Guided Imagery, Snake Oil, and the need for Love

 

 

Guiden Imagery and relaxation improves allergice response  

"Our study confirmed a positive and clinically relevant effect of FR(functional relaxation) and GI(guided imagery) on total serum IgE levels"

 

Ok so I'm doing all this research on inflammation in the body and brain which seems to be at the root of a large portion of illness and also seems to be deeply relatied to hormones which seem to be deeply related to emotional stress and trauma.

 

We need more research on these kinds of therapiesbut I truly think they will have genuine application.

 

Something about yoga: I've seen people with mental illness get worse. I saw a correlation between both people having mental illness and being attracted to exotic esoteric spiritual practices and people who didn't seem all that messed up get so obsessed (insert fanatic diet, movement therapy,yoga, random philosophical jargon) that one has to wonder if they weren't implicitly seeking to INCREASE or even CREATE a manic state that wasn't already there.

 

When I say this: I'm thinking along the lines of "crazy like us". People have x pathology--- they are looking for a way to present symptom sets such that they can be seen. I think people tend to intentionally albeit subconsciously CHOOSE activities that will increase a mentally ill state in an attempt to present to the world that they need support.

 

One theory as to why the placebos are helping people with mental illness MORE now than they used to is the change in the amount of service, support, and attention that people participating in the studies are given. People need to be seen, and they need to be seen at the specific level of the root of pathological problem. (I'm not going to bother looking for a more appropriate term and assume you get what I mean.)

 

You can over stimulate the "spiritual" areas of the brain to complete mania and the reality is that is actually the goal of a lot of the esoteric practices.

 

My point with all this is that I believe that people can bring themselves back into a balanced state. And when I say that, I mean even from extreme conditions. I think that MOST books on this subject are over reaching-- IE they get overzealous with positive results and write books saying, "You can fix your genes with meditation!" when this is a pretty wild claim (albeit one I believe worth researching)--- that has NOT been verified.

 

It's akin to telling someone in a hospital who can't walk, "You CAN walk, you just have to believe and you have to push yourself and it going to hurt but you have to do it."

 

On the one hand-- this might actually help the person walk. On the other hand, if the person can't walk-- you're torturing someone.

 

And on the ... er... third hand... if the person could walk but they need other interventions, you may have just prevented them from getting better support by pressuming they just need to "exert their will more forcefully".

 

One thing I've really been getting into is research on the nature of how supportive people in life-- meaningful relationships, etc etc--- have a protective factor in physical and emotional health. If that process has been disrupted in early life, it doesn't just get fixed when you add supportive people.

 

There's something to knowing that ultimately if you really need people they will disappear that changes you. People can say, "Sure, I'm here" but if you know, "Yeah but if I was helplessly dependant (a child) you wouldn't be there." and it changes how you relate to people.

 

The reason this is relevant to me is that a fundemental tenant of the self help industry (american style) is that all you need is yourself. I don't believe that is true. I believe that truly genuinely, for real health we need meangingful relationships, we need to believe there is an external reason for continuing through a painful existance, and in general, that kind of purpose usually comes from being needed/wanted/appreciated in a meaningful way by the external world. We also need to know on some level that if we fell apart there would be someone to carry us.Most of us don't fall apart in a permanent debilitating way.... so therefore most of us can have a sense int he back of our minds that "people are there for us" simply because that is how it worked in our lives. When we really truly were in need, we found someone.

 

For people who found themselves really truly in need of meaningful compassionate empathy and support and found the world bone dry--- creating that "false" pressumption that "people will be there for us if we really need them" is particularly difficult, because we know it isn't true. When a therapist tries to convince a person to trust the world--- they fail because they are being paid.

 

It's fundamentally NOT a case of someone agreeing to be there for you if you fall apart. It's a case of a person doing there job and tolerating your presence and giving some research based feedback because they want to be paid.

 

i'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm working on it. : )

Dissociation and Mental Health Disorders

Dissociation requires a physical process to occur in the brain (and very likely body). People who have near death experiences often report a sensation of feeling above their bodies watching what is happening below. So too, do some people who report dissociating from traumatic events. Interestingly, the temporal lobe seems to be affected both by sexual abuse and by near death experience. It's also considered the home of the religious experience in the brain (as usual other brain regions are involved as well-- modular brain models are problematic so we are told).


Dissociative experiences can involve other bodily sensations of "not existing". The parietal lobe is considered to be the part of the brain most responsible for the bodies awareness of itself and spatial awareness. The resulting temporal and parietal lobe epileptic activity whether full siezures, pseudoseizures, or partial siezures seems to be correlated with dissociation during sexual abuse. According to the following study, somatic, not psychological dissociation was most correlated with subsequent siezure activity.




http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/1999/12000/Dissociation_in_Temporal_Lobe_Epilepsy_and.2.aspx


"Also, PES patients significantly more often reported sexual traumatic experiences." PES is pseudoepileptic siezures. This begs an interesting question of whether pseudo siezures are a result of the brain deliberately dissociating from an event identified as too stressful to fully feel--- and perhaps ES is more rooted in... something else (But What?!!)


Just wanted to call it first. Somatic dissociation is going to be highly correlated with abnormal funtioning in the parietal lobe.


The angular gyrus is also highly correlated with out of body experiences.

But where are we going?!

Another aspect of these studies are the implications they have for other neurological disorders which are currently (badly) diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses with disregard for the biological processes and traumas that are going on. (Yeah I'm looking at you shitty DSM whatever edition)

For example "Borderline Personality" is highly correlated with altered functioning in these brain regions. Why, oh why, did they claim these adult women "with histories of severe abuse" are "borderline personality disordered" women and not that they have PTSD? Why would they say this:

"Compared with control subjects, BPD subjects had significantly smaller right parietal cortex (−11%) and hippocampal (−17%) volumes. The parietal cortex of borderline subjects showed a significantly stronger leftward asymmetry when compared with control subjects. Stronger psychotic symptoms and schizoid personality traits in borderline subjects were significantly related to reduced leftward asymmetry. Stronger trauma-related clinical symptoms and neuropsychologic deficits were significantly related to smaller hippocampal size."

And not conclude that BPD is more likely a traumatic disorder than a "personality disorder" at all?

Fucking scientists.

Further more medical models of treatment with drugs will miss the point. If a person wants to escape their body you can't pump them full of meds and make them stay. A person has to make a conscious decision to be fully present in their body and increase their capacity to face the suffering in the reality of their life. The deeper the capacity to withstand the suffering and the deeper the drive to exist despite the suffering and be fully present, the more normalization of these kinds of symptoms you're going to see.

Time Travel Experiment

Excellent!!



When I was a wee little sophomore in highschool I began to get curious about whether or not time travel would happen in the future and how that would work with keeping it a secret from people in the past. (Basically I watched 12 Monkeys.)

Cooooole don't diiieeee!!!   (How depressing!)



So I created a brilliant experiement to determine if time travel will be possible in the future. Scientifically.

Here was my procedure:

1. Obtain diary.

2. Write super cool message sure to impress someone in the future who is CERTAIN to read my diary in 6897 AD.

"DEAR PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE. I AM WONDERING IF TIME TRAVEL IS REAL. IF TIME TRAVEL IS REAL WOULD YOU COME BACK TO MAY 23rd 1996 AND WRITE A MESSAGE TO ME ON THE WOODEN TABLE AT LA MADELINE ON XXXXXXXXXXX ROAD? I WILL KEEP IT A SECRET IF YOU DO."

3. Go to wooden table at Le Madeleine and see if message from the future has been written.

ABSTRACT:

Steps one and two were completed as described. The following day, wooden table at Le Madeleine was visited. No message was found on wooden table other than a previously existing carved sentence "Suck my dick, bitch." It was determined through detailed analysis that this message did not come from the future.

CONCLUSION: Due to ethical delimmas of allowing peoples "of the past" to be aware of time travel technology "of the future" results may or may not indicate that time travel is impossible. Our time traveling descendents of the future may have moral constraints and possible laws preventing them from contact with people "of the past". Another possible complication of the experiment is that said journal was lost, possibly preventing time travelers of the future from having awareness such an experiment took place.

The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis

The what?

Sounds far out.

I was reading about the controversies in what the placebo effect actually is, whether it affects biological function at all, and by what mechanism it functions and came upon this paragraph:


"Collectively, the findings of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here strongly support the view that the subjective nature and the intentional content (what they are “about” from a first-person perspective) of mental processes (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the various levels of brain functioning (e.g., molecular, cellular, neural circuit) and brain plasticity. Furthermore, these findings indicate that mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of the neural bases of behavior in humans. An attempt is made to interpret the results of these neuroimaging studies with a new theoretical framework called the Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis."


The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis? I love it when you talk dirty to me like to me sciencey writers. So what is this Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis?


Roy J. J. Pereira, a Jesuit priest working on his Ph.D. at the Philosophy Department of Boston College, tells us this:


"I .... make use of Beauregard and O’Leary’s Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis (PTH) which posits that ‘the mind (the psychological world, the first person perspective) and the brain (which is part of the so-called “material” world, the third-person perspective) represent two epistemologically different domains that can interact because they are complementary aspects of the same transcendental reality."

Ah I get it. So thoughts are spiritual phenomena that can't be measured by science because they don't exactly match neurological measurements of thought process. I admit, I find this fact infuriating. You mean you haven't mapped out the location of my thoughts yet oh scientists? But surely they must have  a a specific location, I can feel them happening in my head!! Where are my thoughts happening in my brain?!

I'll have to look into this matter further because this is simply unacceptable.