By Michael Schulson / Salon
CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE
Monday, April 6, 2015
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Memories likely can’t be erased: Research offers new clues to how we remember - Salon.com
A new study challenges more than a century of neuroscience and could radically change the way we treat PTSD
RONI JACOBSON, SCIENTIFIC AMERICANCLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Past Lives by Thomas Shroder — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists
A riveting firsthand account of one man's mission to investigate and document some of the most astonishing untold phenomena of our time All across the globe, small children spontaneously speak of previous lives, beg to be taken "home," pine for mothers and husbands and mistresses from another life, and know things that there seems to be no normal way for them to know. CLICK HERE TO READ!
Friday, March 13, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
Narcissistic Parents' Psychological Effect on Their Children/Seth Myers/Insight is 20/20
Narcissistic Parents’ Psychological Effect on Their Children
Narcissistic parents will never understand the breadth of their impact on kids.
Alas, the question presumes a type of normalcy and natural order of the parent-child relationship that betrays the root of narcissism. The truth is, narcissistic parents don’t have children because they want to nurture and guide their offspring through life; they have children so that they have an automatic, built-in relationship in which they have power, one in which the narcissist can write the rules without any checks and balances. Understand this: Control over someone else is the ultimate jackpot every narcissist works so hard to win. The reality of narcissistic parenting couldn’t be sadder: The child of the narcissist realizes early on that he exists to provide a reflection for the parent and to serve the parent - not the other way around.If you comb through online relationship forums and chat rooms devoted to the subject of adult children of narcissists, you'll find that all of the posters of comments have suffered similar bruises at the hands of a narcissistic parent. To read some of the comments is heartbreaking, and calls into question how strange and illogical it is to create such rigorous adoption laws when an ill-fit individual can procreate whenever they want – and mess up the life of a child without suffering a consequence. The real tragedy occurs behind closed doors at home, much like the process of physical abuse. The problem with being a child of a narcissist is that it takes these children so many years of frustration and anguish to figure out that Mom or Dad isn’t quite right; until that point, these children are merely dancing as fast as they can, trying to please the impossible-to-please narcissistic parent. It takes years to finally see that the type of parenting they’ve been receiving is wrong – if not emotionally abusive.Young children of narcissists learn early in life that everything they do is a reflection on the parent to the point that the child must fit into thepersonality and behavioral mold intended for them. These children bear tremendous anxiety from a young age as they must continually push aside their own personality in order to please the parent and provide the mirror image the parent so desperately needs. If these children fail to comply with the narcissist’s wishes or try to set their own goals for their life – God, forbid – the children will be overtly punished, frozen out or avoided for a period of time – hours, days or even weeks depending on the perceived transgression in the eyes of the narcissistic parent.With young children, the narcissistic parent is experienced as unpredictable and confusing. After all, narcissists are awfully difficult to understand for adults, so just imagine how confusing the capricious narcissist is in the eyes of a young child! Because young kids can’t make accurate sense of the narcissist’s interpersonal tricks and stunts, these children internalize intense shame (‘I keep failing my Mom’) which leads toanger that the child turns on himself (‘I’m so stupid,’ ‘Something’s wrong with me’). The overall quality and strength of the bond between the narcissistic parent and young child is poor and weak. Deep down, the child doesn’t feel consistently loved, as the child is taught the metaphoric Narcissistic Parenting Program: You’re only as good as I say you are, and you’ll be loved only if you’re fully compliant with my wishes. Simply put, it’s truly heartbreaking for the child – though the narcissistic parent is sinfully oblivious.It’s not until many years later that the life experiences of the child of the narcissist start to make a little more sense. Friends often catch glimpses of the kind of ‘crazy’ parenting these individuals received, so he or she starts to get a healthy reality check like this: “Your mom is insane,” or “Your Dad is seriously messed up.”How narcissistic parenting impacts the adult relationships of children of narcissistsBecause the narcissistic parent-child bond was so distorted and corrupt, the offspring as adults tend to gravitate toward drama-laden, roller-coaster relationships – especially with romantic partners. Because they didn’t grow up with the belief that they were intrinsically okay and good, it makes perfect sense that these individuals would gravitate toward stormy romantic partners later. These adults would feel like a fish out of water in a relationship with someone who loved them consistently, and the experience would be so unfamiliar that it would cause major anxiety. Accordingly, these individuals tend to seek out partners who are emotionally unavailable, critical or withholding – just like Mommy and/or Daddy was in the past. In short, the only kind of relationship the adult child of a narcissist really fits in with is one with a highly skewed dynamic: The child of the narcissist must cater to and keep their partner happy, even when that involves squashing her own needs and feelings.It’s not until the adult children of a narcissist get (a lot of) psychotherapy or have a life-changing experience that pulls them away them from the disturbed parent that these adult children can truly begin to heal – and then create better, more normal relationships that offer the give-and-take reciprocation most of us have and value in our relationships.What’s interesting to note is the narcissistic parent’s reaction to witnessing healthy psychological change in their child. Once the child or adult child of the narcissist starts to get psychologically healthier and begins to distance himself a bit from the parent, the narcissistic parent experiences a sort of existential panic. Often, it’s a psychotherapist, colleague or friend who plants the seeds of change, declaring to the child that the parent is toxic and emotionally abusive. Thrust into fight mode, the narcissistic parent feels furious and works to ostracize the individual suspected of inducing the change and pulling the child away from the parent’s tight grip. Though it can initially be confusing to the adult child why the narcissistic parent verbally tears apart his closest confidants, the parent’s reaction ultimately shows the adult child what matters most to the narcissistic parent: his or her own emotional needs – not those of the adult child.If you happen to be someone who has suffered at the hands of a narcissistic parent, talk to your friends and other family members about your experience, and consider talking to a mental health professional. After years of dealing with the inconsistency of a narcissistic parent, it can be extremely healing to have a therapist help you make sense of the craziness.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
What You Should Know About Walmart’s Raise | The Nation
"Besides, the modest wage hike still barely offsets the lag between associates’ earnings and shareholder gains in recent years. While wages have barely kept pace with inflation, during the “recovery” since 2007, Walmart has seen a 22 percent rise in profits per worker,according to The New York Times.
What would a fairer raise at Walmart look like? Workers have proposed their own simple—and surprisingly feasible—demand: $15 an hour, and full-time jobs. According to an analysis by the think tank Demos, Walmart could already afford this measure simply by redirecting about $6.6 billion away from its current practice of repurchasing its own shares—a tactic to artificially boost shareholders’ income—and boosting workers’ pay instead. This measure “could give its 825,000 low-wage employees a raise of $5.13 per hour, boosting productivity and sales.” CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE
What would a fairer raise at Walmart look like? Workers have proposed their own simple—and surprisingly feasible—demand: $15 an hour, and full-time jobs. According to an analysis by the think tank Demos, Walmart could already afford this measure simply by redirecting about $6.6 billion away from its current practice of repurchasing its own shares—a tactic to artificially boost shareholders’ income—and boosting workers’ pay instead. This measure “could give its 825,000 low-wage employees a raise of $5.13 per hour, boosting productivity and sales.” CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
O'Reilly's Flunkies Are Lashing Out Wildly as Scandal Grows | Alternet
"Bill O’Reilly continues his frenzied attacks on Mother Jones’ David Corn, even after at least seven former CBS colleagues have come forward, with varying degrees of outrage and disdain, to back up Corn’s reporting and...." CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
What Happens if You Refuse to Pay Off Your Student Debt? | The Nation
The debt strike, which launched Monday as part of the Debt Collective campaign, is led by the Corinthian Fifteen, former students of Everest College—part of the scandal-ridden for-profit Corinthian college chain. They’re undertaking financial civil disobedience against the private lending industry, demanding cancellation of federal student debts and voicing dissatisfaction with piecemeal debt relief programs. The actual financial impact of their campaign is negligible, but for the former students, this collective action is a way for them to reassert their economic sovereignty:We paid dearly for degrees that have led to unemployment or to jobs that don’t pay a living wage. We can’t and won’t pay any longer. Repayment plans presented as a helping hand simply aren’t good enough. The wrong done to us is deeper than that.Ann Bowers of Florida was drawn in by Corinthian’s Trojan Horse marketing, which convinced her that she could readily obtain an online degree to help restart her career in marketing, after years of being out of the workforce due to disability. But in exchange for a bloated federal loan burden of some $40,000, she received an anemic education—with coursework that was more like high school than college and classmates struggling with even the basics."..... CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The Secret, Taboo Aspects of Male Sexual Desire / Psychology Today
The Secret,Taboo Aspects of Male Sexual Desire
Through millions of anonymous Internet searches, men have repeatedly divulged some rather curious sexual interests. Exploring at length this most bountiful subject of human sexual desire, I’ve already discussed several of them. In this particular post, I’d like to focus on certain erotic predilections that most people would agree slip into the realm of the forbidden. And rightly or wrongly, such preferences are likely to be seen not as erotic but pornographic.
As in most things, there’s clearly a continuum operating here. Males’ most common X-rated computer searches are for youth. And although this preference may be a bit disconcerting, it hardly warrants being seen as perverted (as I’ve sought to explain earlier). Nor does men’s secondary, but substantial, interest in fifty-year-old women (which I’ve also attempted, rationally, to account for). But as we move farther out on the continuum — as we did in mylast post, discussing heterosexual men’s attraction to transsexual porn — more eyes can be expected to roll ... or eyebrows to rise.
Here I’d like to start by adding another dimension to my earlier discussion of the curious popularity of “shemale,” “T-girl,”or “ladyboy” porn. Then I’ll move on to other sexual topics that, however unfamiliar (or unsavory) to us, a good number of men find arousing. At some point, it will be patently obvious that we’re well into illicit territory.
As in the rest of the posts in this 12-part series (of which this is number eight), most of my points will be rooted in the research reported in Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s comprehensive volume on sexual predilections: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire (2011). And what these two neuroscientists have to say about men’s fascination with penises will help us better understand why transsexual porn, featuring all the positive visual cues of the feminineplus the strange bonus of an erect male organ, can be so intriguing to men generally.
While it’s no doubt hypothetical, these authors suggest that — evolutionarily speaking — the sexual stimulation that the erect phallus embodies for males can be traced back to our primate ancestry. In this context, the male sex organ is associated not only with male-to-male aggression and marking territory, but also with making sexual overtures to females. And as well-known biologist (and equally well-known atheist) Richard Dawkins has suggested, the erect organ may be a signal of a male’s general health as well. (p. 41)
Ogas and Gaddam also talk about primitive human tribes and their rites involving the penis, including ones that might well be regarded as penis flaunting. As these authors half-seriously opine: “Historically, male exhibitionism has been considered a mental disorder. If that is the case, the Internet suggests we are a planet of mentally deranged men” (!). (p. 42) Of course, the impulse to publicly display one’s erect penis and actually doing so are worlds apart. Still, it’s worth noting that such an impulse (as outrageous or shameful as it may seem) is probably much more common than males would care to admit.The authors go on to offer additional biological and anthropological explanations as to why erect penises — particular large ones — would so beguile a great number of heterosexual men (not to mention gays and bisexuals). But it’s probably sufficient to say here, as do Ogas and Gaddam, that there’s abundant evidence pointing to “the penis['s] special power to activate the male sexual brain” (p. 218). And, ironically, there’s just as much evidence to conclude that, for women, this particular part of a male’s anatomydoesn’t rank very high as a sexual cue for them.
In an earlier post I mentioned that the category MILF (“Mother [or Mom] I’d love to f**k”) was one of men’s most popular Internet searches. In fact, on PornHub, the world’s most heavily trafficked adult video site, “mom” is the single most popular entry for users. And Ogas and Gaddam note that “more men search for 50-year-olds than ... for 19-year-olds” (pp. 26 -27). But since I’ve already discussed some of the (fairly normal) reasons for this preference, it’s time to go one big step further out on the “sexual-cue continuum.”
By now, most of us are familiar with a term roughly synonymous with the porn category MILF: namely, cougar, referring to an older, more sophisticated women “on the prowl” for younger men. Yet how many of us have heard of the category GILF? (“Granny I’d like to f**k”)? And here we’ve clearly set foot on “squick” turf (i.e., sexual interests that most of us can’t help but experience as repugnant). Strangely, this search designation turns out to be more prevalent than most people might suppose. In 2010, Alexa (a company measuring traffic to different Web sites) listed 313 granny sites among its 42,337 adult sites. Relatively, a small number but still ...
Noting that “there’s an active and well-defined community of granny porn enthusiasts,” Ogas and Gaddam confess: “The popularity of GILFs presents a serious challenge for evolutionary science” (p. 31). Consequently, these authors seek to explain this remarkable phenomenon by observing that in Kenya and England — the two countries that reveal the greatest interest in granny porn — inadvertent societal messages to youth likely account for its occurrence.In Kenya, for example, young people are enjoined to take up sexual matters with their grandparents. So these much older confidantes can become to their grandchildren diffusely associated with erotic arousal. In the United Kingdom, the inferred dynamic would work rather differently. Here we’re confronted with a connection between a boy’s developing sexuality and corporally punishing elderly matrons at boarding schools, widespread in the culture. Ogas and Gaddam quote a veteran of the adult industry, who suggests: “‘When a lot of [these men] were schoolboys, they were spanked or slapped or pinched by a schoolmarm. It might have been their first intimate contact with a woman’” (p. 31). And going beyond this reasonable speculation, I might add that the buttocks are full of nerve endings, such that in being spanked the adolescent’s ripening eroticism may well have been sparked. (And in fact, this sort of “imprinting” is how many kinks and fetishes get started — say, getting turned on by being paddled.)
The next topic I’d like to cover is the sexually arousing cue of transgression: that is, outrageous acts that are inordinately exciting precisely because they’re so fraught with danger. Interestingly enough, though this post centers on men’s secret or forbidden desires, these powerful activators of erotic impulse seem to be equally shared by women. Which indirectly suggests that there’s something about abandoning ourselves to our id and behaving in ways that are physically or socioculturally risky that can powerfully turn us on. Since, fortunately, very few of us are actually so reckless as to carry out such unrestrained fantasies, we can generally indulge in them with impunity. And doubtless the Internet affords us — at a safe remove from reality — ample opportunity to do so.
Note that the cue for arousal here doesn’t have to do with sexually-related body parts (the chief catalyst for male arousal) but with something situational — the reason that such cues are understood as psychological rather than physical or visual. Ogas and Gaddam are unable to find a logical societal, cultural, or evolutionary explanation for this (well) “uncivilized” preference. So by default, they attribute the phenomenon (in both sexes) to “a strange quirk of our brain wiring” (p. 176). As they describe it, our sympathetic nervous system, which controls many unconscious processes, is what governs our fight-or-flight response. This system, when confronted by something that scares us, prepares us to act by speeding up our heart, increasing muscular blood flow, and deepening our breathing. But — surprise! — the sympathetic nervous system also controls another autonomic behavior: namely, orgasm.An ingenious experiment by two Canadian psychologists (too involved to provide details of) tested the hypothesis that it’s this part of the nervous system that affects our being sexually turned on: that is, through engaging in (or imaginatively identifying ourselves with) precarious acts — whether they’re illegal, immoral, taboo, or simply dangerous. And the study’s results support the notion that the same part of our nervous system that’s sensitive to threats is also able to engender a sexual reaction. If that’s the case, then actually, or vicariously, taking part in acts of transgression represent yet another source of arousal — and in both sexes. As Ogas and Gaddam put it: “Transgression ... could be a counterintuitive enhancement of erotic feeling due to our quirky brain wiring—an evolutionary by-product, rather than an adaptation” (p. 179). As in so much I’ve described, what seems peculiar or perverted might well be ingrained (or “inbrained”) in us.
One act of transgression that deserves special attention is sexual betrayal. But oddly enough, in these scenarios it’s not the husband but the wife who’s the transgressor. Ogas and Gaddam single out the subject of cuckold porn as immensely popular on the Web. And the question naturally arises as to why such a genre would so appeal to men—why it would be the second most popular interest (following Youth) for straight males on English-speaking search engines. How is it that just the thought of their wives cheating on them could lead men to experience intense arousal?
Ogas and Gaddam provide an evolutionary explanation for this seemingly masochistic fantasy. To them, it’s sperm competition(see pp. 182-84) — a physiological and behavioral adaptation “found in a dazzling variety of species” — that best accounts for the phenomenon. A man’s believing that his mate may have had sex with another male may compel him (because of such an adaptation) to have intercourse with her as soon afterwards, and as forcefully, as possible. His very jealousy may drive him to perform with a lust absent earlier, culminating in a quicker ejaculation and a “larger load” being deposited inside her, unconsciously calculated to oust the other males’s sperm.
As interesting, and possibly valid, as this analysis may be (and I’ve condensed it somewhat), I’d like to propose a simpler, non-evolutionary hypothesis for males’ common obsession with cuckold porn. This is one that seems to have been overlooked by these authors (and others as well). Let’s assume that the male’s relationship with his partner (1) is no longer novel (and novelty itself can incite substantial sexual excitement), and (2) is a committed one, with all the conflicts and complexities such a union inevitably brings to light. In such instances, he can’t really regard his spouse two-dimensionally — as a sex object. And as I’ve noted in previous posts, men generally are wired to be most turned on by women when they’re able, reductively, to “objectify” them. If my hypothesis is correct, then through imagining other males relating to their wife as really “hot” — and their spouse as wildly turned on (another key determinant for male sexual arousal) — through such “illicit” fantasizing (or, we might say, through bringing their “mirror neurons” into play) they can regenerate a sexual excitement that may have all but disappeared from the comparatively mundane circumstances of their married life.
As in my previous examples of secret or taboo male sexual preferences, I see cuckold porn as yet another clandestine interest. For how many men would be comfortable sharing such a predilection with their mate? One where, symbolically, not he but she is acting wrongfully and — much more than this — that he finds her sexual betrayal intensely arousing?
Doubtless, most males would also tend toward secrecy as regards disclosing their attraction to the submissive (vs. dominant) role in sexual interactions. As Ogas and Gaddam intriguingly point out: “Both males and females in several mammal species appear to possess both sexual dominance and sexual submission circuitry,” noting further that “both types of circuits are wired to the pleasure centers of the brain” (p. 199).
These authors observe that the joint category domination and submission represents the sixth most popular search topic on the meta- engine Dogpile. And it may well be that though most people prefer one mode of sexual interaction over the other, their preference is rather more flexible than fixed. Most fascinating, perhaps, is the fact that while sexual domination sites are unquestionably popular, sexual submission sites are more popular still — and have a majority male audience (!). These sites include a considerable variety of (we’ll call them) “submission specialties.” And some of them, frankly, depict scenes that are particularly degrading, humiliating, or squicky. (see p. 202) I’ll spare you the distasteful names for many of these sites, while simply making the point that virtually all of them display role reversal: a dominant female exploiting or abusing a submissive male.
To Ogas and Gaddam, the likeliest “neural” explanation for this anomaly — since, both biologically and socially, men are programmed for sexual dominance — is that “male fans of sexual submission porn are accessing the female submissive circuitry their brains share with women” (p. 203), a circuitry wired to their brain’s reward centers.
But whatever circuitry is responsible for such distinctly “unmacho” imaginings, it’s almost guaranteed that most men would strongly prefer their partners be kept in the dark about them.
NOTE 1: Perhaps males’ most bizarre erotic interest is transformation fiction (i.e., reading stories about men turned into women — and ultimately enjoying the sex change). This odd arousal cue is more suitably taken up, however, in my next-to-last segment (see below).
Love is like cocaine: The remarkable, terrifying neuroscience of romance - Salon.com
Excerpted from “On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion.”
"On popular websites, we read headlines such as “Scientists are finding that love really is a chemical addiction between people.” Love, of course, is not literally a chemical addiction. It’s a drive perhaps, or a feeling or an emotion, but not a chemical addiction or even a chemical state. Nonetheless, romantic love, no doubt, often has a distinct physiological, bodily, and chemical profile. When you fall in love, your body chemicals go haywire. The exciting, scary, almost paranormal and unpredictable elements of love stem, in part, from hyper-stimulation of the limbic brain’s fear center known as the amygdala. It’s a tiny, almond-shaped brain region in the temporal lobe on the side of your head. In terms of evolutionary history, this brain region is old. It developed millions of years before the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for logical thought and reasoning." CICK HERE TO READ
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
"The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once." CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
What Brain Science Can Teach You About Sex | Psychology Today
This book, though written primarily for the layperson, takes into account an immensity of research—as evidenced by a bibliography containing over 1,300 items. As relates to experimental methodology, its authors, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (both with Ph.D.’s in cognitive neuroscience), decided to base their investigations on the almost inexhaustible tool that is the Internet. Contrary to interviewing individuals, or having them complete self-report inventories or questionnaires, they took advantage of the anonymity and unobtrusiveness afforded by the Web ..... CLICK HERE TO READ
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Sunday, January 25, 2015
PLOS Medicine: A Comparison of DSM-IV and DSM-5 Panel Members' Financial Associations with Industry: A Pernicious Problem Persists
And we wonder why we are constantly pummeled by TV prescription drug ads, pharmacies and hospitals hounding us to get flu shots (which in this year have roughly about a 30% chance of success in the elderly, and "new" diagnoses every day (of course the y are ones which would benefit from pharmaceutical drugs).......PLOS Medicine: A Comparison of DSM-IV and DSM-5 Panel Members' Financial Associations with Industry: A Pernicious Problem Persists
Most adults would likely fail this 1912 8th grade test—try it
"Now HERE is a reality test!" (So much for "No child left behind!)
Most adults would likely fail this 1912 8th grade test—try it
Most adults would likely fail this 1912 8th grade test—try it
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"there were no words, but images flooded every cell in her being ...4 and a half decades!"
