Friday, October 25, 2024

Borderline Personality Disorder and Projected Self-Loathing


Individuals with symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) often lash out hurtfully at others. This may be in response to provocation such as frustration, disagreement, or disappointment, or it might seem to be unprovoked. The lashing out often takes the form of saying hurtful things or committing destructive acts toward those they are closest to. Understanding this behavior as an expression of their disorder will offer you tools to relate without being hurt by these episodes.

Hurtful lashing-out behaviors are common in those who suffer from BPD. This typically happens when they become frustrated because they cannot get their way or when others disagree with them, which they experience as being offensive. These episodes are sometimes initiated by the symptomatic person with a phone call, email, or text.

Following is a typical example of seemingly unprovoked lashing out. Tim answers his telephone on Sunday morning and speaks to his mother who has symptoms of BPD.

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Thursday, September 19, 2024

Why children perceive time slower than adults


Children's perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.

My household is absorbed in debate over when time goes the fastest or slowest.

"Slowest in the car!" yells my son.

"Never!" replies my daughter. "I'm too busy for time to go slow, but maybe on weekends when we are on the sofa watching movies."

There's some consensus too; they both agree that the days after Christmas and their birthdays dawdle by gloomily as it dawns on them they have to wait another 365 days to celebrate once more. Years seem to drag on endlessly at their age.

It's a feeling I remember well; the summer holidays filled with water play, skipping on the freshly cut lawn, the laundry drying on the washing line whilst the Sun blazed. At moments like that, time really did feel like it moved slowly.

Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology who studies cognitive development at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, believes children and time is a hugely understudied topic. Her work has long probed whether there is something fundamentally different about time processes in children, such as an internal clock that functions at a different speed to that of adults. But there are still more questions than answers.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2024

How Mindfulness Can Help You Become More Humble


There's an old story about a sage who lived in a lofty mountain hermitage. It was attached to a cave where he often meditated, but his followers and benefactors had also built him a lovely little building that housed all his books and provided him with a very comfortable place to sleep and a dining area with a sweeping view of many valleys below and peaks in the distance. Also attached to the building was a closet-like dwelling for his faithful attendant.


One morning the sage declared that he would like to go down to the village to exchange some of his tattered books for new ones and see what newly minted works of philosophy he could get his hands on. Reaching the village required crossing a rope bridge strung high above a gorge. As they approached the entry to the bridge, the attendant hesitated. He rarely interrupted his master, who loathed having his contemplative silence broken, but this time he felt he must speak up, knowing that his master's eyesight had been weakened by so much reading. "Master," he broke in, "I fear the bridge needs to be repaired. The rope looks very frayed to me." Perturbed, and eager to get to the village, the sage responded brusquely, "How would you know? It seems perfectly fine to me."

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Monday, July 10, 2023

Groundbreaking new study determines the cause of ADHD

Groundbreaking new study determines the cause of ADHD


According to the World Health Organization, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is estimated to affect approximately 5% of children worldwide and 2.5% of adults.
This disorder manifests as inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and difficulty focusing, and it can greatly influence a person's academic and social functioning.


Although ADHD has been recognized to have a genetic basis, the specific genes implicated have been challenging to identify.However, recent advancements have brought us closer to unraveling this mystery.
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Thursday, February 9, 2023

Strange Illusion Shows The Human Brain Mess With Time to Maintain Our Expectations

 


'I saw it with my own eyes' is something people often say. The implication is that since we perceived something, it must have happened.

But what we perceive can be influenced by a great many things, and a strange new experiment shows just how easily our perceptions can be manipulated by our own expectations and assumptions.

In a new study, scientists discovered a "novel perceptual illusion" that effectively reorders the perceived temporal order of events in a sequence.

"Is our perception of time and temporal order a faithful reflection of what happens in the world (or at least what arrives at our retina) or can seemingly higher-level expectations, such as [presumed] causality, affect the order in which we experience events occurring?" writes a team of researchers led by first author and experimental psychologist Christos Bechlivanidis from University College London.

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Thursday, December 15, 2022

Why Too Much Empathy Can Be Unhealthy

 


Experiencing empathy has its benefits, but there are also many downsides to it, which is why we must learn to practise healthy empathy.

Empathy is an ability to sync emotionally and cognitively with another person; it is a capacity to perceive a world from their perspective or share their emotional experiences. It is essential for building and maintaining relationships, as it helps us connect with others at a deeper level. It is also associated with higher self-esteem and life purpose.

There are broadly two types of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is about sharing feelings with others to the extent that you may experience pain when watching someone in pain, or experience distress when watching someone in distress. This is what happens to many people when they watch upsetting news on TV, especially when they relate to specific people and their lives.

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Thursday, October 6, 2022

Here's How The Human Brain Reboots Itself After The Deep Sleep of Anesthesia

 

You may well have spent hours wondering what your laptop is up to as it takes its time to boot up. Scientists have asked the same question of the human brain: How exactly does it restart after being anesthetized, in a coma, or in a deep sleep?

Using a group of 30 healthy adults who were anesthetized for three hours, and a group of 30 healthy adults who weren't as a control measure, a 2021 study reveals some insights into how the brain drags itself back into consciousness.

It turns out that the brain switches back on one section at a time, rather than all at once – and abstract problem-solving capabilities, as handled by the prefrontal cortex, are the functions that come back online the quickest. Other brain areas, including those managing reaction time and attention, take longer.

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