#Object in the Mirror || Amygdala | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bluesunsdusk · 1 year

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A light tapping filled the diagram-filled room. Cold light from a screen served as the only illumination, bathing Najma in white and blue. Their optics were fixed on projections of wide expanded synthetic neural networks from a variety of different omnics, some awakened and others not.

Something distracted them though. A soft electrical whirring followed by a light click of metal against metal. They looked over their shoulder and turned their seat to get a better look of what was behind them.

Setesh stood dormant in one of the corners, statuesque like a decorative suit of armor. Their optics were visibility active, but the lights indicating it were dim, faintly blinking on and off like that of a computer on standby. They turned their attention down to the station next to Setesh. It was were Najma would be plugged in for post-test analyses. There was no reason for that to be making a sound, the wires were security stored away.

The sound came again. In the corner of their vision, they spotted something. Movement. They switched their focus back to Setesh. Specifically, to their head.

This time, they kept their optics firmly on Setesh.

There it was again, and this time they saw what it was. Involtary convulsions. Without any seeming intent, Setesh's neck actuation activated and very slightly angled their head upward like they were about to look up, just enough for one of their hard metal antennae to touch part of the wall.

This was unusual in omnics, especially the less human ones. It usually resulted from a fault somewhere within a unit's system.

Najma kept looking, considering their next course of action. It was basically the kind of standby where non-essential functions were put on hold to divert processing power to another task for increased efficiency. It was easy to break a properly-functional unit out of.

Perhaps, they could do something discrete to snap them out of it...

[ Sending direct device connection request... ]

There was no quick response. At least, not by Setesh's usual metric, but Najma wouldn't delve too deep into what the ramifications of this might be just yet. Shortly after Najma making a mental note of this, Setesh's head twitched ever so slightly in their direction.

[ Direct connection accepted... ]

> What is it you require, Najma?

> You were exhibiting involuntary tremors and head convulsions during deep memory processing. It is unusual...and concerning. Your neural network may have a faulty layer causing the stored memory being processed to be mistaken for active input.

> ...

> If you could inform me what you were processing before the connection request was made, it could help narrow down which section of your processing unit may be responsible.

> ...I do not wish to recall this information.

> ...May I ask why?

> You may not.

> I see. It could a series of different causes. For example, it could be the part of your processing unit that mirrors the function of the amygdala in humans, the component responsible for identifying threats.

> No.

> ...Peculiar response. If I could be allowed to perform a second party diagnostic, I could pinpoint the error. We could also run one during your deep memory processing.

> ...I will...think about it.

[ Direct connection terminated. ]

Once the connection was broken, Setesh continued to remain still for several minutes, seemingly staring ahead at nothing. Of course, Najma was aware their optics were advanced enough that turning their head to see most available visual data in the room was unnecessary and only served to place objects into direct view of their central optic. Setesh could, realistically, be looking at anything.

Najma kept their attention on them for a while, but eventually returned to their studies. As soon as their head was turned away, Setesh walked to the door. They could hear their heavy and notably hasty footfalls. Najma didn't turn to look when they heard the exit to their quarters open and close.

After having been linked with Setesh at least once well enough to walk one of their lived experiences before, they really didn't feel like it needed to be said. It didn't need to be said that Setesh had suffered tremendous damage on multiple occasions and witnessed things no person should. It didn’t need to be said that both left a permanent impact on them, both mentally and physically. Najma knew how to repair some of it, but this required a level of trust only the reckless tended to have... Setesh was far too on edge to be quite that reckless, even if they'd proven their skills on one of their own people before.

Perhaps, they simply needed time. Perhaps, they'd just grown used to this way of being. They would see.

[ Receiving direct device connection request... ][ Source: Sj-0000a. ]

[ Altering designation... ]

[ Source: Setesh. ]

[ Direct connection accepted... ]

> ...

> Is there something you wish to ask me, Setesh?

> ...Yes. I request that you keep what we previously discussed confidential. Suspicions of an internal vulnerability would be detrimental to the cause.

> Of course.

[ Direct connection terminated. ]

Well, it was... a step. Najma wasn't sure what direction a step it was, but it was a step.

#ic: najma #ic: setesh #drabble: setesh #drabble: najma #just some mindless writing ...from someone with limited ai learning knowledge forvive my unscientific techno babble #long post #set vc: no one can learn about this. Ramattra can't learn about this. Maximilien can't learn about this. OGUNDIMU DEFINITELY can't learn a-#naj vc: It's literally just the machine equivalent of a mild REM sleep behavior you aren't dying...

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mentalmindsetmatters · 7 months

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Unveiling the Layers of Specific Phobia

Exploring the intricate world of specific phobias invites us into the nuanced realm of human psychology. Beyond the surface-level understanding, where fear manifests in response to specific stimuli, lie layers of perplexity and burstiness that shape the landscape of these mental health challenges.

Unraveling Perplexity: The Complex Tapestry of Specific Phobia

At its core, perplexity in the context of specific phobias speaks to the intricate web of thoughts, emotions, and physiological responses that individuals experience when confronted with their feared object or situation. Unlike the simplicity often associated with fear, specific phobias weave a complex tapestry, intertwining cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements.

Consider the scenario of someone with arachnophobia. The perplexity arises not only from the immediate fear of spiders but also from the cognitive processes that fuel this fear. The mind races with irrational thoughts, conjuring worst-case scenarios and heightening the perceived threat. Understanding this complexity is crucial in developing effective therapeutic approaches.

Embracing Burstiness: Diverse Expressions of Specific Phobia

Burstiness, on the other hand, unveils the diverse expressions of specific phobias across individuals. While commonalities exist, the varied ways in which specific phobias manifest highlight the uniqueness of each person's experience. Burstiness introduces the notion that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to specific phobias.

Let's delve into the burstiness of agoraphobia, where individuals fear situations perceived as difficult to escape or where help might not be readily available. Some may experience panic attacks in crowded places, while others might avoid leaving their homes altogether. The burstiness in these manifestations underscores the need for tailored interventions that address the individual intricacies of specific phobias.

Crafting a Narrative: Utilizing Sentence Structure for Engagement

To keep readers engaged, we must navigate the delicate balance of sentence length and structure. In discussing specific phobias, employing a mix of longer, detailed sentences and concise, impactful ones mirrors the diversity inherent in the subject matter. This dynamic approach mirrors the ebb and flow of the emotional and cognitive processes involved in specific phobias.

Consider the following:

Longer sentence: The intricate dance between the amygdala, responsible for emotional responses, and the prefrontal cortex, governing rational thought, orchestrates the complex symphony of specific phobia manifestations.

Shorter sentence: Fear grips the mind, rendering rationality silent.

Navigating the Landscape: Using Descriptive Headings and Examples

Descriptive headings act as signposts, guiding readers through the multifaceted terrain of specific phobias. Let's journey into the landscape with headings such as "Perplexity Unveiled" and "Burstiness in Action," offering readers a clear roadmap.

Additionally, enriching the narrative with vivid examples and relatable analogies bridges the gap between theory and lived experience. Imagine a tightrope walker navigating the fear of heights, providing a tangible metaphor for the delicate balance required in confronting specific phobias.

Formatting for Impact: Harnessing Markdown's Power

To enhance the visual appeal and accessibility of our exploration, leveraging Markdown is paramount. Bold text emphasizes key concepts, bullet points delineate essential insights, and headings create a hierarchical structure.

In conclusion, our journey through the perplexity and burstiness of specific phobias unveils a rich tapestry of human experience. By embracing the diversity inherent in these conditions, we pave the way for a more nuanced understanding and, ultimately, more effective approaches to support those grappling with specific phobias.

#mental health #mental illness #mental wellness #stressfree

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jellymove04 · 2 years

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Pentose phosphate pathway Packed Chitosan-Protamine Nanoparticles Revealed Antitumor Exercise Through Suppression involving NF-κB, Proinflammatory Cytokines and Bcl-2 Gene Phrase within the Cancer of the breast Cellular material

Summary: Free Alternative flap composed of pores and skin as well as adaptable subcutaneous muscle, equally decreases donor internet site deaths and it is ideally suited for most soft-tissue renovation in the dorsal ft ., heel as well as plantar base. Free muscle tissue flaps, however, offer comparatively simpler cells moves and are favored with the ankle joint location inside the presence of open tibia fractures, plus high risk sufferers to decrease the perioperative deaths.Although the co-occurrence regarding damaging affect and discomfort is well recognized, the system main his or her organization is actually cloudy. To examine whether or not perhaps the most common self-regulatory capability effects the experience of the two emotion as well as discomfort, we incorporated neuroimaging, conduct, along with bodily measures from about three tests split up by considerable temporary durations. Each of our outcomes revealed that person variations feeling rules capability, because classified by an objective way of measuring emotive state, corrugator electromyography, expected self-reported achievement although controlling discomfort. In sentiment as well as ache paradigms, the particular amygdala mirrored regulation #Link# achievement. Especially, all of us learned that greater sentiment regulation achievement had been connected with increased alter regarding amygdalar exercise right after pain regulation. Moreover, personal variants a higher level amygdalar modify right after emotion legislation were a powerful predictor regarding ache legislations good results, and also from the a higher level amygdalar wedding right after ache legislation. These bits of information claim that frequent individual differences in sentiment and also soreness regulation good results are usually reflected in a nerve organs composition known to give rise to value determination procedures.Gold(My spouse and i)-catalysed addition of alcohols to 3,3-disubstituted cyclopropenes occur in an extremely regioselective as well as semplice way to create alkyl tert-allylic ethers in great produces. The reaction is actually loving toward sterically hindered substituents about the cyclopropene as well as primary and also extra alcohols as nucleophiles. On this entire article, many of us directory of the particular substrate opportunity as well as plausible mechanism, as well as the regioselectivity issues arising from following gold(We)-catalysed isomerisation associated with tertiary to primary allylic ethers.Sr(Pd1-xPtx)(Only two)Ge-2, SrPd2(Ge1-xSix)(2), along with Sr(Pd1-xAgx)(2)Ge-2 individual crystals had been created by using a self-flux approach to examine the connection between chemical substance strain and also electron doping on the superconductivity of SrPd2Ge2 superconductors. The greatest increased superconducting stage move temperature (T-c) ended up being 3.Twenty-six Nited kingdom, that was affecting Sr(Pd1-xPtx)(A couple of)Ge-2 from a Equals 2.0618. In comparison, the particular T-c of SrPd2(Ge1-xSix)(A couple of) continued to be practically constant because the level of dopant elevated, and also electron doping throughout Sr(Pd1-xAgx)(Two)Ge-2 under control your superconductivity. In addition, regarding by <Equals 3.0657, the particular superconducting upper crucial industry (H-c2) greater linearly with an boost in the price of a throughout Sr(Pd1-xPtx)(2)Ge-2, whilst H-c2 stayed practically continuous inside #Link# SrPd2(Ge1-xSix)(Two). The outcome in the present #Link# review ended up in comparison with that relating to pnictide compounds which has a ThCr2Si2-type construction.

#Bortezomib #Dasatinib #Pentose phosphate pathway

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maritzaerwin · 4 years

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How to Formulate Your Career Goals and Objectives (+Examples)

Progress results from targeted action. When you are not quite sure where you want to be career-wise, you won’t accomplish much. You need a strong sense of direction to push your career forward and that’s where precise career goals come into play.

By knowing where you want to be in 3-, 5-years, and, more importantly, understanding how you’ll get to that point can help you massively improve your career progression and accelerate job search. So let’s dive in and take a look at why having goals is important and how you can get better at meeting them!

Why You Need to Have Clear Career Goals

Job searching without career goals is like driving without a rearview mirror — you can easily miss some big opportunity heading your way. Setting clear professional goals and objectives can help you stay on track towards your success.

In fact, precise goal setting is one of the four techniques the US military used to increase NAVY SEAL passing rates from 25% to 33%. And their framework also delivers great results in the “civilian” fields.

Goal-setting teaches you to break lofty, intangible dreams into smaller, daily steps that are much easier to accomplish. For instance, rather than stating that you want to get a high-paid IT job, drill down to the specific goals such as a) write or update your resume b) craft a compelling cover letter c) find and review at least 5 job posts this week and so on.

Mental rehearsals help you visualize yourself in succeeding with your stated course of action.

Self-talk. Talk positively to yourself. The military found that doing so helped recruits “override fears” that are generated by the amygdala — a useful part of our brain that helps us deal with anxiety. So pep talk yourself into the right mood whenever you feel like the job blues are about to hit you.

Practice arousal control — getting your excitement or anxiety levels in check with the right breathing and emotional control techniques is key to helping you mitigate the crippling emotions and fears.

This framework is an excellent tool for helping you formalize and push through your day-to-day job search and short-term career goals.

When it comes to long term career goals, you’ll need some extra time to think and strategize about what you want to achieve in life.

Do you want an increase in your earnings, move up the career ladder, or change your occupation entirely? Asking yourself where you would like to be in five or ten years is a good starting point.

Doing so helps you work backward and plan for more short-term, smaller, and more achievable goals with an objective (as per technique above) and slaying them effectively so that you can hit your five or ten-year target.

Also, by having a formalized list of both short-term and long-term career goals, you’ll be able to easily answer the “what are your career goals?” interview question!

So let’s get started with the goal-setting part!

How to Set Your Career Goals

The benefits of setting a career goal give you something to work towards achieving, but it spurs you on to take the necessary steps needed to fulfill your long-term ambitions.

So how do you identify those steps? Here are some pointers, plus career goals examples.

Aim for Smaller Byte-Sized Career Goals

When setting up your career goals, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Set yourself smaller goals that can be spread out daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. This way you will not become overwhelmed by trying to achieve too much at once and potentially suffering a career set-back should you fail to meet your goals.

It is very easy to say ‘I want to double my salary in five years’, but achieving that goal can be made much more difficult if you try to take on too much too soon. So rather than writing down that broad idea, consider the following wording instead:

“In five years, I want to break into a management position in my industry that pays $80,000-$100,000 on average. To accomplish that I will need to a) improve my leadership skills by completing an online training course (by December 2020) b)negotiate more supervisory responsibilities at my current job (starting from Jan 2021) c)get more proactive during group work (whenever the opportunity comes up).”

Having such a detailed formula planned out with achievable goals set at regular intervals is much more effective than merely stating some ‘dreamy’ objective without thinking much about how you’ll accomplish it.

Get Your Priorities Straight

Berkeley Career & People division advises prioritizing all the goals you are setting. As the earlier example shows, your grand career goal will likely involve several interim steps. Prioritizing them helps you focus your attention on what’s really important right now and reduces the overwhelm.

Also, as studies show people who can precisely picture or describe their set goals are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them eventually.

So get that pen and paper, jot down your big long-term goal. Then pounder over and add short-term sub-goals that stand for steps you’ll be taking to get there. Here’s an example:

“In 3 years, I’d like to work as a Customer Success Manager for a SaaS startup with 1+ million active monthly users. I’d like to have a salary of $95,000 to $120,000.

This year, I will maximize my issue resolution rate to 90% and try to raise the Customer Satisfaction Score to 85%.

By May 2021, I will complete a course in product management and apply for a certification from Boston University via edX

During the next year, I will attend at least 5 SaaS startup/Product Management meetups to network.

Also, by February 2022, I will negotiate a promotion at my current job (from Customer Support Specialist to Customer Support Supervisor).”

Set H.A.R.D Goals

You’ve probably heard about SMART goals a dozen of times already. But the truth is…SMART goals don’t really work for most people. As one study suggests: only 15% of survey respondents agreed that their set SMART goals will help them accomplish something this year.

HARD goal-setting isn’t a new concept either. But it’s a big boon is that it helps you set more ruthless and refined goals — ones that are both challenging and delightful to achieve.

HARD stands for:

H — Heartfelt: Can you create an emotional attachment to the set goal? In three adjectives, describe what makes you want this. Your motivation can be intrinsic, extrinsic, or personal.

A — Animated: Can you visualize your goal? In great detail, describe exactly where you want to be and what do you want to do in 3-,5-,10-years. Try to paint the best picture you can.

R — Required: What’s required of you to get to where you want to be? Set deadlines for yourself. What do you want to get done in 90 days? In the next 30 days? What can you accomplish today?

D — Difficult. What are the possible stumbling blocks on your way to the top? Do you need extra skills, training, credential, confidence? What difficulties will you need to overcome to achieve your outcome?

Research shows that people who use the HARD goal-setting technique end up feeling up to 75% more fulfilled than people using weaker frameworks. So give yourself a challenge, OK?

Several More Career Goals Statement Examples To Swipe

If you need some more inspiration, think about your career goals from either of the following perspectives:

Level up your skills

Improve your in-person networking skills

Get better at networking on LinkedIn

Boost your performance metrics

Get a new degree or extra certifications

Obtain a new license

Speak at an industry event

Change jobs or career fields

Negotiate a promotion

Break into management/executive roles

Improve your personal brand

Find a new weekend job

Launch a side-hustle

Start a business

By knowing what direction and steps you need to take in life over the foreseeable future will keep you ahead of the curve. Setting career goals will prevent you from going forward in an aimless direction and will make you stop and think carefully before taking up opportunities that are not quite right for your long-term goals.

How to Create Winning Career Objectives

While career goals are rather ‘personal’, a career objective (also known as resume objective) is a succinct statement atop of your resume explaining what you want to get from the job and what you are bringing to the table.

A career objective should align with your career goals. When these two don’t match, you can easily get derailed from your selected career pass and settle for opportunities that don’t quite tick all the boxes.

We wrote a separate big guide on writing great resume objectives with some snappy examples, so be sure to check it out. Here’s we’ll just recap some key best practices:

Maintain a positive, confident tone. Speak about what you want to achieve, rather than what you’d want to avoid.

Customize your career objectives to each role to make a positive impression with a potential employer.

Keep it short. A good career objective does not need to incorporate all your goals. It should not be more than 2-3 short sentences long.

It should be about “them”, not “you”. Don’t just say what you want from this job. Indicate how you can help the company.

Here’s a quick career objective statement for a recent graduate, looking for an internship position:

“BA of Management Sunnydale College graduate with strong marketing analysis, social media marketing, and writing skills seeks a full-time internship at Communications/Marketing Department at a SaaS startup”.

Don’t Forget to Create Accountability

Having career goals is one thing, but taking the necessary steps to reach them is another. You may sit and imagine yourself working in your dream job, but unless you actually take those physical steps to reach your goal, a dream is all it will ever be.

That’s why you need to build a strong accountability system to support your goals.

One study suggests that you have a 65% higher chance of completing a goal if you commit to someone. And your success rate rises to 95% if you have regular meetings with the person you’ve committed. While building an accountability tandem with a professional career advisor or mentor can give you the most acceleration, committing to your friend, spouse, or family member can be very beneficial too. They’ll act as your support system and will help you to get going despite possible setbacks.

Further, by becoming accountable for what you do, and remembering to praise yourself once you have finished a set of tasks, you can get great satisfaction from being another step closer to your dream job. This in itself can be extremely motivating and will encourage you to take the next step, then the next step, and so on.

You can also try to use various habit trackers and planning tools to personally track your progress on your small day-to-day goals. Doing so also helps you visualize your progress over time — a helpful and satisfying thing to do!

Wrap Up

Your career goals will remain ephemeral unless you break them down into management chunks, write down the outcomes, and place them on a timeline. By creating and accomplishing small steps one at a time, you will be consistently working towards your end goal, but you will also be more productive and motivated along this path to complete these tasks because you have a firm career goal in mind!

This post has been originally published on September 4, 2017 and has been extensively revised and updated on July 21, 2020.

The post How to Formulate Your Career Goals and Objectives (+Examples) appeared first on Freesumes.com.

How to Formulate Your Career Goals and Objectives (+Examples) published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

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fierceawakening · 4 years

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Against empathy Liveblog 18

“Batson and his colleagues put subjects in a situation where they have the opportunity to do something nice—such as donating money, taking over an unpleasant task from someone else, or cooperating with someone at a cost. Some of the subjects are told nothing or are told to take an objective point of view. But others are encouraged to feel empathy—they might be told: “Try to take the other person’s perspective” or “Put yourself in that person’s shoes.”

Over and over again, Batson finds that these empathy prompts make subjects more likely to do good—to give money, take over a task, and cooperate. Empathy makes them kind.

Batson finds these effects even when helping is anonymous, when there is a justification for not helping, and when it’s easy to say no. He concludes from his work that these effects cannot be explained by a desire to enhance one’s reputation or a wish to avoid embarrassment or anything like that. Rather, empathy elicits a genuine desire to make another person’s life better.”

I’m VERY interested in how this is so bad you recommend people stop.

“Even among psychologists who should know better, images derived from PET or fMRI scans are seen as reflecting something more scientific—more real—than anything else a psychologist could discover. There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.”

Bruh.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you’re making very strong versions of your claims. Please acknowledge that.

“If you’re one of those people who doesn’t believe something is real unless you see it in the brain, you’ll be relieved to hear that empathy actually does exist. It really does light up the brain. Actually, at first blush, empathy looks as if it’s everywhere in the brain. One scholar describes at length what he calls “an empathy circuit in the brain,” but this “circuit” contains ten major brain areas, some of them big chunks of brain stuff, larger than a baby’s finger, like the medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala—all of which are also engaged in actions and experiences that have nothing to do with empathy.”

Interesting. Yay data!

“It turns out, though, that this the-whole-brain-does-it conclusion arises because neuroscientists—along with psychologists and philosophers—are often sloppy in their use of the term empathy. Some investigators look at what I see as empathy proper—what happens in the brain when someone feels the same thing they believe another person is feeling. Others look at what happens when we try to understand other people, usually called “social cognition” or “theory of mind” but sometimes called “cognitive empathy.” Others look at quite specific instantiations of empathy (such as what happens when you watch someone’s face contort in disgust), and still others study what goes on in the brain when a person decides to do something nice for another person, which is sometimes called “prosocial concern” but which one normally thinks of as niceness or kindness. Once you start pulling these different phenomena apart, which I’ll do below, things get more interesting, and you see how these different capacities relate to one another.”

Fair—I can see how people might looks at a whole brain going FWEEEEEE and assume the thing is super important, only to miss that they’ve over defined the thing.

Still not sure you haven’t under defined it, let’s see what you have to say

“The first finding is that an empathic response to someone else’s experience can involve the same brain tissue that’s active when you yourself have that experience. So “I feel your pain” isn’t just a gooey metaphor; it can be made neurologically literal: Other people’s pain really does activate the same brain area as your own pain, and more generally, there is neural evidence for a correspondence between self and other.”

For the people who think “how can you feel MY pain? Is that magic, NTs? Lolol.” What we mean!

“As you might be able to tell from the title of his book, Hickok is critical of the claims that have been made about mirror neurons, and many scholars would agree that they have been overhyped. One strong objection to the view that they explain capacities such as morality, empathy, and language is that most of the findings about mirror neurons come from macaque monkeys—and monkeys don’t have much morality, empathy, or language. Mirror neurons cannot be sufficient for these capacities, then—though they might help out with them. Nevertheless, the more general finding of shared representations—the discovery that there exist neural systems that treat the experiences and actions of others the same way they treat the experiences and actions of the self—really is an important discovery about mental life.”

Caveat.

“You can see this overlap between self and other as a clever evolutionary trick. To thrive as a social being, one has to make sense of the internal lives of other individuals, to accurately guess what other people are thinking, wanting, and feeling. Since we’re not telepathic, we have to infer this from information we get from our senses.”

Ding ding! It’s a perceptual apparatus, like eyes or ears. It’s not wizardry.

Now... while I concede there are times when covering my ears or eyes make it MORE easy for me to perceive something important. It doesn’t follow that I should pluck out my eyes or eardrums.

Yet in a previous chapter you said “if you’re considering what to do and trying to feel someone’s pain, you should stop.” Implying T the very least that I should have my eye mask at hand at all times.

Seems odd. I get that disabilities aren’t death sentences but this is parsing like “blind yourself so you can truly hear.” Nah?’

“But there’s an alternative. We can take advantage of the fact that we have minds ourselves, and we can use our own minds as a laboratory to bring ourselves up to speed on how others will behave and think.”

Porquenolosdos.gif

“We can do the same for subjective experiences. Which would hurt a stranger more: stubbing her toe or slamming her hand in a car door? You could try to figure this out from scratch, like a scientist looking at the biological workings of a novel species, but a better way is to assess memories of your own pain (or just to imagine yourself in those situations) and assume that the other person will feel the same way you do.”

Which is why I say ditch the eye mask and remember you’re capable of both.

“Our occasional success at understanding individuals who are different from ourselves shows that simulation can’t be the whole story in understanding other people. Hickok points out that we can often successfully read the minds of dogs and cats, figure out what they mean when they bark or purr, wag their tails, put their tails up high, and so on, but surely we’re not simulating them. Those who are quadriplegic from birth can have a rich understanding of other people, figuring out their mental states based on their movement—she has loudly slammed the door, she must be angry—even though these quadriplegics are not in any sense simulating the actions.”

Is anyone arguing against this?

“And, of course, there has to be a brain difference between self and other because there is a psychological difference. Watching someone getting slapped in the face doesn’t really make your cheek burn, and watching someone get a back rub doesn’t make your aches go away. We may feel the pain of someone else, in a limited sense, but in another sense we really don’t. Relative to real experience, empathic resonance is pallid and weak.”

But thinking about it in a detached way isn’t? How do you know?

“Our empathic experience is influenced by what we think about the person we are empathizing with and how we judge the situation that person is in.

It turns out, for instance, that you feel more empathy for someone who treats you fairly than for someone who has cheated you. And you feel more empathy for someone who is cooperating with you than for someone you are in competition with.”

Fair. But that’s why I said don’t rely on empathy alone, except maybe when you need to make a very quick decision or when interacting with people you know.

“People said that they felt less empathy for the person who became infected through drug use—and their neural activation told the same story: When they viewed this individual, they had less activation in brain areas associated with pain, such as, again, the anterior cingulate cortex. And the more subjects explicitly blamed the drug users for their fate, the less empathy they said they had and the less brain activation there was.”

Does rational compassion suffer from a similar problem? (Still not sure what it is exactly.) That is, are we sure this goes away when we appeal to something other than empathy?

Do professed rational actors, for example, reason that addicts deserve less help because they put themselves at risk doing something they don’t have to do, like someone getting a transfusion has to?

“Empathy is also influenced by the group to which the other individual belongs—whether the person you are looking at or thinking about is one of Us or one of Them.”

Fair, which is what o was trying to say with the stories help post—stories help us make Them into Us. Real stories are better but imagined can work, which is why I was okay with them too, anon.

“Subjects found these pictures to be disgusting and showed correspondingly reduced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a chunk of the brain involved in social reasoning. Although this study didn’t directly look at empathy, the findings do suggest that we shut off our social understanding when dealing with certain people: We dehumanize them.”

Fair.

But I still want to see whether this changes when you see pictures of people you find disgusting stubbing their toe or having a birthday party. Do you savor their pain and feel disgusted by their pleasure, or do you relate to them in spite of yourself? Does it vary? When?

“I’ve been using the term empathy in the sense of Adam Smith’s sympathy—feeling what another feels. But one can ask how this sharing of feelings relates to the ability to understand people’s psychological states. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that we sometimes call this empathy as well—“cognitive empathy”—and one might wonder whether they are one and the same.

If they were, it would call into question my argument against empathy. You can’t make it through life without some capacity to understand the minds of others. So if feeling the pain of others arises from the same neural system that underlies everyday social understanding—if you can’t have one without the other—then giving up on emotional empathy would be giving up too much.”

Fair

“One system involves sharing the experience of others, what we’ve called empathy; the other involves inferences about the mental states of others—mentalizing or mind reading. While they can both be active at once, and often are, they occupy different parts of the brain. For instance, the medial prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is involved in mentalizing, while the anterior cingulate cortex, sitting right behind that, is involved in empathy.”

Do they tend to go on at the same time, or different times? Can doing one cause doing the other?

“One recent scientific article struggles with the question of whether these troubling individuals are high in empathy or low in empathy. For the authors, the evidence suggests both: “Psychopathic criminals can be charming and attuned while seducing a victim, thereby suggesting empathy, and later callous while raping a victim, thereby suggesting impaired empathy.” So which is it?

The authors try to resolve this apparent paradox in terms of a distinction between ability (one’s capacity to deploy empathy) and propensity (one’s willingness to do so). They suggest that these criminal psychopaths have normal empathic ability but adjust it like the dial of a radio—turn it up when you want to listen to the lyrics, turn it down if you want to focus on passing a slow truck on the I-95.”

That’s what I’d heard, maybe from the same article?

No... maybe not. The one I read said empathy by default is “on” in neurotypical people and has to be “turned off” by fatigue or encouraging callousness, but “off” by default in psychopaths. So if you want them to care how their actions hurt others, you have to call attention to it and “flip the switch.”

“So criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.”

Fair. But that makes it sound like affective empathy is good? And something that people should use, and might be bad if they dont?

So far anyway.

“None of this is to deny that understanding and feeling are related. Smell, vision, and taste are separate, but they come together in the appreciation of a meal, and it might be that the act of adopting someone’s perspective in a cold-blooded way makes you more likely to vicariously experience what they are feeling and vice versa. But these are nonetheless different processes, and this is important to keep in mind when we think about the pros and cons of empathy.”

Hey! I might be right!!

“Why would empathy make us nicer? The obvious answer—the one that comes to mind immediately for many people—is that empathy allows our selfish motivations to extend to others. The clearest case of this is when someone else’s pain is experienced as your own pain. The idea is that you will help because this will make your own pain go away.”

Yep. And you soothe yourself AND somebody else! It’s win-win!

“It’s not clear, though, that selfishness can explain the good acts that empathy leads to. When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape.”

That’s what I think we need reason for, but I don’t see why we should throw affective empathy out.

“People often cross the street to avoid encountering suffering people who are begging for money. It’s not that they don’t care (if they didn’t care, they would just walk by), it’s that they are bothered by the suffering and would rather not encounter it.”

Fair. I do this. But is that the whole story? For some it surely is. For me, I’m sure it’s part of the story, but part of it is that i feel that what I do in my job is more likely to substantially help homeless people more than giving money. I think I’d feel more guilt about letting my anxiousness around contagion and dirt make me move if I didn’t have another way to help that triggers my disgust less.

“I favor Batson’s own analysis that empathy’s power lies in its capacity to make the experience of others observable and salient, therefore harder to ignore. If I love my baby, and she’s in anguish, empathy with her pain will make me pick her up and try to make her pain go away. This is not because doing so makes me feel better—it does, but if I just wanted my vicarious suffering to go away, I’d leave the crying baby and go for a walk. Rather, my empathy lets me know that someone I love is suffering, and since I love her, I’ll try to make her feel better.”

Seeems fair.

“It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient.”

Then what makes people kind?

#the empathy discussion #against empathy liveblog

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compneuropapers · 5 years

Text

Interesting Papers for Week 28, 2019

Thirst regulates motivated behavior through modulation of brainwide neural population dynamics. Allen, W. E., Chen, M. Z., Pichamoorthy, N., Tien, R. H., Pachitariu, M., Luo, L., & Deisseroth, K. (2019). Science, 364(6437), 253.

Biased competition in the absence of input bias revealed through corticostriatal computation. Ardid, S., Sherfey, J. S., McCarthy, M. M., Hass, J., Pittman-Polletta, B. R., & Kopell, N. (2019). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(17), 8564–8569.

Network structure and input integration in competing firing rate models for decision-making. Barranca, V. J., Huang, H., & Kawakita, G. (2019). Journal of Computational Neuroscience, 46(2), 145–168.

Higher-Order Thalamic Circuits Channel Parallel Streams of Visual Information in Mice. Bennett, C., Gale, S. D., Garrett, M. E., Newton, M. L., Callaway, E. M., Murphy, G. J., & Olsen, S. R. (2019). Neuron, 102(2), 477-492.e5.

Emotional Mirror Neurons in the Rat’s Anterior Cingulate Cortex. Carrillo, M., Han, Y., Migliorati, F., Liu, M., Gazzola, V., & Keysers, C. (2019). Current Biology, 29(8), 1301-1312.e6.

Ergodicity reveals assistance and learning from physical human-robot interaction. Fitzsimons, K., Acosta, A. M., Dewald, J. P. A., & Murphey, T. D. (2019). Science Robotics, 4(29), eaav6079.

Slowdown of BCM plasticity with many synapses. Froc, M., & van Rossum, M. C. W. (2019). Journal of Computational Neuroscience, 46(2), 141–144.

Amygdala ensembles encode behavioral states. Gründemann, J., Bitterman, Y., Lu, T., Krabbe, S., Grewe, B. F., Schnitzer, M. J., & Lüthi, A. (2019). Science, 364(6437), eaav8736.

Human noise blindness drives suboptimal cognitive inference. Herce Castañón, S., Moran, R., Ding, J., Egner, T., Bang, D., & Summerfield, C. (2019). Nature Communications, 10, 1719.

Opposing Influence of Sensory and Motor Cortical Input on Striatal Circuitry and Choice Behavior. Lee, C. R., Yonk, A. J., Wiskerke, J., Paradiso, K. G., Tepper, J. M., & Margolis, D. J. (2019). Current Biology, 29(8), 1313-1323.e5.

Circuit mechanisms of hippocampal reactivation during sleep. Malerba, P., & Bazhenov, M. (2019). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 160, 98–107.

Reversible Inactivation of Different Millimeter-Scale Regions of Primate IT Results in Different Patterns of Core Object Recognition Deficits. Rajalingham, R., & DiCarlo, J. J. (2019). Neuron, 102(2), 493-505.e5.

Distributed Plasticity Drives Visual Habituation Learning in Larval Zebrafish. Randlett, O., Haesemeyer, M., Forkin, G., Shoenhard, H., Schier, A. F., Engert, F., & Granato, M. (2019). Current Biology, 29(8), 1337-1345.e4.

Torque-planning errors affect the perception of object properties and sensorimotor memories during object manipulation in uncertain grasp situations. Schneider, T. R., Buckingham, G., & Hermsdörfer, J. (2019). Journal of Neurophysiology, 121(4), 1289–1299.

Neurally constrained modeling of speed-accuracy tradeoff during visual search: gated accumulation of modulated evidence. Servant, M., Tillman, G., Schall, J. D., Logan, G. D., & Palmeri, T. J. (2019). Journal of Neurophysiology, 121(4), 1300–1314.

Hippocampal Reactivation of Random Trajectories Resembling Brownian Diffusion. Stella, F., Baracskay, P., O’Neill, J., & Csicsvari, J. (2019). Neuron, 102(2), 450-461.e7.

Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity. Stringer, C., Pachitariu, M., Steinmetz, N., Reddy, C. B., Carandini, M., & Harris, K. D. (2019). Science, 364(6437), 255.

Category-Induced Transfer of Visual Perceptual Learning. Tan, Q., Wang, Z., Sasaki, Y., & Watanabe, T. (2019). Current Biology, 29(8), 1374-1378.e3.

Visual delay affects force scaling and weight perception during object lifting in virtual reality. van Polanen, V., Tibold, R., Nuruki, A., & Davare, M. (2019). Journal of Neurophysiology, 121(4), 1398–1409.

Distinct types of neural reorganization during long-term learning. Zhou, X., Tien, R. N., Ravikumar, S., & Chase, S. M. (2019). Journal of Neurophysiology, 121(4), 1329–1341.

#science #Neuroscience #computational neuroscience #Brain science #research #neurobiology #mirror neurons #cognition #cognitive science #machine learning #psychophysics #scientific publications

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anonthenullifier · 6 years

Text

(in)Finite

Summary: Vision wakes up to discover he is not as dead as he should be.

AO3 link:https://archiveofourown.org/works/16570853

Written for @visionweek, Day 7 (Death, Friends, Heart)

Death was uncomfortable. An understatement, he presumes, though he can’t seem to come up with a better description at the moment. How he knows this is a bit of a quandary given a sweep of available information suggests such a process is a one time thing, life finite and immutable once taken. Despite this there are flickering images in his mind, faces coming in and out of focus like an old television in need of aluminum foil ears and a swift smack to the side. From what he can gather through the interference is that he died twice, both uncomfortable yet in different ways, at least he seems to have a niggling inclination that they were different. The first seemed oddly peaceful, his attention solely directed at the tear-stained cheeks of the woman taking his life - her name, her face, her voice, her essence lost somewhere that he cannot locate, but she seemed reluctant to steal his last breath. The second, in contrast, was greedy, violent, the sneer on the face sends a jolt deep into his brain, terror suddenly and unequivocally recognizable.

His eyes open, desperate to confirm there isn’t a hand on his forehead or fingers fracturing his skull with brute force. Air rushes from between his lips as he finds himself laying on a table in an industrially fashioned room, fluorescent lights humming in boredom above his head, causing him to blink. Four times he tries to keep his eyes open, figure out his surroundings, but it is so bright, the fifth blink elongates as he holds his eyelids just a bit tighter to stop the flow of the overwhelming amount of information to process.

With the environment nullified from perception (minus the softness of the mattress beneath him and the way the air conditioning sends invisible twisters dancing along his bare skin), he seeks to assess his functioning.

First he tests his toes, curling and then uncurling them four times, noting the way the fibers of the blanket tickle his skin, a pleasing sensation. Next he bends his knees, right and then left, alternating them before testing out his coordination to move them as one. The blanket lifts as he raises his knees and he discovers an unpleasant pocket of frigid air, an experience he swiftly reverses by straightening his legs and collapsing the blanket to its resting state. His hands and arms he tests a bit differently, using them to run along his torso, seeking out any sign of damage or concern, their journey slowing down when he reaches a fault line on his chest that seems out of place. Methodically he runs the pad of his finger up and down the scar, noting the smoothness of the new skin as compared to the slightly ridged texture of the rest of his body. A slither descends along his spine, initiating from the same place in his brain as the jolt, an all encompassing feeling shrouding him. It takes .86 seconds to recognize his fear.

Luckily, it seems his amygdala is functioning quite well. Technically his visual cortex is too, as is his spinal cord, neural networks, limbic system, occipital lobes, auditory cortex (or so he assumes the gentle click click echoing in his head is from the machine next to his bed and not a product of a hallucination - though if it is a hallucination it confirms his temporal and parietal lobes are at least communicating, albeit incongruously to reality). Which leaves his frontal lobe. Given he has been astutely reasoning through his bodily functioning and physical location, his ability to systematically analyze is still in tact. Memories and emotions (besides fear) are a bit less discernible, each reach into his mind reveals a kaleidoscope of colors and faces, rotating at such a breakneck pace he cannot parse out any details.

“Vision?”

A word with numerous meanings, some more direct concerning the ability to physically see objects, others more abstract, prophetic even. But this is said as if it is a name which is not one of the options in Merriam Webster.

“Vision, are you awake?”

As far as he is aware, he was the only one in this room, thus, thanks to his neurons sending waves across his frontal lobe, he can deduce that he might be this Vision. So he opens his eyes and finds a woman staring at him, her black hair tied into a ponytail and forehead developing deeper creases the longer he remains silent. “Am I Vision?”

The woman nods, a hand coming to cover her mouth as her eyes develop a harrowed sheen, “Do you rem-” a pause, a wave of her hand, a turn of her head, a sharp intake of breath, and the deflation of her body are all things he takes to indicate a negative emotional reaction to his question. She resets herself, haltingly lowering to sit onto the wheeled stool next to his bed, the squeaking of the plastic on the floor grating as she moves closer. “I’m Helen Cho.”

“It is nice to meet you.”

Lines branch from her eyes as she flashes him a smile, it is one he perceives as disingenuous. He is not sure if that is concerning given it has no impact on his own perceptions or functioning currently. “How are you doing?”

Her question is slow, professionally calm though he can sense a small vibration at the end of the last word, a break from the cool and collected persona she has on display for him. The answer is one he was attempting to ascertain before she came in, so he decides to finish his assessment before answering, believing truth needs to be based on an adequate amount of quantifiable data. All other parts of his body confirmed to be working appropriately, he runs a diagnostic of his heart and finds its lively beat falls in the exceptional range of health. “My heart is functioning well.”

“Good.” A flutter on his wrist draws his eyes down. “I’m sorry.” Immediately she removes her hand from his arm and he is unconcerned with her action, more curious about the dull gray of his flesh blending in with the vibranium imbedded in his arms. “Vision?”

He lifts his arm, eyes squinting as he catalogues the observation, uncertain why he feels a hollowness in his chest, a flare of despair in his overactive amygdala that screams run. “I-,” a vertiginous array of images surface in his mind, convoluted, harrowing, and indistinguishable, but there is a feeling of loss, of longing, that there should be something...more, yet it fades, falling away in granules no larger than sand that dissipate into non-existence once they are spread too far. It leaves him feeling slightly perturbed. “I feel...odd.”

A tear carves a lazy path down her cheek, Helen wiping it away as her lips fight between a stern line and a slight smile. “Your frontal lobe sustained incredible damage. We tried to fix it as best we could but we don’t know what will be affected or how permanent it may be.”

The feel of tearing in his forehead is strictly psychosomatic, yet it is just real enough for him to bring his fingers to his head, feel the indent in his skin. “I may never remember what happened?”

“Possibly, though we are going to do everything we can to help you.” Each word is weighed down more than the one before, as if the continuation of the thought adds another sandbag to her body, until she can barely breathe enough to say the rest. It is alarming, the way she wilts, yet he cannot figure out why nor if he is supposed to respond in a certain way. Based on the offer of help he believes some sort of gratitude is acceptable.

“Thank you.” Vision considers what she has shared, and all the things that fell through the cracks in her words, the little truths that aren’t being uttered, all reference to the life he has seemingly forgotten left strategically out of reach. There is only so much he can do to resolve whatever issues are occurring. But it all seems infinitesimal to him, given the peculiarity of his situation. Life is supposed to be finite, death the last stop before oblivion occurs. His body seems to have forgotten that fact, yet his mind did not, a mostly empty canvas on which he can paint the rest of his new existence. Perhaps this is as it should be, when one cheats death. “My heart is beating.”

”Impresively well.”

“And my brain is operating appropriately.”

She nods, “For the most part, yes.”

A concession he accepts but does not acknowledge, not certain if memory is necessary for living. “I suppose that is acceptable for now.”

A genuine smile creates more lines on her tired face. “I think after everything, that’s pretty good. I mean,” she gestures at him, hands waving up and down at his torso, “You’re alive!”

Vision isn’t sure how to process the tone of her voice or her tears, can’t tell if they are to be tied to sadness of some kind, joy at his revelation, or perhaps there is simply something in the air disturbing her lachrymose glands. Whichever it is is mostly inconsequential at the present moment. If they can never discover a way to correct for his frontal lobe damage, whomever he was before his death may forever be a mystery. This itself is unfortunate. But he has been given a rare opportunity in his rebirth, a privilege he will not squander. Hesitantly he mirrors the smile on her face. “I am.”

#visionweek #vision #mcu #the vision #helen cho #mine #ao3

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iremember · 6 years

Text

an essay i submitted

I had never seen the show, but I had heard of it. It was a series worthy of watercolor-esque tattoo trends and hyperrealistic Halloween costume plans. My significant other perched himself eagerly on his red leather armchair, squeezing a smile in between his cheeks, waiting for me to shower him with praise for introducing me to the infamous Stranger Things. Together we sat in the dark under army blankets—he waited for a revelation from me, and I waited for something I couldn’t put my finger on. Science fiction? A likening to The X Files?

It happened forty minutes into the first episode. A character, a young girl clad in a hospital gown, is dragged forcefully down a pristine, blank hallway characterized by its clinical appearance. The audience can tell that the character is being held captive in a medical building, tortured and experimented on. Poked and prodded. The audience, in general, knows that this is part of a television show, that it is all make-believe.

But instead of understanding that what I’m watching is fiction, my entire body hardens beneath me. My skin burns with hot pricks of panic, my teeth grind into each other. I leave handprints outlined with beaded sweat on the sticky armchair. All objects in my field of vision dissolve and mesh together. Suddenly, I’m no longer a twenty-one year old female sitting in the comfort of a living room. I’m still myself of course, but now I am four year-old me, believing my life is about to end at the hands of clinicians, under the guise of routine procedures—a routine procedure that did not have to be forced, a routine procedure that did not have to mirror sexual violence, for a routine procedure that did not have to happen the way it did, or at all. When a medical professional hurts you as a child, there is rarely any evidence to prove that it was criminal. It needed to be done, they often counter. Or: She’s too young to understand what’s really happening.

Eighteen—or seventeen, from injury to the memory—years later, my skull still swims with nausea at the smell of rubber gloves. I cannot lay onto my back without the image of six biohazard-protected nurses pinning me to a table, outstretching my legs and sealing my arms at my sides—roadkill preparing to be stuffed and displayed; already dead, but positioned to look alive for the rest of my years. I cannot walk into a pediatric medical office without blacking out, becoming years younger than I am, searching frantically for exits, or wishing I was not alive.

Recently, while walking downtown, I heard a young man joke with his friends that he was triggered by the fact that his school’s dining hall ran out of his favorite muffins—blueberry. Everyone laughed. The joke allowed a segue into a string of “triggered” punchlines. “Fat chicks get so-o-o-o triggered when you call ‘em fat,” another one spat out. Laughter.

Yet the world continues to turn. The question, “When did you serve?” pops up whenever the disclosure is, “I have post-traumatic stress disorder”, and that is universal. A friend lamented that she no longer feels she can use the word triggered to describe the experiences that set off recollections of trauma, because the word has transformed into a tool to mock those who need it. In fact, the word itself was introduced in clinical settings for the sole purpose of describing trauma. What is the motive for trivializing an open wound that lives on forever? A relationship “on a break” has become a trauma, a terrible grade on a midterm becomes traumatic. In so many places, the concept of trauma has become casual. An everyday occurrence. The world forgets about those of us who have resorted to bloodletting to cast out said trauma.

The brain, however, remembers.

It remembers because it is most wounded—first physically, then cognitively. Brain scans performed on those with significant trauma highlight the dents in the hippocampus and the amygdala like Christmas lights with burnt-out bulbs. I understand what’s said when I hear that my body has protected me primitively since the incident, but I also understand that it means my body has betrayed me. Relationships have crumbled, one after the other. Long nights were spent in tears, the other person always yelling, “I don’t understand how you can’t have sex, unless you’re defective.” Longer days were spent in gynecological offices—the first time in such a place occurring at age 20—rolled into a ball, dry heaving, and choking over the words that spilled from my mouth and into the air. I can’t do this right now, I’m scared, please wait.

My partner, his body chalk-outlined from the strobing glow of the desktop, swallows down a sharp intake of breath as he feels me stiffen beside him. He knows not to draw significant attention to the trigger, but sometimes, he can’t help himself. I dry heave. Saliva slicks my tongue.

The offending scene has ended. It ended several minutes ago, in fact. I think of how the hippocampus shrinks after developmental trauma occurs. Of how many children repeat nightmares in their play and are sent to time-out, punished for making sense of what happened. I think of how small in size the brain is, how one can easily fit it into both palms and examine the pruned indents and corn-maze pathways.

Trauma is a parasite that laughs in the corner as its host sits bloodletting on a bathroom floor: a practice performed in order to exorcise the sick out from where it festers, semi-dormant under the skin. For me, bloodletting held the goal of a kind of exorcism, a promise that if I continued to do it, I would spill the trauma and the remembering out. In hospital stays, I had the privilege of a staff member wedging their foot in between my door and the hallway to dogwatch my every move, but with kindness. Some nights, I’d talk quietly to them—about how my day was, how theirs was, what their favorite book was. And some nights, I didn’t talk at all. I curled over onto my side and thought of razor blades and serrated knives, how smoothly they could glide over your outstretched skin like scissors on wrapping paper; water over a river stone. I thought of that split second before the blood poured out: how your body prepared for an opening, savored that last moment before it became scarred.

I had always carried with me the notion that when what happened to me happened, I died some sort of death; that my body was disposed of improperly. That I have been either passing through the world as a memory, or that I have been carrying my young ghost on my back, uphill, unable to set her down. Traumatic stress continues to be so commonly associated with war, yet this is a war of its own—a war between living and dying, or dying again, a war between remembering and forgetting. The saying goes that only the dead have seen the end of war. Yet if only the dead have seen the end of war, I wonder if I am alive after all.

I look back at the desktop. The episode has ended and the screen is black, mirroring the blank, glassy expression of my face. The episode has ended, but I still see that little girl. In trauma, when the loss is your own self and existence, the fifth stage of grief is the remainder of your life. The act of mourning stains everything you do.

#trauma blogging #traumablogging #actuallytraumatized #actuallyptsd

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hopeful-hugz · 5 months

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@strawberry-barista || Moved

The "aetherling" bites down on her bottom lip, gauging the angel's reaction. That therapy had evidently been doing him some good; he was learning outside of it too. That made her all the more... what was the word...?

Fear? Was this fear?

"I don't think that's a good idea." Any tone of emotion is dropped. Might as well just rip off the bandaid, right? Shut it all down and hope for the life of her she wasn't immediately destroyed (Killed? Could she even die?) on the spot. "You'll most likely want me to leave after what I have to say."

Another pause. Another moment of hesitation. This was so much more difficult now that she had become attached over time...

The disguise relinquishes, she still looks like Hope. Only now, there's no color to her. Her skin, hair, even dead eyes are some form of black, white or grey. Her skin is sewn in patches, as if she was a corpse trying to make herself seem more alive. "I'm the creation of a Nagete-Aether hybrid, a pawn in his petty games. He had me take her place and locked her out... for what reason I don't know."

Her rotted tail curls around her legs, body language completely different than the dead stare and expression that watched Hanekoma with. Not unlike a prey animal waiting to see if it needed to run.

"She's safe; I just checked on where she is currently, this morning. He hasn't laid a hand on her." Not this time at least. "I plan to get her access back while my creator's focus is shifted. I'm not supposed to, but... You and your children are so... Nice. You deserve to have the original back and not just some rotting mimic. Never deserved to lose her in the first place, let alone without even being aware of it."

She wants to run, but her tail only wraps tighter around her legs. She knows she can't run if she wants to make this right, no matter what instinct screams at her. "I know it doesn't make up for time lost, but it's all I can do at the moment."

#strawberry-barista #Moving The Story Along || Plot #Object in the Mirror || Amygdala #body horror tw #I suppose we'll see what version of Coffee Dad this brings out :)

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your-volume-is-too-low-gan · 6 years

Text

Journals

Pairing: Platonic LAMP, Romantic Prinxiety

Warnings: Minor physical violence, angst, kissing, Virgil being the self-deprecating bean that he is, Roman being a sad bean

Summary: Patton gives each of the others a journal to help with their emotions, self esteem, etc. However, it didn’t go according to plan. In the beginning.

A/N: this was co-written with @ipaniceverywherenotjustthedisco , so were just going to tag her taglists here.

General Taglist: @lightningbug04

Prinxiety Taglist: @sandersmarvel

Let Tor know if you want to be added to her Taglist, or let me low if you want to be on mine! :)

And without further adoooooo..........

VIRGIL POV

Dear Dumb-Journal-thing-that-is-definitely-not-a-diary-that-Patton-said-would-help-me-get-my-feelings-out,

Patton said to keep a journal. So. here I am. This is definitely not a diary. Right? Whatever. So today Roman and I were fighting, as always. I just wish we could get along. Sometimes I forget why I even bother, why I even try, why I even like him. He can be such a jerk sometimes. You know, when he isn’t being his sweet, happy, bright self. Ugh. Maybe if I was more like the others he’d like me. But I’m not. I’m, in Roman’s own words, a giant thorn in their side. I’m the one they don’t want. The one they wish would go away. The bad-guy. Always the bad guy. But I really don’t want to be. I’m like Wreck-It-Ralph. See, I love Disney too! Even though most Disney movies are secretly really dark and stuff. Oh my God. Why am I like this?

ROMAN POV

So one day I decided, you know what, i’m gonna get revenge. Revenge on who, you ask? The evil, bitter… Virgil. He has been acting really strange lately, ever since Patton gave him that notebook. So, I’m gonna sneak into his room. And I’m gonna read his journal.

Virgil POV

Oh no. Oh no no no no. I’m stressing so bad right now. I just saw Roman go into my room. And i know exactly what he is looking for.

Roman POV

When Virgil came in, I had already read his entry. It was too late.

V- “I, I can explain… Patton gave me...I...you...dont…”

R- “Virgil… I didn’t know you felt that way…”

V- “Well, do you? Like, like me, I mean.”

R- “Anxiety, i’m so sorry…”

Roman POV

Then I just walked away. I really didn’t want to break his heart.

VIRGIL POV

Dear Stupid Journal thing or whatever,

I don’t know what to do or what to think. He doesn’t like me. When he walked out of the room, I just stood there. Too stunned to move. Or to think. I walked to the corner of my room and slid to the floor. How could I have been so stupid? I’m such an idiot. I cried. And cried. I cried until I ran out of tears, and then a little more. That was yesterday. I still haven’t left my room. I’m hungry, but I’m not going to risk going to the kitchen and running into Roman. I can’t handle that. Since yesterday, Logan and Patton have both tried to cheer me up. But it’s a lost cause. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live a life without Roman. He’s the only thing that makes me feel at ease. I wish I had just burned this stupid journal as soon as Patton gave it to me.

PATTON POV

Ever since I gave Virgil the journal, I have to admit, he has been acting differently. But yesterday, someone put some sadness in his soup, and now he is upset. Roman has also been keeping to himself lately., so I gave him a journal of his own. I was only trying to help…

LOGAN POV

Neither Virgil or Roman have shown their faces in a while. I suspect it has to do something with icky human emotions. Patton gave Virgil a diary to help him with his amygdala. This is the part of your brain which controls the intensity of one’s emotions. Patton offered one to me but I, however, am not in need of a log, since I have no time for emotions. Speaking of time, did you know that The theory of relativity suggests that before the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, space and time did not exist and matter was packed together in a tiny ball. Since time is measured by motion in space, there was no time without moving cosmos. Totally didn’t just look that up on the Web. Also, was that the correct usage of “totally”?

Virgil POV

I visited Patton’s room today. I guess I thought it would bring me happiness, or whatever. But it did the opposite. The second I saw Roman, I hid behind a giant stuffed unicorn, which was the nearest object to me. I peeked my eye out and saw that Patton was giving Roman a journal. Wow, everyone is turning on me now. Even Patton has given up on me. They argued for a bit, then I heard a slam. Once they both left, I ran out of the room and quickly slammed my door.

Roman POV

So what, I got mad at Patton. I didn’t need that stupid journal. I could “deal with my feelings” in another way. Father doesn’t always know best. Well, I mean maybe I could try the stupid journal. Maybe. No, who am I kidding. That journal will never help me. That’s it then, it’s decided. I will never use the stupid diary. Virgil was dumb enough to do it, and look at him now. Idiot.

Virgil POV

Dear Stupid Notebook

Another day of crying. I’m such a crybaby. I can’t help it. I guess I’ve kind of had all of my feelings all locked up in a closet, and in the past few days, I guess that they’ve all came out.

Patton POV

Dear Amazing Journal😼😁😊😘😍🙌

I went into Virgil’s room to check on my poor little guy. He was still curled up in the corner.

“C’mon Virg,” I said. “You’ve got to eat buddy. This isn’t healthy. I handed him a plate of food and a glass of water. He didn’t budge. I left, stealing one last glance at him. My poor little ball of darkness.😢

Roman POV

I don’t know why. I walked by Virgil’s room today. He was sitting there crying. Today was a shooting day for a sanders sides video, so I probably walked by to see if he wanted to join. I just don’t know. I felt like it wasn’t me who saw Virgil today. It was a different me. Maybe it was the me who I want to be. Or something. I don’t even know. This is stupid. I’m stupid. That’s why I went back to Patton’s room.

Virgil POV

Dear Stupid Journal

I finally left my room today. I got up from the corner and looked at the hideous disaster in the mirror. Maybe if I wasn’t so ugly Roman would like me. UGH, I have to stop with these kind of thoughts. I’m done with this. I need to eat. I need to get over myself. I looked at the moldy sandwich Patton brought me yesterday. Yeah, um, no. I’d have to leave my room to get something to eat.

I was on my way to go down and I passed Roman’s room. I walked a few steps then I went back. Am I seeing things? There is a tattered up journal lying on the bed. It couldn’t be. I know I’m supposed to be over this, but I kinda want to read it. No, Virgil, you can’t let yourself down like this. But there’s just a little tiny angel voice on my shoulder that told me, “do it.” that voice kept on getting louder and louder, and it surged through my whole body. I can’t, I told the voice. I looked down at my hands. “Who am I? What do I really want?”

Roman POV

“NO!” I screamed. I ran into my room. Virgil was sitting on the bed, a tattered up journal in his hands. I tackled him to the floor and ripped the book out of his hands. I rolled off of him and stood up.

“Go away!” I yelled. He just sat there, smirking. “I said go away!”

V- “You like me.”

R- “THAT IS NOT TRUE. PATTON JUST TOLD ME TO-”

Roman POV

He smiled. An actual smile. Like, with teeth and everything. The only other time I see his teeth is when he hisses at Logan.

V- “You’re blushing, Roman.”

R- “AM NOT!”

V- “I knew it. You love me.”

Roman POV

“No, I don’t! I told you to just go away!” I flopped down onto the bed. “I would never love you Anxiety! Why would I? All you do is sit there and make snarky comments under your breath! You’re a monster! One of the dark sides! Nobody likes you, or ever will. Because you, you are the bad guy.” Shooooot. Definitely should have internalized that one.

Virgil POV

I started to cry again. But no, I knew that he did love me. He did, right? Right?! I will not give up.

V- “If you don’t love me, prove it. Hit me.”

R- “I’m sorry, what?”

V- “I said, HIT. ME. Slap me. Or are you too soft!”

R- I just wanted to prove I didn’t love him. So, I did. I hit him. Then I ran as fast I could. I ran to the lounge of the Mind. I sat down on the rug and I realized. Maybe, just maybe, I do love him. I do. I love him. And I made a mistake. I started crying, sobbing, punching myself, screaming, not caring who heard. Then, an angry Virgil with a red mark on his face came into the room and saw me crying. I looked away from him. He stormed over and pulled me off the ground by my sash.

V- “Just admit it,” I said. “You love me.”

Roman POV

And now I know. I do love him.

“I do love you.”

And with his hand still gripping my sash, we both leaned in, and our lips met.

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leebird-simmer · 3 years

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Psychology Test Prep, Illustrated

{Chapter 3, Part 2}

The medulla is an extension of the spinal cord into the skull that coordinates heart rate, circulation and respiration. Beginning inside the medulla and extending upward is a small cluster of neurons called the reticular formation, which regulates sleep, wakefulness, and levels of arousal.

Behind the medulla is the cerebellum, a large structure of the hindbrain that controls fine motor skills.

The last major area of the hindbrain is the pons, a structure that relays information from the cerebellum to the rest of the brain.

The tectum orients an organism in the environment; the tegmentum is involved in movement and arousal.

The cerebral cortex is the outermost layer of the brain, visible to the naked eye, and divided into two hemispheres.

The subcortical structures are areas of the forebrain housed under the cerebral cortex near the center of the brain. They include the:

1. Thalamus: relays & filters information from the senses, transmits information to the cerebral cortex.

2. Hypothalamus: regulates body temperature, hunger, thirst, and sexual behavior. Part of the limbic system (along w/ the hippocampus & the amygdala).

3. Hippocampus: critical for creating new memories and integrating them into a network of knowledge so they can be stored indefinitely in other parts of the cerebral cortex. Part of the limbic system (along w/ the hypothalamus & the amygdala).

4. Amygdala: plays a central role in many emotional processes, particularly the formation of emotional memories. Part of the limbic system (along w/ the hypothalamus & hippocampus).

5. Basal ganglia: a set of subcortical structures that directs intentional movements.

Other parts of the forebrain include the: 6. Corpus callosum: connects large areas of the cerebral cortex on each side of the brain and supports communication of information across the hemispheres.

7. Pituitary gland: manages the body’s overall hormone production; sends hormonal signals to other glands in the endocrine system.

The endocrine system is a network of glands that produce and secrete into the bloodstream chemical messages known as hormones, which influence a wide variety of basic functions, including metabolism, growth, and sexual development. Some of the main glands in the endocrine system include the thyroid, which regulates bodily functions such as body temperature and heart rate; the adrenals, which regulate stress responses; the pancreas, which controls digestion; and the pineal, which secretes melatonin, influencing the sleep/wake cycle.

A. The occipital lobe processes visual information. It contains the primary visual areas.

B. The parietal lobe carries out functions that include processing information about touch. The parietal lobe contains the somatosensory cortex.

C. The temporal lobe is responsible for hearing and language. The temporal lobe contains the primary auditory cortex.

D. The frontal lobe has specialized areas for movement, abstract thinking, planning, memory, and judgment. The frontal lobe contains the motor cortex.

Association areas are composed of neurons that help categorize & make sense of information registered in the cortex. Neurons in the association areas are usually less specialized and more flexible than neurons in the primary areas. They can be shaped by training & experience to do their job more effectively.

Mirror neurons are active when an animal performs a behavior, such as reaching for or using an object, and are also activated when another animal observes that animal performing the same behavior.

A gene is the major unit of hereditary transmission. Genes have been defined as sections on a strand of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that code for the protein molecules that affect traits.

Genes are organized into large threads called chromosomes, strands of DNA wound around each other in a double-helix configuration.

Epigenetics is the study of environmental influences that determine whether or not genes are expressed, or the degree to which they are expressed, without altering the basic DNA sequences that constitute the genes themselves. The environment can influence gene expression through epigenetic marks, chemical modifications to DNA that can turn genes on or off. There are two widely studied epigenetic marks:

A. DNA methylation: There are special enzymes, referred to as epigenetic writers, whose role is to add methyl groups to DNA. Although adding a methyl group doesn’t alter the basic DNA sequence, it switches off the methylated gene.

B. Histone modification involves adding chemical modifications to proteins called histones that are involved in packaging DNA. We tend to visualize DNA as a free-floating double helix, but it’s actually tightly wrapped around groups of histone proteins. Whereas DNA methylation switches genes off, histone modification can switch genes off *or* turn them on. But just like DNA methylation, histone modifications influence gene expression without altering the underlying DNA sequence.

DNA methylation studies with rats provided the foundation for more recent studies with humans showing a role for epigenetics in the persisting effects of childhood abuse on adult men. Related studies suggest that the effects of early experience are not restricted to a single gene, but occur more broadly.

Heritability is a measure of the variability of behavioral traits among individuals that can be accounted for by genetic factors. Heritability is calculated as a proportion, and its numerical value (index) ranges from 0 (no genetic contribution to individual differences in the behavioral trait) to 1.00 (genes are the ONLY reason for individual differences).

Scores of 0 and 1.00 are theoretical limits rather than realistic values; almost nothing in human behavior is completely genetic OR completely environmental. For human behavior, almost all estimates of heritability are in the moderate range, between .30 and .60.

Heritability has proven to be a theoretically useful and statistically sound concept in helping scientists understand the relative genetic & environmental influences on behavior. However, there are four important points about heritability to bear in mind:

1. Heritability is an abstract concept. It tells us nothing about the *specific* genes that contribute to a trait.

2. Heritability is a population concept. It provides guidance for understanding differences across individuals in a population, rather than abilities within an individual.

3. Heritability is dependent on the environment. Just as behavior occurs within certain contexts, so do genetic influences. For example, “intelligence” isn’t some fixed, objective quality. People are intelligent within a particular learning environment, a specific social setting, a family environment, a socioeconomic class, and so on. Heritability, therefore, is meaningful only for the environmental conditions in which it was computed. Heritability estimates may change dramatically under other environmental conditions.

4. Heritability is not fate. It tells us nothing about the degree to which interventions can change a behavioral trait. Heritability is useful for identifying behavioral traits that are influenced by genes, but it is not useful for determining how individuals will respond to particular environmental conditions or treatments. CW/TW: gore, traumatic brain injury

Before his accident, Phineas Gage (1823-1860) had been a mild-mannered himbo, a handsome hard-working man of the rails. But on September 13, 1848, Phineas was in Cavendish, Vermont, packing an explosive charge into a rock crevice, when the powder exploded, driving a 3 foot 13 pound iron rod through his head at high speed. As you can see, the rod entered through his lower left jaw and exited through the middle top of his head.

Incredibly, 25-year-old Phineas lived. But the destruction of his frontal lobe made him irritable, indecisive, irresponsible...not like his old self at all. His case study was the first to allow researchers to investigate the hypothesis that the frontal lobe is involved in emotion regulation, planning, and decision making. Furthermore, because the connections between his frontal lobe and the subcortical structures of his limbic system were affected, scientists were able to better understand how the amygdala, hippocampus, and related brain structures interacted with the cerebral cortex.

I just wanna take a moment to put some respect on Phineas Gage’s name. Frequently in the annals of psychology, we just hear the doctor’s story; the patient is nameless, faceless. Phineas became the exception because his accident was so grisly. It seems almost impossible for him to have survived. He became a medical curiosity, a sort of sideshow...but he deserves better than that. Let’s talk about the rest of his life:

1. Phineas was the eldest of five children. We don’t know much about his early life, other than he was literate. 2. He is known to have worked on construction of the Hudson River Railroad (near Cortlandt Town, New York) and by the time of his accident, he was a blasting foreman. He was known to be a “great favorite” among his men. 3. He probably survived because he had a blacksmith make a custom tamping iron for him, without the usual bend or “claw.” 4. When the doctor came to inspect his wound, Phineas joked with him, and was explaining to passerby/bystanders at his hotel what had happened. This was while he had a visibly pulsing brain and was vomiting blood. 5. It took him about 10 weeks (November 25) to recover sufficiently from this injury so he could return to his parents’ house in New Hampshire. 6. By late 1849, he felt well enough to work as the owner of a stable & coach service in Hanover, New Hampshire. 7. In August 1852, Phineas was invited to Chile to work as a long-distance stagecoach driver on the Valparaiso-Santiago route. This seems to have helped him recover to a noticeable degree, as it provided both structure/routine and an opportunity to socialize with a wide variety of passengers. A day’s work for him would have been a 13-hour journey over 100 miles of poor roads, often in times of political instability or outright revolution, and all this in a land whose language & customs were foreign to him. 8. He did this job for seven years, until his health began to fail mid-1859. At that time, he left Chile for San Francisco and recovered under the care of his mother and sister, who had relocated there around the time he left for Chile. 9. “Anxious to work,” he found employment with a farmer in Santa Clara, but in February 1860, he began to have epileptic seizures, and lost his job. As the seizures increased in frequency and severity he "continued to work in various places [though he] could not do much". 10. On May 18, 1860, Gage "left Santa Clara and went home to his mother. At 5 o'clock, A.M., on the 20th, he had a severe convulsion. The family physician was called in, and bled him. The convulsions were repeated frequently during the succeeding day and night.” He died during a seizure, in or near San Francisco, late on May 21, 1860. He was buried in San Francisco's Lone Mountain Cemetery.

The portrait that emerges is that of a young man with indestructible pride, a man determined to support himself, even if it killed him, which it probably did. He deserves a better reputation than he’s been given.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Computerized axial tomography (CT) scan

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a type of MRI used to visualize white matter pathways, which are fiber bundles that connect both nearby and distant brain regions to each other. DTI measures the rate and direction of diffusion or movement of water molecules, which reveal where a white matter pathway goes. Scientists can use measures based on the rate and direction of diffusion to assess the integrity of a white matter pathway, which is very useful in cases of neurological & psychological disorders.

Because DTI provides information about pathways that connect brain areas to one another, it’s a critical tool in mapping the connectivity of the human brain and it plays a central role in an ambitious undertaking known as the Human Connectome Project. - This is a collaborative effort funded by the National Institutes of Health that began in 2009 and involves a partnership between researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital & UCLA, as well as another partnership between researchers at Washington University & the University of Minnesota. - The main goal of the project is to provide a complete map of the connectivity of neural pathways in the brain: the human connectome. - The researchers have made some of their results publicly available on their website (www.humanconnectomeproject.org), where you can find more of these beautiful color images of some of the connection pathways they’ve discovered.

Positron emission tomography (PET)

1. A harmless radioactive substance is injected into a person’s bloodstream. 2. The brain is then scanned by radiation detectors as the person performs perceptual or cognitive tasks, such as reading or speaking. 3. Areas of the brain that are activated during these tasks demand more energy and greater blood flow, resulting in a higher amount of radioactivity in that region. 4. The radiation detectors record the level of radioactivity in each region, producing a computerized image of the activated areas.

Note that PET scans differ from CT scans and MRIs in that the image produced shows activity in the brain while the person performs certain tasks.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

- detects the difference between oxygenated hemoglobin and de-oxygenated hemoglobin when exposed to magnetic pulses. - Hemoglobin is the molecule in the blood that carries oxygen to our tissues, including the brain. When active neurons demand more energy and blood flow, oxygenated hemoglobin concentrates in the active areas; fMRI detects the oxygenated hemoglobin and provides a picture of the level of activation in each brain area. - fMRI can also be used to explore the relationship of brain regions with each other, using a technique referred to as “resting state functional connectivity”. As implied by the name, this technique does not require participants to perform a task; they simply rest quietly while fMRI measurements are made. - Functional connectivity measures the extent to which spontaneous activity in different brain regions is correlated over time; brain regions whose activity is highly correlated are thought to be functionally connected with each other. - Functional connectivity measures have been used extensively in recent years to identify brain networks. For example, functional connectivity helped to identify the default mode network (DMN), a group of interconnected regions in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes that is involved in internally-focused cognitive activities, such as remembering past events, imagining future events, daydreaming, and mind-wandering. - Functional connectivity, along with DTI (which measures structural connectivity), is used in studies conducted by the Human Connectome Project. It also has potentially important applications because researchers believe that advances in understanding brain connectivity can enhance our ability to predict & characterize the clinical course of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

#study blog #my notes #psychology

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ojaswini · 7 years

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Fear It’s dark outside,you’re at your home alone, watching TV show you like on a quiet day and suddenly you hear a voice ,your main door is slammed against the door ,you think who could it be when you’re the only one home so you look around, get alert in some cases collect yourself, call for the roommate if he’s back ,go to the gate and find out it was mere wind. The feeling you had right when you kept a pan or baseball bat with you is said to be FEAR. What is Fear? Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that cause a racing heart, fast breathing and energized muscles, among other things, also known as the fight-or-flight response. The stimulus could be a spider, a knife at your throat, an auditorium full of people waiting for you to speak or the sudden thud of your front door against the door frame. The brain is a profoundly complex organ. More than 100 billion nerve cells comprise an intricate network of communications that is the starting point of everything we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action, while others produce autonomic responses. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: We don't consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course. Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear. But research has discovered that certain parts of the brain play central roles in the process: Thalamus - decides where to send incoming sensory data (from eyes, ears, mouth, skin) Sensory cortex - interprets sensory data Hippocampus - stores and retrieves conscious memories; processes sets of stimuli to establish context Amygdala - decodes emotions; determines possible threat; stores fear memories Hypothalamus - activates "fight or flight" response Top 100 Phobia List These are the top 100 phobias in the world, with the most common ones listed from the top,names suggesting what they’re about. Arachnophobia – The fear of spiders affects women four times more (48% women and 12% men). Ophidiophobia – The fear of snakes. Phobics avoid certain cities because they have more snakes. Acrophobia – The fear of heights. Five percent of the general population suffer from this phobia. Agoraphobia – The fear of open or crowded spaces. People with this fear often won’t leave home. Cynophobia – The fear of dogs. This includes everything from small Poodles to large Great Danes. Astraphobia – The fear of thunder/lightning AKA Brontophobia, Tonitrophobia, Ceraunophobia. Claustrophobia – The fear of small spaces like elevators, small rooms and other enclosed spaces. Mysophobia – The fear of germs. It is also rightly termed as Germophobia or Bacterophobia. Aerophobia – The fear of flying. 25 million Americans share a fear of flying. Trypophobia – The fear of holes is an unusual but pretty common phobia. Carcinophobia – The fear of cancer. People with this develop extreme diets. Thanatophobia – The fear of death. Even talking about death can be hard. Glossophobia – The fear of public speaking. Not being able to do speeches. Monophobia – The fear of being alone. Even while eating and/or sleeping. Atychiphobia – The fear of failure. It is the single greatest barrier to success. Ornithophobia – The fear of birds. Individuals suffering from this may only fear certain species. Alektorophobia – The fear of chickens. You may have this phobia if chickens make you panic. Enochlophobia – The fear of crowds is closely related to Ochlophobia and Demophobia. Aphenphosmphobia – The fear of intimacy. Fear of being touched and love. Trypanophobia – The fear of needles. I used to fear needles (that and death). Anthropophobia – The fear of people. Being afraid of people in all situations. Aquaphobia – The fear of water. Being afraid of water or being near water. Autophobia – The fear of abandonment and being abandoned by someone. Hemophobia – The fear of blood. Even the sight of blood can cause fainting. Gamophobia – The fear of commitment or sticking with someone to the end. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – The fear of long words. Believe it or not, it’s real. Xenophobia – The fear of the unknown. Fearing anything or anyone that is strange or foreign. Vehophobia – The fear of driving. This phobia affects personal and work life. Basiphobia – The fear of falling. Some may even refuse to walk or stand up. Achievemephobia – The fear of success. The opposite to the fear of failure. Theophobia – The fear of God causes an irrational fear of God or religion. Ailurophobia – The fear of cats. This phobia is also known as Gatophobia. Metathesiophobia – The fear of change. Sometimes change is a good thing. Globophobia – The fear of balloons. They should be fun, but not for phobics. Nyctophobia – The fear of darkness. Being afraid of the dark or the night is common for kids. Androphobia – The fear of men. Usually seen in younger females, but it can also affect adults. Phobophobia – The fear of fear. The thought of being afraid of objects/situations. Philophobia – The fear of love. Being scared of falling in love or emotions. Triskaidekaphobia – The fear of the number 13 or the bad luck that follows. Emetophobia – The fear of vomiting and the fear of loss of your self control. Gephyrophobia – The fear of bridges and crossing even the smallest bridge. Entomophobia – The fear of bugs and insects, also related to Acarophobia. Lepidopterophobia – The fear of butterflies and often most winged insects. Panophobia – The fear of everything or fear that terrible things will happen. Podophobia – The fear of feet. Some people fear touching or looking at feet, even their own. Paraskevidekatriaphobia – The fear of Friday the 13th. About 8% of Americans have this phobia. Somniphobia – The fear of sleep. Being terrified of what might happen right after you fall asleep. Gynophobia – The fear of women. May occur if you have unresolved mother issues. Apiphobia – The fear of bees. Many people fear being stung by angry bees. Koumpounophobia – The fear of buttons. Clothes with buttons are avoided. Anatidaephobia – The fear of ducks. Somewhere, a duck is watching you. Pyrophobia – The fear of fire. A natural/primal fear that can be debilitating. Ranidaphobia – The fear of frogs. Often caused by episodes from childhood. Galeophobia – The fear of sharks in the ocean or even in swimming pools. Athazagoraphobia – The fear of being forgotten or not remembering things. Katsaridaphobia – The fear of cockroaches. This can easily lead to an excessive cleaning disorder. Iatrophobia – The fear of doctors. Do you delay doctor visits? You may have this. Pediophobia – The fear of dolls. This phobia could well be Chucky-induced. Ichthyophobia – The fear of fish. Includes small, large, dead and living fish. Achondroplasiaphobia – The fear of midgets. Because they look differently. Mottephobia – The fear of moths. These insects are only beautiful to some. Zoophobia – The fear of animals. Applies to both vile and harmless animals. Bananaphobia – The fear of bananas. If you have this phobia, they are scary. Sidonglobophobia – The fear of cotton balls or plastic foams. Oh that sound. Scelerophobia – The fear of crime involves being afraid of burglars, attackers or crime in general. Cibophobia – The fear of food. The phobia may come from a bad episode while eating, like choking. Phasmophobia – The fear of ghosts. AKA Spectrophobia. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! Equinophobia – The fear of horses. Animal phobias are pretty common, especially for women. Musophobia – The fear of mice. Some people find mice cute, but phobics don’t. Catoptrophobia – The fear of mirrors. Being afraid of what you might see. Agliophobia – The fear of pain. Being afraid something painful will happen. Tokophobia – The fear of pregnancy involves giving birth or having children. Telephonophobia – The fear of talking on the phone. Phobics prefer texting. Pogonophobia – The fear of beards or being scared of/around bearded men. Omphalophobia – The fear of belly buttons. Touching and looking at navels. Pseudodysphagia – The fear of choking often after a bad eating experience. Bathophobia – The fear of depths can be anything associated with depth (lakes, tunnels, caves). Cacomorphobia – The fear of fat people. Induced by the media. Affects some anorexics/bulimics. Gerascophobia – The fear of getting old. Aging is the most natural thing, yet many of us fear it. Chaetophobia – The fear of hair. Phobics tend to be afraid of other peoples hair. Nosocomephobia – The fear of hospitals. Let’s face it, no one likes hospitals. Ligyrophobia – The fear of loud noises. More than the instinctive noise fear. Didaskaleinophobia – The fear of school. This phobia affects kids mostly. Technophobia – The fear of technology is often induced by culture/religion. Chronophobia – The fear of the future. A persistent fear of what is to come. Spheksophobia – The fear of wasps. You panic and fear getting stung by it. Ergophobia – The fear of work. Often due to social or performance anxiety. Coulrophobia – The fear of clowns. Some people find clowns funny, coulrophobics certainly don’t. Allodoxaphobia – The fear of opinions. Being afraid of hearing what others are thinking of you. Samhainophobia – The fear of Halloween affects children/superstitious people. Photophobia – The fear of light caused by something medical or traumatic. Disposophobia – The fear of getting rid of stuff triggers extreme hoarding. Numerophobia – The fear of numbers and the mere thought of calculations. Ombrophobia – The fear of rain. Many fear the rain due to stormy weather. Coasterphobia – The fear of roller coasters. Ever seen Final Destination 3? Thalassophobia – The fear of the ocean. Water, waves and unknown spaces. Scoleciphobia – The fear of worms. Often because of unhygienic conditions. Kinemortophobia – The fear of zombies. Being afraid that zombies attack and turn you into them. Myrmecophobia – The fear of ants. Not as common as Arachnophobia, but may feel just as intense. Taphophobia – The fear of being buried alive by mistake and waking up in a coffin underground.