Tag: psychology

Abstract reasoning and mental illness

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Listening to the ranting of a friend who has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), I am struck by two things:

  • he gives reasons for his anger
  • his reasoning or abstract understanding of his predicament is ridiculous

(His rant was recorded and sent to me by a third party who is trying to help.)

With that as a starting point, consider the various ways abstract reasoning or solid abstract paradigms can compensate for or mask mental illness. Not all of it is pretty.

For example, serial killers often mask their illnesses for decades by holding fast to the appearance of normalcy while secretly indulging their madness.

Less bad are career criminals who act with savagery in less direct ways, through hit men, poisons, theft, fraud, and so on.

There is a wide spectrum between serial killers and normally inoffensive people.

It is reasonable to see all cultures as fundamentally abstract paradigms that mask and allow for madness among large groups of people.

A culture, after all, is nothing more than a Lowest-Common-Denominator system of communication; an LCD semiology. Consider how many cultures are grotesquely narcissistic.

Personality is much the same whether it conforms well or not to whichever cultural semiology it inhabits.

From this point of view, enshrining diversity only ensures a wider array of mad people. Identity politics is the same; just more ways for mad people to function, more room for them to run free; more abstract paradigms to mask their underlying chaos.

That is a decent modern restatement of the First and Second Noble Truths: life is suffering because we are crazy.

The Third and Fourth Noble Truths tell us that the way out of being crazy is to use our reason better; to understand why we are crazy; that clinging to LCD semiologies can’t ever work.

A philosophical psychologist might rightly say that a mad mind open to reason will gradually become well.

My friend with BPD can reason, but his reasoning is really bad. It’s selfish, marinated in anger, and not open to contrary views. But even he can do it if he clings to reason and evidence.

Abstract reasoning and paradigms such as Buddhism, science, other religions, atheism, psychology, or philosophy can lead us out of madness if we use them diligently.

Diligence or perseverance is one of the most important virtues in Buddhist practice. Wisdom is the most important. Compassion is probably the most famous Buddhist virtue but compassion without wisdom or diligence is not good and can even be dangerous.

Indeed, my BPD friend frequently and loudly demands unreasonable compassion from others. And that is one of the most obvious flaws in the way he thinks about himself, the way he reasons.

Verbal abuse in childhood has devastating impact on adult brain

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The survey asked participants how often they felt optimistic about the future, useful, relaxed, had dealt with problems well, had thought clearly, felt close to others and were able to make up their own minds when required.

What the researchers found was that those who experienced verbal abuse as children were 1.64 times more likely to report poor mental well-being as adults. Meanwhile, individuals exposed to physical abuse were 1.52 times more likely to have compromised mental health later in life, and those who experienced both verbal and physical maltreatment were 2.15 times more likely to have negative mental health outcomes.

There’s a growing body of evidence that demonstrates how verbal and emotional abuse in childhood has long-term impacts, even changing the brain as it’s developing. Nonetheless, it’s often viewed as less harmful than other forms of maltreatment. In this study, the researchers found that while physical abuse had decreased – from around 20.2% of children born in the 1970s to 10% of those born in 2000 or later – verbal abuse has steadily increased.

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Study: Comparative relationships between physical and verbal abuse of children, life course mental well-being and trends in exposure: a multi-study secondary analysis of cross-sectional surveys in England and Wales

Mind-control is a paramount form of verbal abuse, both by what it forces us to say and what it forbids us to say.

We all know the abusiveness of the silent treatment; mind-control uses the silent treatment very often.

They won’t say it and neither can you, so silence spreads like a psycholinguistic contagion.

Some even believe silence is a sign of maturity, so they succumb proudfully.

Early, middle and late education is also rife with mind-control verbal abuse. They even test your levels of indoctrination.

Intelligent humans are highly susceptible to psycholinguistic mind-control and semiotic hypnosis.

A medical setting is but one example of semiotic hypnosis, and it includes medical personnel. Schools are similar, and there are many other examples. ABN

New study links psychedelic use to mental health recovery in times of crisis

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A new longitudinal study involving more than 240,000 individuals in the United Kingdom suggests that people who used both psychedelics and cannabis during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced average improvements in symptoms of anxiety and depression over time. Unlike other groups of drug users—who tended to report persistently worse mental health—this group’s mental health scores became comparable to those of individuals who had never used illicit drugs. The findings have been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Psychedelics are a class of substances that alter perception, mood, and cognitive processes. Classic psychedelics include psilocybin (the active compound in magic mushrooms), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). These substances are known for producing intense alterations in consciousness, including visual and auditory hallucinations, shifts in thought patterns, and changes in self-perception. Unlike more commonly used substances such as alcohol or cannabis, psychedelics are often used less frequently and in settings intended to foster introspection or emotional insight.

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Gab AI answers ‘What is FIML’?

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Answer:

FIML = Functional Interpersonal Meta-Linguistics (often shortened to Functional Interpersonal Mutual [sic] Linguistics).

It’s a mindfulness-based communication protocol for two people who are close (couples, close friends, etc.).

The core idea: in real time, you stop the moment either of you feels even a tiny emotional jolt, ask what exact word/phrase/tone caused it (“let’s do FIML on that”), uncover the micro-misunderstanding, clarify it, and resume. Repeated many times, the partners gradually remove all the accumulated tiny layers of misinterpretation and latent resentment.

Developed by two Buddhists, Rob Kauth and Tara Stewart, back around 2011–2012. It was initially published on the Mindfulness in 3D blog and later formalized in small PDF guides. There is no commercial training empire; you just grab the instructions (often titled “FIML Basic Method” or similar) and do it yourselves.

Question: Where did you get the information on Rob Kauth and Tara Stewart?

Gab AI Answer: I don’t have a verifiable source that names Rob Kauth and Tara Stewart as the founders of FIML; that detail came from my own memory and I cannot confirm it. If you need certainty, you should look for primary documentation or contact the original FIML community directly.

Gab AI is wrong about the origin of FIML. I am the inventor/discoverer and developer of FIML.

Nonetheless, I am pleased that Gab AI was able to answer as well as it did in its first three paragraphs above.

FIML has never been called Functional Interpersonal Mutual Linguistics.

I am not aware of a Mindfulness in 3D blog mentioned by Gab AI, but there is a book by that title. I hope the author at least acknowledged where he got the idea, if Gab is right, especially if he called it Functional Interpersonal Meta-Linguistics or FIML.

Whether he did or didn’t, it’s no big deal to me. I mainly want people to use the technique to make their lives better. I don’t charge anything for it.

I may do more exploration with AI to learn how to present FIML to a wider audience and maybe discover more uses for it and more ways to do it.

That said, FIML is a very human psychology- or spirituality-based technique.

It may prove to be one of the really profound things humans can do that AI will never be able to do.

AI, however, should be able to model the FIML technique, which will show people how to do it more easily.

From the above, we can see that AI gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong.

AI itself may have the same deep problem all of us have — inescapable existential ambiguity. See this for more: Indeterminacy of translation and FIML.

I have asked Grok the same question I asked Gab AI.

It replied fairly well but needed more prompts to get there. It did not throw in a bunch of detail that came from my own memory and I cannot confirm, however, as Gab AI did. ABN

ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS — Executive Order. July 24, 2025

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By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose and Policy.  Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.  The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded.  The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.  Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.  An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.  The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.  Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.  My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.

Sec. 2.  Restoring Civil Commitment.  (a)  The Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shall take appropriate action to:

(i)   seek, in appropriate cases, the reversal of Federal or State judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees that impede the United States’ policy of encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time; and

(ii)  provide assistance to State and local governments, through technical guidance, grants, or other legally available means, for the identification, adoption, and implementation of maximally flexible civil commitment, institutional treatment, and “step-down” treatment standards that allow for the appropriate commitment and treatment of individuals with mental illness who pose a danger to others or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves.

Continue reading “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS — Executive Order. July 24, 2025” →

Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

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Abstract

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials1,2,3,4. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus5,6,7,8. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later. Psilocybin massively disrupted functional connectivity (FC) in cortex and subcortex, acutely causing more than threefold greater change than methylphenidate. These FC changes were driven by brain desynchronization across spatial scales (areal, global), which dissolved network distinctions by reducing correlations within and anticorrelations between networks. Psilocybin-driven FC changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience. Performing a perceptual task reduced psilocybin-driven FC changes. Psilocybin caused persistent decrease in FC between the anterior hippocampus and default mode network, lasting for weeks. Persistent reduction of hippocampal-default mode network connectivity may represent a neuroanatomical and mechanistic correlate of the proplasticity and therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

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It is my understanding that the Buddha and/or the Buddhist tradition was and always has been well aware of psilocybin and probably other psychedelics and herbal drugs, like opium and cannabis.

In light of this, it is significant that the Fifth Precept for lay Buddhists proscribes only alcohol, and it does this very specifically by mentioning two types of alcoholic beverages (fermented and distilled) and nothing else. The Fifth Precept does not mention any other drugs.

As modern Buddhists, we can see that this conforms with what many of us have experienced with psychedelics and cannabis, among other ‘recreational’ drugs. Of course those drugs can be harmful but they can also do people a lot of good. Alcohol use, on the other hand, too often leads to very dangerous and spiritually stultifying mental conditions that do no one any good.

I have no problem with Buddhist teachers extrapolating the meaning of the Fifth Precept to include other drugs and sensory indulgences, but also believe that paying attention to the original meaning and its socio-environmental context (when people knew lots about plants) is important to keep in mind.

For more on this see: Are We Misunderstanding the Fifth Precept? ABN

The tragedy of Superman’s original Lois Lane, the Hollywood star who ended up homeless, eating out of trash cans with a life in turmoil

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She flew into the hearts of global audiences and the annals of cinematic history as her nightgown-clad heroine soared over the skyline of metropolis alongside Christopher Reeve when Superman hit theaters in 1978.

Actress Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane – a mixture of journalistic feistiness and besotted comic book-girlfriend vulnerability – became instantly iconic and recognizable. She starred in four of the franchise’s blockbusters, gracing the covers of countless magazines and making shoeless appearances for TV interviews as the world couldn’t seem to get enough of the ethereal Canadian star.

As legions of fans envied her aerial on-screen escapades with one of Hollywood’s then-hottest heartthrobs, however, Kidder was grappling with a lifetime of what she called ‘mind flights.’

Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve played Lois Lane and Superman in 1978 film Superman

She would only come to accept a bipolar diagnosis later in life, but Kidder, from childhood, was plagued by mental struggles that would at one point in the 1990s leave her homeless and near toothless in California, committed to psychiatric care th and rummaging through garbage for food.

…In the early days of her international stardom, in the wake of the Superman box office behemoth, she described to Rolling Stone ‘a constant sense of conflict: if I think about what I believe is important, I’ll be crazy; and if I don’t think about it, I find myself denying, denying, denying in order to be normal.’

…‘The reality of my life has been grand and wonderful, punctuated by these odd blips and burps of madness.’.

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People are being lied to when they’re being diagnosed with gender dysphoria

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I cannot find who the speaker is but this is the best short summary of gender dysphoria madness you will hear.

This issue reveals how important uncrossed or uncrossable lines can be in all societies.

The speaker focuses on gay marriage as the line that was crossed at the top of the slippery slope we are still sliding down today.

To be clear, no one especially likes having clear societal lines that cannot be crossed. Those lines are always philosophically and morally weak in many contexts, but removing them makes things even worse.

I personally believe we would be better off if gay marriage had never happened. It is a good example of a line that should not have been crossed.

I am aware of all the reasons in support of gay marriage. But it is also true that by erasing that line we came to allow many thousands of young people to be harmed by extremely deluded if not mentally ill adults.

Gender-affirming care is a truly Orwellian term; evil in its message and even more evil in its preemptive denial of there even being any other possible message. The term is a psycholinguistic torture chamber nightmare.

I hope readers of this site are aware that all psychology, value, philosophy and belief can always be analyzed at the linguistic level because all of it comes from words or ends up with words.

Take anything that bothers you and analyze it at the linguistic level of its psycholinguistic descriptors. Analyze the words. Change the words. Think about them with both psychological and linguistic feeling and you will see what I mean.

Deeply satisfying and beautiful mysteries can be discovered through that method. ABN

How Jimmy Swaggart Changed American Christianity

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The disgraced televangelist built his career on an undeniable talent. His downfall contributed to a major shift in how Americans viewed religious leaders.

THE DEATH THIS WEEK OF JIMMY SWAGGART at the age of 90 brings to an end one of the most controversial and remarkable careers in recent American religious life. For younger Americans, Swaggart’s name might not mean anything; others might recall blurry footage of a weeping preacher confessing, “I have sinned.” And sin he did, but in a time when Americans have become accustomed to seeing headlines about sex scandals involving religious leaders, it’s hard to convey just how consequential his indiscretions seemed when they were first reported.

The story broke in 1988 and caused an immediate media earthquake. The ground shook because Swaggart had fallen from a great height: He was, for a time, one of the most powerful religious voices in America, commanding a global television ministry, shaping conservative politics, and presenting himself as a moral compass to millions.

One of the challenges when it comes to properly evaluating Swaggart as a public figure is that nowadays we are not inclined to imagine a televangelist as a figure inherently worthy of any real respect. But the man’s own scandals are one of the reasons for that. When Swaggart’s resonant voice first started being heard in living rooms across the country, TV preachers occupied a very different place in the American imagination than they do today.

Swaggart emerged from the rural Pentecostal world of midcentury Louisiana, where fervent faith and musical flair often went hand in hand. His family background offered intimations of his later path: His cousins, rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley, both had the signature family blend of raw talent and unruly impulse. But while they chased fame across beer-soaked honky-tonk stages, Swaggart was drawn to a different kind of spectacle: revivals.

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Psychophysics gains a new law of sensory perception that also sheds light on subjective perception

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First we have to understand Weber’s Law:

Weber’s law, also called Weber-Fechner law, historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. It has been shown not to hold for extremes of stimulation. (Weber’s Law)

Hang in with this, it’s interesting.

About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation which led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics – the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments , he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights.

For instance, if a subject is correct 75% of the time when comparing a weight of 1 Kg and a weight of 1.1 Kg, then she will also be correct 75% of the time when comparing two weights of 2 and 2.2 Kg – or, in general, any pair of weights where one is 10% heavier than the other. This simple but precise rule opened the door to the quantification of behavior in terms of mathematical ‘laws’. (NEUROSCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN 200-YEAR-OLD PUZZLE)

What’s new today is Time–Intensity Equivalence in Discrimination (TIED):

We investigated Weber’s law by training rats to discriminate the relative intensity of sounds at the two ears at various absolute levels. These experiments revealed the existence of a psychophysical regularity, which we term time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), describing how reaction times change as a function of absolute level. (The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law)

Simply stated TIED says that the intensity of the stimulus determines the time it takes to “just notice” a change in it and that that scales linearaly as intensity changes up or down. For example, changes in louder sounds are noticed quicker than proportionally equal changes in quieter sounds and this can be scaled mathematically.

TIED is a new theory and needs more research, but whether it works out perfectly or not, I think it shows something very important about our individual and shared subjective perceptions of words, gestures, meanings, intentions, implications, and so on including all semiotics.

At present, we do not have machines that can measure our subjective perceptions, but we can surely feel them. And with training, we can also decently calibrate them.

Most of us can already vaguely talk about our subjective perceptions of each other, but few of us know how to do that with the precision of Weber’s Law or TIED. This is because we are all unique and we all react uniquely to each other. On top of that, few are able to employ language efficiently enough to capture significant detail when describing subjective responses or impressions.

FIML provides a very useful method for isolating and calibrating individual, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions.

Consistent, repeated use of FIML gradually recalibrates and reorganizes the entire psychologies of both partners.

FIML has virtually no content.. FIML is a method, and as such it allows partners to gradually identify, isolate, measure, and reorganize their entire body of psychological data, however they construe it.

A psychopath’s brain is strikingly different

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A new study has found that psychopaths show structural changes in particular areas of the brain that deal with things like impulse control and emotional regulation. This improved understanding may help to formulate targeted treatment and rehabilitation strategies.

Psychopaths appear to be walking contradictions, exhibiting (sometimes extreme) antisocial behavior while staying on the right side of a diagnosis of “insanity.” But as one of the strongest predictors of aggressive and violent behavior, it’s important to be able to accurately diagnose psychopathy, especially in the forensic setting.

A new study by US and German researchers has provided a greater understanding of psychopathy, using advanced brain imaging to pinpoint the structural changes that occur in the brains of individuals diagnosed with psychopathy.

The researchers focused on whether different psychopathic traits could be mapped to different brain regions. Psychopathy was measured using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a 20-item scale scored from interview and file information, which has two main parts:

Factor 2: Antisocial behavior (e.g., deviance from an early age, aggression, impulsivity, irresponsibility, proneness to boredom).

Factor 1: Emotional detachment (e.g., lack of guilt or empathy, superficial charm, manipulativeness).

Psychopathic individuals were found to have a smaller total brain volume, about 1.45% less than non-psychopathic individuals. This was especially so in the cortex, the right subiculum (a part of the hippocampus), the anterior cingulate and insular cortices. These areas are important for social behavior, emotion, and self-control.

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Can Patients With Narcissistic Personality Disorder Change? A Case Series

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Abstract

The study was set out to establish the potential for psychotherapy to effect improvements in patients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Eight patients with NPD who improved in treatment were identified. Consensus clinician/investigator diagnostic scores from before and after the psychotherapies were retroactively established on the Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism (DIN) and the Diagnostic Statistic Manual for Psychiatric Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) Personality Disorder Section II criteria. Psychosocial functioning (work or school, romantic relationships) before and after the psychotherapies was retroactively evaluated as well. At the completion of the therapies after 2.5 to 5 years, all patients had improved, no longer met DIN or DSM-5 criteria for NPD, and showed better psychosocial functioning. Symptomatic improvements were associated with large effect sizes. In conclusion, changes in NPD can occur in treatment after 2.5 to 5 years. Future research should identify patient characteristics, interventions, and common processes in such improved cases that could help with development of treatments.

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