Psychology

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/7641

Imagine being able to remember every single day of your life, all the way back to when you were a newborn.

Australian woman Rebecca Sharrock is one of only 60 people in the world with a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia.

This is Nurse Apy with some quick practical tips on communicating with someone who has a serious mental illness! (SMI)

(Obviously the video is not a real patient, but I can't show you a real patient and I stg this is actually pretty spot on.)

Delusions have a tendency to strengthen themselves when confronted. Instead of new observations or information weakening the belief, they're usually incorporated into the delusional belief system. This means that when the person encounters that information or situation in the future, that information/situation will actually continually strengthen the belief. Don't confront delusions; instead, redirect!

Try to redirect the conversation towards things that reconnect the person with the wider human community. Ppl with serious and ongoing delusions have a tendency to become progressively isolated from those around them. They want to talk about delusional topics, and most people only know how to confront them about something they can clearly see is untrue. This pushes the person further into their delusions to avoid conflict with those around them. This isolation also often leads to suicidal ideation, behavior, and completion, ppl w psychosis are some of the highest risks of suicide.

Ways you can try to connect with the person are as varied as humans themselves. As the person who actually knows and interacts with a given person, you are likely the most knowledgeable about what the best topic to do that is in a given situation. Common examples include sports, popular media, and hobbies like sewing, woodworking, or gardening. Bonus points if it's related to a communal activity of some kind.

As an aside, this is a big reason q-anon rose to popularity during the pandemic and has remained entrenched ever since. It provided community where people were missing it, and we have a very confrontational and argumentative culture that often serves to strengthen ingrained belief systems like this.

TLDR: if you want to get your aunt off her q-anon roll, try to get her to go back to gardening club instead (preferably one that is not also q-anon-ers, a lot of people pushing it also understand these concepts).

"We are constantly making decisions with our limited time and cognitive resources and memory storage.

"We're not robots, and the fact that you can seemingly Google your way to anything does not make us smarter."

She was plagued by the idea that while we're living in the information age, life seems to be making less sense.

"It certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any better, even though the quality of life is overall actually improving.

"Our innate irrationalities, that have always existed, are being dialled up to 11 because of the culture that we've created."

Cognitive bias is a mental magic trick that we developed in order for us to make sense of the world sufficiently to survive it, she says.

"The natural world was always too much for us to process, if we had to catalogue the precise colour and shape of every twig in order to understand it, that would take more than a lifetime.

"So, we came up with these cognitive biases, dozens upon dozens of them. And they help us make decisions without our even noticing."

Every human has cognitive biases, but when they collide with digital information overload, bad things can happen

The phenomenon of hearing intelligible voices or noises in meaningless background noise is known as "auditory pareidolia." The sources of this noise vary; they may include electric fans; running water; airplane engines; the hums of washing machines; or white-noise machines, according to audiologists. It is an auditory sub-type of pareidolia, in which people see faces or other meaningful patterns in ambiguous images.

Are you an asker or a guesser? Short interesting read.

Have you heard of the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’? It’s the (apparent) tendency for unskilled people to overestimate their competence. Discovered in 1999 by psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning, the effect has since become famous.

Except there’s a problem.

The Dunning-Kruger effect also emerges from data in which it shouldn’t. For instance, if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.

EDIT: see response from dustyData and the article they linked to https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-and-its-discontents

In which Bateson argues that the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous is (in a Western, Cartesian context) comes at least in part from providing a more correct epistemology/ontology that subsumes a reified "self" into a larger system/circuit. The alcoholic is, by "hitting bottom," forced to shift from a destructive symmetrical to a complementary pattern of relation with the system.

Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black (N = 452, Wave 1) and White (N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.