Thursday, June 26, 2008

Psychology Link Dump - Meditation, Coincidence, Self-love, and New Books

Time to clean up some tabs I've had open for the past few days.

First up, a great post from Developing Intelligence: "Untraining" The Brain: Meditation and Executive Function.

Some meditative practices purport to reverse automatization of thought and behavior, such as transcendental or mindfulness meditation, and indeed there is some evidence that these techniques can reduce interference on the Stroop task.

For example, in a study by Alexander, Langer, Newman, Chandler, and Davies from the Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 73 elderly participants were randomly assigned to either no treatment, a transcendental meditation program, mindfulness training, or relaxation training. Note that transcendental and mindfulness techniques are frequently described as inducing a state of "pure consciousness" during which the mind is "silent," and yet not empty: in this state, meditators claim to be intensely aware only of awareness itself. Less cryptically, this state is also referred to as "restful alertness." Subjective reports aside, this state is also accompanied by increased interhemispheric phase coherence in frontal alpha EEG (Alexander, 1982, cited by Alexander et al, 1989), the amount of which is highly correlated with subsequent measures of fluid intelligence (Dillbeck & Vesley, 1986, cited by Alexander et al, 1989).

Be sure to check out the whole post -- there are several studies presented that support the use of meditation techniques to deprogram automatic thinking. The possibilities for this in therapeutic situations seem very promising.

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Next up we have two articles from Psychology Today.

The Power of Coincidence

One thing is certain about coincidence. The phenomenon fascinates believers and skeptics alike. It's a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective? Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People find it dispiriting to hear, 'It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything.'"

To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity, the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though, the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect anomalies in a meaningful way. Many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform—including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our penchant for noticing coincidences. In fact, mathematicians, cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are applying the tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. Are they easily explained, or so improbable they must signify something?

This is a fairly long article, but it's a good read, not matter how you personally view the idea of coincidence and/or synchronicity.

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Your Trump Card: Self-Love
Having a glowing vision of the future helps you tackle the core beliefs about yourself—such as doubts about your own worthiness for success—that have held you back until now. So as you peel back the curtains around your core self, you become ready to tap the source of all change and success—self-love, and forgiveness for past failures.

Self-love doesn't happen by luck or the grace of God. You have to create it. These are among the most important elements of it.

  • Honoring yourself and who you really are. Love is your birthright. As Teilhard de Chardin said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience."
  • Telling the highest truth, which is that we are powerful beings capable of creating joy and success or pain and suffering in our lives. We are not destined to be victims. We have the power to choose, and this power is both the greatest responsibility we have and the greatest opportunity.
  • Honoring who you are becoming. Self-love involves recognizing that you are constantly evolving and growing to become a more powerful and more loving being.
  • Honoring your feelings and responding to those feelings. Remember, feelings are important signals, and even the so-called negative feelings of anger and fear serve the important purpose of alerting us to the obstacles in our life.
  • Recognizing that the universe is literally made of love. "If we will just open ourselves to receive, like flowers opening to the sun, then everything is possible," says Ti Caine, hypnotherapist and life coach based in Sherman Oaks, California.
This article is a bit woo woo, but useful I think.

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Finally, three book reviews from Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process
by Richard M. Berlin (Editor)
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
Sixteen poets, sixteen essays about mental illness and poetry. In this nicely produced book, editor Richard Berlin has brought together a diverse range of poets united by two common factors: mental illness and poetry. While each has his or her own story to tell the essays address some pertinent and challenging questions, not least of which is the effects of mental illness on the creative process. A related question is about the effects of pharmacological and psychological treatments. In discussing these and other issues the contributors come across, in Harry Stack Sullivan's words, as 'more simply human than otherwise'. Therein lies, perhaps, the enigma of the creative person with mental illness. In addition to whatever burdens mental illness imposes, for the artist there is an added dilemma, the expectation that art must flow from an uncontaminated mind, one that is free to explore where it will. Of course artists have traditionally altered their minds through the use of one psychoactive substance or another, but drugs prescribed for mental illness are another matter. Might they not reduce the artist to merely mortal status? Instead of 'better than well' as suggested by Peter Kramer, might the artist on Prozac not be 'less than luminous'?
Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections
by Robert D. Stolorow
Analytic Press, 2007

In Trauma and human existence, Stolorow presents a 'contextualized' reading of the emotions, which situates trauma as central to the understanding of human existence. Although a 'short' book, Stolorow presents a detailed theoretical and personal account of mood, unconscious, temporality and therapeutic change which draws upon the thought of Gadamer, intersubjective theory, and primarily the philosophical work of Heidegger. As such, Trauma and human existence would be of interest to both practicing psychotherapists seeking to integrate philosophical insights into their work, and philosophers interested in the 'lived experience' of existentialist thought.

For Stolorow, the 'possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence' (p. xi) and the way in which it is permitted to emerge is largely governed by the relational context in which we find ourselves.

Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self
by Joan Mccarthy
Humanity Books, 2007

Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self gives us a careful study of the narrative account of selfhood of each philosopher. Narrative approaches to the self are presented as an alternative to traditional discussions about the self, which have tended to see it as either a substantial entity, existing separately to any particular experience that it has, or as an illusion, a mere linguistic convention. McCarthy chooses to focus on these two philosophers because they both present a narrative view of the self, yet have vastly different influences and backgrounds. McCarthy's own view, that the self can be thought of as a "culturally mediated narrative unity of action" (9), is closer to Ricoeur's.

McCarthy's introduction will be valuable reading to those already familiar with narrative ideas, but is also very clear for those new to the area. McCarthy explains the idea of narrative as a way of making things intelligible that is distinct from causal or scientific explanation. It allows a teleological kind of explanation that can get at the meaning or significance of events. She also discusses here the need for an alternative to dualist or reductionist views of the self, which she believes the narrative approach can give.

That's a wrap for today.


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