Scientists are beginning to understand the neurological patterns behind mental repression, suppression, and dissociation. Multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), can actually cause complete changes to the structure of the brain dependent on which personality a patient is expressing. A person suffering from DID was diagnosed as blind for 15 years:

There was nothing wrong with the patient’s eyes per se, but she claimed she couldn’t see, and testing at the ophthalmologist bore this out. During the experiment reported here, one personality state had essentially normal eyesight, whereas a younger, male personality—which could be summoned momentarily by calling out his name—was blind. When in her sighted personality, the EEG showed normal brain waves in response to a checkerboard pattern that alternated its squares 10 times each second—from white to black and back again. But visually evoked activity was much reduced in her blind personality state. There is no known mechanism that allows someone to consciously block vision with open eyes. This remarkable finding implies that the brain can rapidly intervene at a very early stage of the visual system, preventing visual information from reaching the patient’s cortex. How it does so remains a mystery.

Adam Carolla on Communication

Q: "How did you get your psychological understanding of people?"

A: "This entire planet is filled with human beings. More people spend time figuring out how to communicate with their dogs than with people. We spend no time trying to figuring out people and how they work and what motivates them, but they will decide whether you have a happy satisfied life or a shit life. And at some point on some level I realized I should start studying people. Because if I figure out how people work then I can figure out how to get money from them, how I can get sex from them, how... and I'm not talking about manipulating them or getting them to do shit they don't want to do, I just mean understand people.

Q: "When did you realize that though?"

A: "I don't think I ever really consciously did it but it was always in the back of my mind. I studied people, I wanted to know why they did stuff and what motivated them to do the things they did do or didn't do and then how could I prevent it from happening again to me or somebody else. And so it always became a sort of quiet hobby of mine that I was going to study people and try to understand how best to deal with those people.

I'm a person, I don't want to get beat up, I don't want to get fired, I don't want to get divorced, I don't want to get 'fill in the blank'. You don't want your kids to hate you: figure out how to be a decent dad. You want your boss to give you a raise. When someone is throwing a party you want to get invited. How does it all work?"

(via Thursday's podcast)

The Obama Conspiracy

So of course you've heard of the rumors swirling that Obama's a "secret Muslim" or that he and/or his wife are radicals. Peter Sagal made a very insightful point of all of the things that would need to be true for an Obama conspiracy to be real, for instance:

...all the sensible, centrist, often bipartisan things Obama did do (eg. the bill to tape interrogations in Illinois) the hundreds of thousands of dollars he he helped hand out via the Annenberg Challenge to things like literacy programs, et. al, were all mere cover for his true, as of yet unenacted agenda.

The problem here is that those who believe the conspiracy never think that deeply about it. Instead they concern themselves with the worst possible scenario. It's like thinking someone you haven't seen in a while is dead, even though most likely they're alive. All you'd have to do to prove it is give them a call or realize that as long as you've known them they've never been... dead. If your mental curiosity is low and your susceptibility to worry is high you'll think they're dead, and that Obama's a secret radical, but you won't question the rationality of your beliefs.

(via kottke.org)

Alternatives be damned

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert has coined a new term: "attentional collapse". It means that when you finally pick and follow through with one of two difficult choices the perception that there ever was an alternate choice fades away. The effect is even more pronounced when the choice you make is irrevocable.

Consider the choice to marry one sweetheart over another. If you pick the genial, down-to-earth banker, will you forever regret letting go of that free-spirited artist who loves traveling as much as you? Probably not. The very fact that you'll be living with — and experiencing — one spouse and not the other means that the passed-over option will quickly fade in your mind. "The people you don't marry don't move in with you," says Gilbert.

Death Cookies

The Journal of Consumer Research recently reported on a study by two social psychologists showing people with low self-esteem shop more and eat more cookies after mulling over death. Volunteers were given the task of writing about either death or going to the dentist, those with high self-esteem were only marginally effected.

"When you indulge in shopping or eating, it helps you forget yourself. One would hope that companies do not exploit this by putting food ads straight after the news," says Dirk Smeesters at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

That seems to be the modus for most compulsion, fear and anxiety. Addiction means doing something to the point of interference with one's life including self regard, so the experiment would probably work with sex, gambling, drugs and alcohol, though I wouldn't want to test it.

(via New Scientist)