Psychology « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Saturday, October 13, 2012

◊ Holotropic Hypoxia: Just My Imagination

Brain / Mind ... Psychology ... Spirituality ...

Last week at the zendo, one of our members gave a talk about holotropic breathwork; the person in question was quite qualified to do this, as she has been practicing it for over 15 years and is now a group facilitator. I wasn’t familiar with that particular form of “bodywork”, so I listened with interest. It sounded quite interesting, especially the claim that holotropic breathers plumb the depths of the psyche and glean great personal and metaphysical insights — without expensive long-term talk therapy or the use of dangerous psychotropic drugs. And without any extraordinary life commitment; the typical breather attends a day-long session every two months, and that’s it. Hey, I’m all for personal and metaphysical insights without a repetitive and burdensome daily practice! So, like many of the other listeners at this talk, I was interested in signing up.

But before I signed on the dotted line, the quasi-scientist in me wanted to know how it worked. The other parts of me said, “oh come on, quasi-scientist, that kind of attitude is exactly what holotropic breathwork puts on hold”. It’s all about the Journey to the Center of the Mind (remember that cheezy song by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes?).

Nonetheless, the quasi-scientist soon had me in front of a Google page typing in terms like breathwork and hyperventilation. Hyperventilation? It was made clear at the recent zendo talk that breathing fast for a good long time (around an hour) is the key to holotropic breathwork, the gateway to » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:41 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 30, 2012

◊ Zen and the Flynn Effect

Brain / Mind ... Psychology ... Technology ... Zen ...

I just found out about the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is all about “psychometrics”, i.e. the measurement of human intelligence. About 28 years ago, a New Zealand sociology researcher who specializes in intelligence issues (whose last name is Flynn, not surprisingly) noticed that IQ scores have been rising steadily since at least the late 1940s, possibly since 1932. This effect has been taking place for both the highest and lowest scoring groups, as well as the middle. In effect, every new generation seems to be smarter than the one preceding it. That effect goes on today. I got out of college in 1975, so the class of 2012 has me and my peers beat by quite a bit — around 12 points (the effect is about 1/3 IQ point per year).

According to a recent Scientific American article (which brought me up to speed on this issue), the Flynn effect has been driven by one specific component of the IQ tests. It is not the component for arithmetic skills, nor the component for vocabulary skills; these scores have only gone up a bit over the past 60-odd years. The big jump is in “similarities”, the measurements of “fluid intelligence”. These are the tricky questions that attempt to gage a person’s “abstract intelligence”, the ability to see patterns (according to someone’s judgment about what patterns are important to see). I.e., which of the following animals is least like the others: orangutan, anteater, skunk and zebra; or BOOM is to 4267 as ZOOK is to (choose one): 3902, 54892, 3319 . . . or Mary is 16 years older than her brother, and is four times her sister’s age; if her sister was born two years before her brother, then . . . (these are not real IQ questions, of course).

Interestingly, the Sci Am article points out that Dr. Flynn and others feel that the Flynn Effect reflects changes in what society expects from us, both in » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:11 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, September 13, 2012

◊ No More Mister Nice Guy

Brain / Mind ... Personal Reflections ... Psychology ...

It’s been almost 20 years since I found out about the Myers Briggs theories of human temperament, and their associated system of classification and testing. I’ll assume that most everyone who trips across this blog is familiar with this, but if not, here’s another link, one of hundreds if not thousands available on the web.

I was in the midst of a short-lived but very intense relationship with a woman from Florida (Gainesville Florida, a rather strange and interesting town located just inside the armpit of the Sunshine State). The relationship disintegrated rather quickly and unexpectedly, something like the two Space Shuttle tragedies. So I came away with it with some interesting stories and mostly good memories; but given what I saw in the final days, I had relatively few regrets over its demise. One of the good things that I walked away with was a personal discovery of Myers Briggs. During the final high-energy months, Ellie told me about the MB Inventory, and so I quickly got to a local bookstore and obtained a copy of Kiersey’s “Please Understand Me“. I made haste to take the test quiz in the book, and lo and behold, I was found to be an INFJ. Just like Ellie! For a brief moment, it seemed like the two of us were a match made in heaven.

Well, we weren’t. But still, I was an INFJ! The most rare of the » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:10 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 20, 2012

◊ Mitt Romney: Bully For You

Current Affairs ... Psychology ...

It’s been about 10 days now since the nation found out that Mitt Romney was a bully in high school. The Washington Post broke the story that in 1965, as an 18 year old senior in a preppie high school, Romney jumped a kid with long bleached hair, pinned him to the ground, and started cutting his locks. The victim was also gay, but I haven’t read anywhere that this entered into Romney’s intentions. Bullies go after anyone who seems different and vulnerable, regardless of sexual preference. Even age wasn’t a barrier for a bully like Mitt; he had also tricked an elderly teacher with poor eyesight into walking into a closed door. Real nice, Mitt.

This made me think about my own bullying experiences in school. I was on the receiving end of a fair amount of bullying from about 4th grade through junior year in high school. Most of it was verbal abuse, being “mocked out” as they called it back then. But there was also some physical abuse, luckily nothing that left any major scars. On my body, anyway. As to my psyche, I still ask myself, did those stupid kids (and the teachers who mostly looked the other way) affect the person that I grew up to be? And if so, how?

There have been various studies on this, and some of them have found that bullying causes increased rates of personality disorders in victims, especially anxiety. Hmmmm, yes, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:34 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

◊ The Pursuit of Unhappiness

Psychology ... Zen ...

Our zendo group (sangha) recently discussed a koan story about a lady who heard a lecture from a wise teacher about how one might find “a Buddha of light” in one’s mind and heart, an infinite enlightenment within one’s own body, a light that would make everything you encounter seem to glow. So, the woman takes this to heart and a few days later she has a religious experience while washing a pot. Everything started to glow for her. So she ran over and found the great teacher and told him about it. He tried to deflate her a bit by asking if the smelly pit beneath an outhouse would also glow for her. She slapped him and called him an old fart (just to play off the teacher’s eschatalogical theme, I guess). He got a laugh out of that. End of story.

Turns out that all of this has something to do with happiness. Or so said the guy who wrote the book that we are studying, a Zen teacher named John Tarrant (book entitled “Bring Me the Rhinoceros”). Roshi Tarrant’s challenges his readers by asking “Are You Afraid of Happiness?” He sums it up by saying “when you are not afraid to forget who you are, life in the kitchen or life in the office might contain huge and overwhelming happiness [assumedly, one’s life in the smelly outhouse might also qualify . . . just to push this koan’s gastro-eschatology to the limit!] . . . when you are not afraid of your own happiness, you don’t get in its way”.

Happiness is an interesting word. The more you think about it, the less you understand it. If you try to » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:33 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, January 21, 2012

◊ Aspergers Syndrome, The Dynamic Version

Aspergers ... Psychology ...

I’ve had my problems with the rest of the human race. I generally like people, but as I get older I have more and more trouble relating to them. Maybe it’s just a part of the process of turning into an old fogie. But for a while there, I thought it was all because of Aspergers Syndrome.

I first read about Aspergers maybe 5 or 6 years ago, and a lot of the characteristics of Aspie-people seemed to hit home with me. Supposedly, kids who like science and who get rabidly interested in something like trains and railroads often have Aspergers, especially if they maintain such obsessive interests into adulthood. I still like science but I can’t say that I’m currently obsessed with trains. Nonetheless, I did have a Lionel layout as a kid, and I was a fairly rabid railran photographer while in high school and college and even a decade or so beyond that (ah, innocent days, fun days they were).

So then, after discovering Aspergers, it seemed as though I finally had my finger on what it is that sometimes » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:37 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, September 22, 2011

◊ Don’t Blink Twice, It’s Alright

Psychology ... Society ...

As I mentioned earlier in the month (Sept. 10), I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”, a popular book on decision-making. Thirty-eight percent of its reviewers on Amazon believe that it only merits 1, 2 or 3 stars. Even one of the 4 star reviewers says “The book is a series of semi-socio-scientific articles on insight and intuition. It is not a cohesive theory . . . Gladwell fumbles in trying take them into some unified theory that is comprehensible let alone cohesive.” My friend Mary basically agrees with that sentiment (see her comments on it); she finds it to be a desultory mix of topics and a grab-bag of sundry theories.

As to myself, I am also scratching my head, wondering why I don’t see what seems obvious to Gladwell, i.e. a big idea that will change how we and our leaders make decisions, big and small, and for the better. Not that Blink is devoid of all worth. There are a number of small ideas that have some value.

One such idea was elegantly presented recently in a short article on the Scientific American web site, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:01 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, September 10, 2011

◊ The Blink and The Look

Current Affairs ... Politics ... Psychology ...

A friend at work recently loaned me a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and I’ve been cruising through it over the past few days (it’s a fairly easy read, with lots of anecdotes; interestingly, a movie is being made about it, to be released later this year). Gladwell’s main point is that we humans are built to make snap judgments about things and people that we see or encounter for the first time, based upon initial impressions; and that such judgments are generally more accurate than you might expect. He calls this the “thin slicing” technique of decision making.

But Gladwell also points out that “blink” judgments are sometimes wrong, and offers some conjectures about what can throw us off when we start judging books by their covers. To be honest, Gladwell doesn’t really leave you with much to help decide whether and when to trust your gut instincts, and when to re-think them. He gives a few examples of the many overt and subconscious prejudices that people harbor, but doesn’t say how to detect when these are blinkering your blink. This book is kind of “blinky” in itself, actually; various critics have said that the evidence for Gladwell’s contentions is usually quite thin. But the stories in it are interesting enough.

One of Gladwell’s stories regards Warren Harding, 29th President of the US and arguably the worst one ever. This was an instance when the “thin slicing” of a first impression let us down. According to Gladwell, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:50 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, April 30, 2011

◊ Evening Reflections

Personal Reflections ... Psychology ...

It is the evening of the day,
I sit and watch the children play.
Smiling faces I can see, but none for me,
I sit and watch as tears go by.

My riches can’t buy everything,
I want to hear the children sing.
All I hear is the sound
Of rain falling on the ground . . .

My first reflection for tonight — not exactly tearful, but a bit pensive: I just read an article about a study done recently at the University of Geneva by a Dr Camille Ferdenzi, which found a link between how attractive women find a guy and the relative lengths of the guy’s pointer finger and the ring finger. It turns out that the shorter the pointer finger is in relation to the ring finger, the better looking the dude is. Guys with ring fingers about the same size as their pointer (ratio 1:1) didn’t do so well, while the guys with ratios closer to 1/1.1 or 1/1.2 were perceived to be pretty hot.

Dr Ferdenzi said: “This illustrates a female preference for men with a low 2D:4D ratio » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:13 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

◊ Bonobos In Paradise

Psychology ... Science ... Society ...

I came across another article about bonobos today; bonobos are a chimp-like African monkey that are growing in popularity amidst their human cousins, because they are so peaceable and hippy-like. When bonobo tribes have conflicts, they often settle them by having an orgy. They also share and hug a lot, and not surprisingly, women are mostly in charge. They seem so happy and well-adjusted, like we humans could supposedly be if only we’d get over our greed and violence and masculine hubris regarding our souped-up brains.

Well, the bonobo world does sound nice. But this article briefly mentions something that probably explains why bonobos are the way they are, and we are not. Quote:

Bonobos’ generous nature likely evolved because they live in an area of the Congo where food is plentiful. They never had to compete with gorillas or kill for a meal like common chimps do.

OK, so the bonobos found a place where everything balanced out for them. Unfortunately, the human species did not. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:26 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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