neurotypicals get mad about can really frustrate me and I feel responsible for them. I want everyone to be happy and no-one to suffer. So in my personal life that becomes a lot and I keep my circle small to prevent being overwhelmed.
Research finds that people with AS have hyper-memories but lack the normal extinction of fear that NTs exhibit. Basically in ASD the brain amplifies fear memories and then generalizes the fear to other stimulus configurations. This results in anything being similar to the original fear becoming frightening also, and the fear of stimuli being exaggerated. Furthermore, research shows that these fears are persistent in people with ASD due to impairments in extinction (the tendency for a stimulus to become neutral after no danger occurs); this results in the fears not being able to dissipate and a circular obsession occurring that runs the fear over and over in the person’s mind, preventing them from using their logical brain. Essentially the person goes into a flight/fight state, without a way to escape from it.
So on both a personal level, yes I am more sensitive and also on a research level people with HFA or AS take things more personally.
For more information on (high-functioning) ASD, have a look at: Embrace Autism
A blog about quantitative- and qualitative research on autism, by Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP and Eva Silvertant.
Footnotes:
[1] The Intense World Syndrome – an Alternative Hypothesis for Autism
Than whom? I assume that it means ‘take things more personally than NTs.’
One mistaken understanding about people with ASD in general is that we are low in emotions. But the truth is that we are INCREDIBLY sensitive. Furthermore our sensory issues result in a greater capacity to get dramatically hurt and upset. One way that our nervous system copes is to become alexithymic, which makes it difficult at times for us to know that we are having an emotion to even though we are. A good example is last weekend when I was upset, my mind did not feel upset but I had the symptoms of a heart attack (I was having a physical panic attack).
Another—perhaps more dramatic—example was at Christmas time when my older son made a joke. I have two Buddha statues at my work as part of the decorations for my meditation classes. He said: “I though Buddhists were one with everything, not have one of everything”. He had told the joke to my younger son who has a greater tendency to understand me, and my younger son said: “Don’t say that to mom, she won’t find it funny”. Nonetheless my older son could not resist. I remember sitting at the table and him saying it. My younger son told me later he knew that trouble was coming because the left side of my mouth twitched and my fingers moved briefly. At the time I did not get upset. But I started obsessing, and feeling really upset. I felt that it was an unfair statement. I am very very minimalistic. I have four sets of clothes, one lipstick etc. So my brain could not make sense of it. By the evening I had taken a number of my things and put them in garbage bags (20 in total) and had a fire in a garbage bin burning other things in the backyard.
So yes, I would say that I am more sensitive than most people in certain circumstances. If it is not a personal comment about me, I have far more resilience and less emotional reactivity than other people. I am able to listen to devastating trauma histories my patients share with deep empathy for them, without getting dysregulated. Basically I do not like things that feel unfair to me. If a comment makes sense then I am not overly sensitive, but fairness and logic are very important to me regarding myself. I am also sensitive about people who know me well saying things that are untrue about me. For example I don’t lie, I approach the world and people in a kind and caring way, and I am non-judgemental. If a person that knows me well accuses me of one of those things then I can get very agitated.
Recent research by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency but, rather, a hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response[1]. Known as Intense World Syndrome, it is suggested that the core challenge in ASD is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of neuronal circuits which leads to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory. This results in the world being painfully intense when the neocortex is affected, and aversive when the amygdala is affected, resulting in social and environmental withdrawal. Due to the fact that the brain is plastic and the brain of people with ASD is believed to be very rapid at learning it is believed that this hypersensitivity results in the individual creating a small repertoire of secure behavioural routines which they obsessively repeat in order to feel safe.
Instead of people with AS or HFA lacking in empathy we empathize too much. What looks like a lack of empathy or coldness to the outside world is actually a response to being overwhelmed by emotion. We have an excess not a lack. People who live with or are friends with people with AS will attest to this. This theory suggests that the social difficulties of this with AS/HFA result from an attempt to cope with the world where the volume on all of our senses and feelings have been turned up to 10++.
My mirror-emotion synesthesia makes things more intense for me. I feel what other people are feeling. it is really helpful for my work, but can really be too much when being around people. Furthermore, things my autistic friends get upset about make sense to me. They are logical. But things neurotypicals get mad about can really frustrate me and I feel responsible for them. I want everyone to be happy and no-one to suffer. So in my personal life that becomes a lot and I keep my circle small to prevent being overwhelmed.
Research finds that people with AS have hyper-memories but lack the normal extinction of fear that NTs exhibit. Basically in ASD the brain amplifies fear memories and then generalizes the fear to other stimulus configurations. This results in anything being similar to the original fear becoming frightening also, and the fear of stimuli being exaggerated. Furthermore, research shows that these fears are persistent in people with ASD due to impairments in extinction (the tendency for a stimulus to become neutral after no danger occurs); this results in the fears not being able to dissipate and a circular obsession occurring that runs the fear over and over in the person’s mind, preventing them from using their logical brain. Essentially the person goes into a flight/fight state, without a way to escape from it.
So on both a personal level, yes I am more sensitive and also on a research level people with HFA or AS take things more personally.
For more information on (high-functioning) ASD, have a look at: Embrace Autism
A blog about quantitative- and qualitative research on autism, by Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP and Eva Silvertant.
Footnotes:
[1] The Intense World Syndrome – an Alternative Hypothesis for Autism
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Jim Croce "I got a name"
The song "I got a name" by Jim Croce meant ever-so-much to me when I was 10 years old.
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