Rehabilitating the electronic butterfly

Electronic socializing has become the craze recently. Boundaries are defined by the medium of communication being used. There is no obligation to answer and participation in every discussion is entirely the choice of the individual. In essence, control is what is given to the electronic butterfly. In any human interaction there are a number of ways that a person can interact in a negative way. We can look at it in terms of on-off phenomenon, for example, lack off or presence of endorphins. In reality to think about the whole range of possibilities in the neurotransmitter/receptor analogy, we would have to consider degrees of "off" and "on" (antagonist, agonist, partial antagonist, partial agonist, inverse agonist, inverse antagonist).
But in a black and white world, a world of ideals, a world of extremes, a positive feeling will lead the electronic butterfly to drone around the electronic interactions more so than the actual interactions. In the same world, the human or the actual interactions are giving a certain negative feeling to such an individual. The morale is not protected. Morale can take a hit in an interaction when invasion, judgment or deception take place.
A person who by Horney's construct "goes with the people", is an anxious person who lives in a dangerous world where control is a luxury. Anxiety and the need for control go hand in hand. This butterfly when laying its eggs, wants to control any invasion, judgment or deception. The barrier, alter persona and freedom to move is granted by the electronic socialization.
The same answer would be invaluable to the same person outside of the world of electronics. Utility of these principles is one of the arm of social skills training.

Placenta brain...pregnancy and cognition

Since there is no extensive research in this phenomenon and I have personally gotten to see this happen, I tried finding some data to see what is the cause.

-One study I cam across found an association between prior history of PMS and perceived forgetfulness with the hypothesis that some women were more sensitive to the effects of the hormones.
-Another study found differences in arousal levels between pregnant women and controls. They also mention that mood can have an effect on perceived cognitive deficits.
-One other study found that pre-pregnancy personality and the level of consciousness had an impact of subjective perception of cognition, as did level of anxiety.
-Another study found selective attention deficits which tended to recover in post partum women.
-Peri-partum memory deficits have been found independant of mood changes. Progesterone and DHEA in pregnancy can have an effect on mood but memory deficits are independant of these variables.

Several conclusions

1. Subjective concern at feeling forgetful and lack of concentration is real and should not be dismissed when encountered.

2. The reason why this thing has not come out in studies is because of lack of instruments to detect a difference in between study population and control.

3. There is concern of "medicalizing" a natural process. There are a lot of implications to calling this a "maternal amnestic syndrome", including work rights for women at work place and discrimination based on gender.

4. Pre pregnancy level of functioning and personality structure and its response to stress can also play a role in which people feel and identify a change in cognition.

5. Changes in sleep and awareness can also contaminate subjective sensations.

More research is needed to see what are the exact deficits that are faced and what is there effect on daily routines. If special work accomodations have to be made at work place, it would not be prejudice, it would be recognizing nature.

The archetype and the meta archetype

As a dear friend recently pointed out a debate that I thought was long gone dead. It was concerning how the sexual roles are basically archetypes. The archetype of a woman is a role defined by the culture. The yearnings, inhibitions and gross cognitive processes would generally be the same cross culturally. Ofcourse not in little details but little details prove the system rather than working against it.
Developmental of psychological apparatus and all such hypotheses are based on an archetype individual. An individual which is present in the world of "idea". Such an individual would do what is the "nature of man".
This main archetype is then divided into atleast two more archetypes, if not more. That of the man and the woman, Adam and Eve, Yin and Yang. These two are then further sub divided depending on conflicts that any of these two archetypes go through for example the archetype of the little girl, the archetype of the teenage girl, the archetype of the fertile woman, the archetype of the mother etc etc.
Talking about archetypes should be facilitated if the word meta and sub is introduced in to the archetype referring to the archetypal classification above or below it.

The spectrum of neuroses

Neuroses as defined by conflicts can be normal in a person during a period in which decisions are required. When the choice is needed between two different paths. They become a problem sometimes though. Horney describes the following characteristics of neuroses which tend to become a problem.
-They are incompatible with each other. Both alternatives to a decision are avoided.
-If looking at them spatially a normal conflict will be 90 degrees to each other where as a neurotic conflict will be 360 degrees to each other.
-A conflict will have both alternatives that can be valued but in a neurotic conflict both alternatives will be abhorred.
-If any conflict plays itself on two poles, the two poles will be more polarized in a neurotic conflict.
-The stakes will be higher when a neurotic conflict is concerned.

Balint describes the malignant and the benign fault. It almost sounds like that is what Horney observed. Balint however put the causes of the fault as development of an individual. A fault in the preverbal stage caused a malignant fault which caused the organism not being able to conceptualize the conflict in words.

It would seem that Horney and Balint talk about swinging on a pendulum which seems to address two different dimensions in two different planes.

Speech problems

Recently while evaluating a child with speech problems, the parents mentioned whether the child had apraxia or not. What ensued was a discussion in which neither the parents nor myself knew what we were talking about. To add to the confusion, my hippocampus had thrown out several associations to apraxia of speech, like dysarthria, phonological disorder and aphasias. Doing an internet search compounded the difficulty just as asking various people did. Everyone answered something that they were not sure about and soon my head was swimming about their differences. Luckily I found an article in Neurocase (2005) 11, 427-432 by Ogar et al.

APRAXIA OF SPEECH: Impaired ability to coordinate the sequential, articulatory movements neccessary to produce speech sounds is called apraxia. Articulatroy erros and prosodic abnormalities are hallmarks. Signs include effortful trial and error grouping with attempts at self correction, persistent dysprosody, articulatory inconistency on repeated productions of the same utterance and/or obvious difficulty initiating utterances. Vacular lesions, trauma, tumors can cause this. Apraxia of speech is also the first symptom in neurodegenerative diseases such as corticobasal degeneration or non-fluent progressive aphasia.

CONDUCTION APHASIA: Result of damage to communication between Wernicke and Broca. This communication is through extreme capsule and/or arcuate fasiculus. Speech is fluent, comprehension is good but oral reading is poor and major impairment in repitiion. Many paraphasias occur and transpositions of sounds within a word also occurs (television -> velitision).

BROCA'S APHASIA: In this the speech is understood, and the all the levels of speech planning are intact except for motor execution which is not intact.

(Apraxic speakers are believed to select the correct phonemes, only to have trouble with their motor execution; People with conduction aphasia typically speak with near normal prosody, whereas halting effortful speech with abnormal prosody. They may also lack awareness of their speech errors and therefore may not always make attempts at self correction while the opposite is true in cases of apraxia of speech)

DYSARTHRIA: Dysarthria is caused by impairment of muscle strength, tone, range of motion and/or coordination. It can be caused by UMN or LMN lesions of the cranial nerves.

(Errors heard in dysarthric speech are typically consistent and predictable, while the speech errors heard in apraxia of speech tend to be highly irregular. Sound distortions, prolonged segment durations (e.g prolonged vowels or consonants) and prolonged inter segment durations (e.g. abnormal pauses within sounds, syllables or words) are characteristic for apraxia of speech.

PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF APRAXIA: Van der Merwe's model of speecch planning and programming says that initially, basic linguistic units or phonemes are selected. During a second motor planning phase these phonemes are organized into temperospatial codes for speech production. In the third, motor programming phase, muscle specific motor programs are selected and sequenced before moving forward to fourth phase when these sequences are carried out by the speech musculature. Apraxia of speech is caused by problem with second phase.

TREATMENTS: For mildly apraxic patients, poor prosody may be the primary speech deficit and therefore, goals designed to improve intonation and stress. For the moderately or severely apraxic patient, therapy might focus on relearning oral postures for individual speech sounds.
-PROMPT uses rate and rhythm control strategies
-Wambaugh and colleagues use remediation of misarticulated consonants through modeling repetition of minimally contrastive words, graphic cues and phonetic placement cueing.

Dreams

Shani says:
"I say dreams are a mechanism of the mind to test any changes it makes to the model of the world (in our head), while we sleep.Say i watch a documentary on snakes. I already have a section on snakes in my head (part of the model of the world around me) that has all the 'relevant' information i have collected on snakes so far. Owing to what happend during the day, while i lay in bed and sleep, my mind goes to work to extract the new data (or extent of emphasis on old data/rules), and then wants to suppliment the old notion of snakes with the new data ... as it does that it needs to verify whether that change is good, i.e. wouldn't lead to me say getting bit by a snake cuz i stepped on it. So to verify, the mind creates a drama and lets my updated model react to it, i might see myself in a jungle and then a snake and the mind carefully monitors my reaction to it ... if everythign goes smooth, good, if not then maybe the changes weren't quite right ... "

I say:
"I think there is the biological and then there is the psychological function of dreams. It is not clear whether the dreams play a homeostatic role in our lives, meaning that they create the balance, re orient us and bring us to the center of our biological or our psychological lives.

I think you are right about dream being the censor for the change that occurs in our minds. I would though want to extend it by saying that introducing snake as a data in the mind means introducing various things in the mind. I would liken it to the mind going over the translation of the world that it did in the day time. I would think that is what you mean by going over the data.
The translation though would be a tricky thing because that would mean what is the data that the mind sees.
If I were wearing red spectacles I would interpret all data about colors as various shades of red. So it is interesting how the mind interprets the new data. In gross terms new data is interpreted, associated and then stored.
In the example of the snake. You dreamed about the snake. Your interpretation of the snake, i would think is a very biological phenomenon which involves integration of the lines and the colors and then naming it by comparing it to past experiences. The comparing part starts to spill over in to the psychological realm. Now when you compare it, the emotional significance of the snake will be brought forth. Freud felt that unconscious mind or the dreaming mind is involved with primary thinking. Thinking that would use primitive patterns of reaching conclusions. (See level I and level II defences). There are some bizarre explanations for a snake incidentally. Snake has been interpreted as a phallic symbol and the explanation is that the mind while associating it might recall a similar emotion (the one that the person might have felt on seeing a snake) associated with a similar form. Ofcourse there is a lot of "static" also going on in terms of defences and the resulting situation is bizarre dreams which need to be interpreted.

Dyslexia

Dyslexia: A specific reading disability due to a defect in the brain's processing of graphic symbols.

Dyslexias are characterized by their characteristic hemishperic deficit.
Pirozzolo (1979) and Pirozzolo and Hess (1976) suggest that there are two fundamental types of dyslexia: auditory-linguistic dyslexia and visual-spatial dyslexia. Persons with the former exhibit difficulties in the verbal and language area, have naming problems, and are slow in carrying out any types of verbal tasks. The persons with the former struggle with visual perceptual difficulties. Bakker (1973; 1979; 1982; 1983) thinks about different approaches to reading. The linguistic-auditory group uses their left type hemishphere hence called L-type dyslexics. The visual dyslexics have a difficulty with perceptual requirements in word representation and use the disorder stems from right hemisphere, hence the term P-called dyslexics. The same kind of differentiation is meant by the the words dysphonetic(auditory problems) and dyeidetic dyslexics (visual problems). Hemishpheric EEGs also show preferential brain activation with the different types of dyslexics.