July 2008 - Posts

• Trance

  July 18, 2008   Psychology and you   Trance   Many of us have often felt as if we removed ourselves mentally from our day-to-day surroundings, and caught ourselves “starting off into space” or “in another world”. These are small everyday instance of entering a mild trance state. Trance includes a variety of processes, techniques, and states of mind, awareness and consciousness. Trance state may occur involuntary and without notice. The term “trance” may be associated with meditation, magic, flow and player.   There are many nature sounds, such as birds, frogs, crickets which fundamentally repeat, but which contain slight variations within each repetition. The fundamental repetition is the trance generating loop (TGL) and the variations in each repetition results in the modulation of the dissociated trance plane. It is for this reason that the sounds of nature tend to produce trance.   All forms of meditation practice involve the repetition of cognitive objects of varying degrees of complexity. The relatively simple meditation of watching the breath will induce a mediation trance. More complex forms such as are practiced by Tibetan Buddhists or Sufis may consist of combinations of meditation and hypnotic trance. Visualizations and physical movements can be combined with mantra yoga produce multiple dissociated trance planes.    Music consists of repeating rhythms and melodies. From a trance theory point of view, music consists of multiple trances, one for each repeating rhythm or melody. Most of these musical loops repeat only a few times and there is a minimum number of repetitions needs before a dissociated trance plane will be created. Musical trance can be described as the creation of multiple trances followed by their collapse. However, another cognitive loop is precisely this repeated creation and collapsing of dissociated trance planes.   Certain types of music are more trance-inducing, generally, than others. Musical loops which are sustained, such as in shamanistic or so-called trance-drumming, have at least the critical element of high repetition. Thus, the high repetition of the musical loop is more likely to produce a single dissociated trance plane. Religious and military marching music also has a higher likelihood of inducing trance because of the high repetition of the musical loop.   Certain sports such as jogging, swimming, basketball, etc. require repetition of action and therefore a repetition of cognitive objects. These sports all create dissociated trance planes and therefore trance.   Certain things known for inducing trance states are generally regarded as negative. Watching television or a movie also generates trance because of the attention loop between the viewer and the images viewed. This cognitive loop is very short and simple. You look, you integrate the image, and you look again. The processing of the content of the images takes place in the dissociated trance plane in which a variety of cognitive functions are disabled.    Posted Jul 18 2008, 06:23 PM by psychology with no comments

• Stress second part

  Second part   In turn, another message that travels through nerves from the hypothalamus to the adrenal medulla created an active secretion of adrenaline. These hormones are responsible for the organic reaction throughout the body.   2. State resistance: when an indivual is subjected to prolonged factors such as the threat of damaging physical, chemical, biological or social agents, while continuing its adaptation to such claims in a progressive manner, it may happen that diminish their ability to respond, because of the fatigue that occurs in the glands of stress. During this phase usually a dynamic equilibrium or homeostasis happens between the internal and external environment of the individual.   Thus, if the body has the ability to withstand this stress a long time, there is no problem; if not, the stress will undoubtedly advance to the next stage.   3. Phase of exhaustion:   The progressive decline of the body facing a situation of prolonged stress leads to a high state of  deterioration, with the loss of important physiological capacities and thereby activates the phase of exhaustion, in which the subject succumbs to the demands and bodily reactions are minimized because their capacity to adapt and interact with the environment diminish.  Posted Jul 15 2008, 05:03 AM by psychology with 1 comment(s)

• STRESS

  July, 2008, psychology   Stress   The concept of stress goes back to the 1930’s, when a young 20-years-old Austrian second year student of the school of medicine at the University of Prague, Hans Selye, the son of Austrian surgeon Hugo Selye, noted that all patients who studied, regardless of the disease itself, showed common symptoms. These generally included: fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, etc. this drew much attention to Selye, who called stress the “syndrome of being ill.”   Selye felt then that several unknown diseases such as cardiac illnesses, hypertension and mental or emotional disorders are simply the result of physiological changes resulting from a prolonged stress in the bodies of these students, and mentioned that these genetic alterations may be predetermined or constitutionally. However, to continue their investigations, others elaborated upon his ideas, which concluded that not only harmful physical agents acting directly on the body are producers of animal stress, but are also in the cases of men. They found that demands of social and threats individual environments that require adaptability cause stress disorder.   In the description of the disease, he identified at least the following three stages in the production mode of stress:   1. Alarm reaction: the body, threatened by the stress inducing circumstances, were altered physiologically by activating a series of glands, especially in the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, which is located at the bottom of the brain, and the adrenal glands, located on the kidneys in the area in back of the abdominal cavity,   the brain, to detect the threat or risk, stimulates the hypothalamus, which produces “liberating factors” that are specific substances that act as messengers for corporal and specific areas. One such substance is a hormone called ACTH (Adrenal cortico Trophic Hormone) which serves as a physiological messenger that travels the bloodstream until it reaches the crust of the adrenal gland, where under the influence of such a message produces cortisone and other hormones called corticosteroids.   To be continue…. Posted Jul 14 2008, 03:06 AM by psychology with 1 comment(s)

• Cartoons

  Work Exploitation    Mr. Ball: I’ am getting old and so do you so who is going to take care of us in a few years?   Mrs. Ball: well I don’t know how to call her; nanny, housekeeper or caregiver because she will probably have to play all those roles     Mr. Ball: yes one of those women that work for many hours and puts up with verbal harassment and even sometimes physical and sexual abuse, an invisible worker   Mr. Ball: when we get back to New York City we need to advocated for the passage in Albany of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights which will insure they get health benefits, paid time off, overtime and cost of living raises besides of other benefits        Mrs. Ball: wow I didn’t know it was so important to you   Mr. Ball: well my grandmother was a German immigrant and she worked as a caregiver for the elderly since she couldn’t find any other job. She used to talk about her feeling mistreated and belittled and said that she lacked at work the essential dignity a human being should have had. We should give these people a minimum of human dignity by improving their working conditions.     Posted Jul 02 2008, 03:10 AM by psychology with 1 comment(s) Filed under: worker's dignity, cartoons, great, art