Tuesday Tidbit – Week 16: The Conscious Self & Free Will

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It’s the end of Week Six. I’m waiting for the ethics forms for my dissertation, I’m officially inducting people into the role I begun in January and I’m now carrying out work as a Mental Health Support Worker once a week.

This week, Sensory and Motor Functions covered Blindsight; which was pretty much too complicated for me to understand, let alone explain. In Neuroscience of Consciousness we discussed the “self” and “free will”.

I passed my neuro-anatomy exam with a first: 72% (highest mark of the whole course) and I wish it had been worth a lot of the degree (it was worth 2.7% of the degree). I also posted a rather reflective blog about last week’s placement at the hospital which I feel is important to share.

 

So, here goes for today’s top ten facts, with a little discussion question at the end:

-          There are 50 billion neurons, which each talk to 2000 others, in our brain.

-          There’s a theory that we all have phantom limbs… it’s just that ours correspond with our real limbs.

-          If one person is asked to memorise 4 numbers and another person memorise 8; if both are offered either chocolate cake or fruit salad, the one with 8 will go for cake because the executive mind is too busy remembering numbers to go “wait, we’re on a diet, it’s bad for you” to override the body (which according to our lecturer says CAKE CAKE CAKE all the time).

-          I’m going to remember that excuse for the next time I eat junk food. :P

-          The one with 4 numbers has enough room to remember fruit salad is better for you and almost exclusively went for the healthy option.

-          If a rubber hand is placed in front of you, and your actual hand hidden behind a screen, and both are touched; you sense the fake hand as your own.

-          When you feel the fake hand is your own; your actual hand’s temperature drops!

-          And if you make the real hand colder, you’re more likely to think the rubber hand is yours. Even if the rubber hand is a foot away from your actual one.

-          Although animals are generally considered to have consciousness, they are not thought to have a “narrative self”, so to have a sense of storyline. “I did this, now I’m doing this, then I’ll do that” as it were.

-          Our brains begin to fire for an action before we have consciously chosen to make it, so before we’ve used our “free will” to decide…

 

Discussion

In light of that final point, I have a question for you.

A lot of scientists have issues with the brain choosing something before ‘we’, as a “conscious self” have chosen to act.

In my view, if it’s MY brain making the choice, it’s MY will; just as my subconscious drives me home on an automated route, it’s still ME driving.

However, I really want to understand what the other views are.

Do you believe in free will as an experience?
Ignoring all religious context right now, in being told that your brain fired to move your arm before you decided to reach for your drink; does that count as “not being free will” to you?

 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and have a good week.

– Rose –

Breaking Through The Silence

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Content Warning: Some emotive language and negative situations are included within this post.

 

Last week I began writing a post about my “Plan Z” – the worst case scenario for being jobless, homeless and moneyless. I talked about my conflicting dream jobs, my lack of direction and the many options I’d enjoy but wouldn’t necessarily support me. I may still even post it. But this week, something happened which stopped me finishing it.

On Wednesday I found out about a suicide attempt. And my worries about which jobs to apply for just… got slammed into perspective.


Perspective’s a Long Road

I’ve been on a Suicide First Aid course. I’ve been exposed to mental health and suicidal people for nearly a decade now. I’m very comfortable discussing it.

I had never met someone, only to find out that they attempted within a couple of hours of my leaving them.
   

And it had never sunk in that I’m working in mental health now, where I’m going to be more exposed to this than normal.
  

I found myself revising for today’s exam (which I thankfully passed), wondering what I was doing in this job, in this degree. Why did I apply for a Doctorate course? Why am I planning a future at least vaguely around Mental Health? Why do I have three jobs in mental health? Why am I doing this to myself? Can I handle it? Can I physically and emotionally manage this?

I’ve brought friends back from the edge of attempting suicide.

I lost one person who told me at the time it wasn’t negotiable. Told me I wouldn’t/couldn’t change their mind.

I’ve never talked to someone and then had them attempt immediately after; once they’ve appeared to accept help. To have asked for and accepted help. To then attempt anyway.
There’s still this sense of Can’t. Fathom.

I sat on that bus home with a consistent three sentence mantra whirling. “I’m going to be sick. I can’t breathe. What didn’t I do?”


Judgement versus Reflection

It’s important to discuss this difference.


I do not feel responsible.

It was not my fault.

I could not have foreseen this.

I could not have helped her.

 

My colleague and I did what we were trained to do.
Yet, there’s that space of reflection. 


Were there signs I could take note of next time?

Do I know the procedure for reporting to the nurse’s station?”

Do I know the difference between expressing suicidal feelings and having a suicide plan?

 

And of course if she did it, she was going to do it anyway. It was her choice and would it really have helped to stop her that day only to have her suffer for another 3 or 24 or 48 hours and try again?


We are not responsible for her actions.

 


My Emotions:

Anger.

This is the side of mental health often ignored; kept quiet. Why do we not talk about this?! Why is it such taboo in society?! Why can’t we express ourselves? Why are mental health patients labelled and thus ignored? Why the hell am I taught to ignore anyone’s statement of “having suicidal feelings”, but report about anyone “with plans”?  Prioritise them, sure, but not out-rightly ignore it (though I do understand the need for confidentially, I still think in some cases it shouldn’t be as black and white as it is).

Then, the anger and injustice at the nurses, if they did act as I’ve been told (it’s all hearsay, so I can’t trust it to be accurate, but I’ve heard similar reports in many places). If you want to say how annoying it is someone chose that time to commit suicide, seriously, take it to the staff room. Don’t say it in front of the other patients. If you must, word it as “Oh, I’m going to miss X’s appointment” or “I have to postpone Y; this worries me”.


Sadness.

I’m here to help people. It’s sad that I couldn’t help this person.


Worry about the Future.

If she survives, I’ll see her again. How will I cope with that? How will I treat her? How will I deal with the next one?


Concern.

They take away as many dangerous items as possible from them… How did she have something to do it with? Will I see this a lot more?


Uncertainty.

Of myself in this role. Of myself in any role.

Of the way society deals with it.

A friend on the ward told V and she told me during supervision. It’s being kept quiet by the staff and my manager (though we’re not exactly forbidden to talk about it), I guess because it’s not strictly relevant for everyone to know. She’s in intensive care and we should respect her privacy.

Yet, I’m glad I was told. And I don’t know how I’d feel if I hadn’t been told. If I’d found out in 6 months time. I think I’d feel betrayed, though I’m not fully sure why.

V and I have learnt from it. It’s given me a lot to think about in terms of my future, my plans and my experiences.


And then I had some un-label-able emotions.

I needed to tell someone, and my OH wasn’t picking up his phone. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I needed to say “I’m struggling right now. I need a hug. I need someone to know what I’m experiencing.”


Thank you to Ellie on twitter for sending me hugs and not asking what was up. Big thanks to my best friends Josh and Kami for letting me cry and talk when I needed to.

Sometimes we need to break through the silence, and speak out.


Sometimes I wonder who put this box of silence around suicide, and wonder how much harm it’s doing to those inside.


– Rose –

P.S. This song came on during writing this, and I just felt it went with this post.

Visit http://youtu.be/MUfgAbFY4CA or see below.

 

Tuesday Tidbit – Week 15: The Half-Way Point

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It’s Week Five of the Ten-week Term. University is officially half over (being week 15 of 30 overall ).

This week, Sensory and Motor Functions covered Visual Perception; while in Neuroscience of Consciousness we were taught about the Neuronal Changes of Sense.

This weekend I also spent a few hours revising for my Neuroanatomy exam, and if you want some friendly resource, here are the two main places I’ve been using:

Neuroscience for Kids – http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/introb.html

Genes to Cognition – http://www.g2conline.org/, particularly the 3D brain option.

 

Anyway, here’s the week’s main lecture points:

-          3D glasses make one eye see one image and the other eye see a different image. Each image is polarised differently, and has the opposing polarisation on the selected eye’s glasses view.

-          The act of binocular fusion then merges these two images to give you a coherent image; much like your nose does block out a section of what you can see right now… the hidden bit from one eye is fused with the sight of the other.

-          There is a specific area of the brain that purely processes faces. This is relatively well-known.

-          However, did you know there’s also a dedicated brain area for processing Houses? I didn’t.

-          If you ever touch a mirror and your finger’s reflection is slightly displaced; it’s a half-silvered mirror and someone is watching you from the other side. I suggest dancing wildly if you find yourself in this situation.

-          If you paralyse your eyes, but you tell your eyes to move (look right for example), the world will shift (I assume to the left?).

-          Real scientists have paralysed there eyes temporarily to study this using drugs in eye-drop form, or plastering the muscles around the eyes.

-          Transgender people have interesting phantom limb experiences. Woman who identify as male sometimes experience phantom penises (peni?), and men who identify as female do not generally experience phantom penises despite straight males often doing so.

-          Neuroscientists like making ferrets blind and deaf. This saddens me.

-          Sensory Substitution Devices are my idea of Hell, particularly the vOICe system, which reminds me of an alien movie*. It makes a noise which turns each light or dark patch of colour (form a camera) into sound; using higher pitches and louder volumes form items higher up the picture (birds in the sky) and lighter colours. I believe the pitch or space between noises also changes with depth. It read from left-to right, and sounds/looks like this.

 

So this week we laughed at the amount of penis talk, felt sad for ferrets, cringed at the idea of paralysing our eyes and I hid behind my friend as the creepy noises got louder and screechier.

Have a good week.

– Rose –

* I recognise it’s an amazing system for those who can’t see; and despite costing 35,000$ currently, it may well be a useful venture in the future. For me though, I’d much prefer it to sound more like this.

The Language of Self-Love

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Today I’ve taken off, in order to search other landscapes.You can find me over at Open Roads Coaching; taking part in the Leap into Love series with a post on how our language can affect our perception of love.

“Language controls our perception, our mental life. Turned becomes plunged and boredom becomes fear. Language can control our emotions. And that includes love.”

Head on over to read the rest of this post and to check out the other wonderful entries in the Leap into Love series.

A Sense of Self-Worth: Compassion versus Rudeness

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Last summer I worked cleaning en-suite bedrooms for summer school students and conference attendees in campus accommodation. We’d knock on a door, and either say “cleaning” or if no one was in, unlock it and clean it. One day I knocked and a guy answered with “No, I’m getting ready” and he slammed the door closed in my face.

That’s fine, I moved on, not even thinking about it. Then as I began to clean the next room, he opened his door and went “I’m ready, you can clean now.”

And I just nodded to him – I hadn’t started the next room and it was vacant so we weren’t time restricted on it.

However, at this point my supervisor for the day stopped me as I walked back to his room and asked quietly “did he just do what I think he did?” And I nodded. She held up her fingers to his now closed door. I laughed.

For some reason, I’d expected this kind of treatment, or I’d automatically thought “oh he was flustered as he was getting ready”. Whichever, I essentially, had no problems letting someone treat me a little badly.

 

Another Role

Shift forward 6 months; as a student ambassador two week’s ago.

I went back to work on campus; helping out with an Open Day. I’d not done this before, but had been trained for it in Novemeber 2010. As I stood with another girl at the main entrance directing people through the one-way system of the corridors and pointing people to their interested subject areas, a woman ignored the “no exit” signs, and when prompted by my colleague of the correct exit, she turned to us and said “Yes well I have a meeting so I’m leaving here” and proceeded to walk through the other people who were all walking towards us, following the signs nicely.

My colleague and I didn’t even turn to each other, both proclaiming “Well, [pause] how RUDE” and got some agreements from those who the woman had barged past.

 

There were three things that I noticed in this incident.

 

The Lessons

Firstly, I had never met that girl before 9:30am that morning. By 2pm, only working together on the doors from 1pm, we’d connected to the point of sharing a value out loud and speaking with the same pauses and intonation.

Secondly, the people who were coming in through that doorway agreed with our stance; some making a joke or agreeing that the woman had been “out of order”.

Both of these points reminded me of my theme of “connecting”, and reminded me of societies values, and how knowing and agreeing to those values helps society flow. It was that one woman’s lack of regard for socially accepted values which caused a stir.

Through another woman’s disconnection, I connected with about six people I wouldn’t have. Connected both to those people as humans who felt compassion for me and my colleague, and connected via conversation, jokes and shared opinions.

 

The Acceptance

When we were asked by our supervisor how it was going, we mentioned the woman. Our supervisor simply said “Oh yes, well that’s be expected. Get that treatment every day”, in a manner that suggested she was used to it and it wasn’t important; shrugging the incident off.

I do, to some extent agree with this. People are rude at times, and perhaps she was really worried and upset about missing her meeting. Perhaps it was more important than the safety of others; or valued higher than two young girl’s views…

 

This led to my third and forth points… Having grown up in a space where I was taught “the world is cruel, you must be cruel back to survive”, I understand this self-preservation of expecting bad behaviour.

However, when I analyse my emotions and feelings on that, I feel sad. I don’t, in my heart, agree with this way of expecting people to be rude.

Here I find this thread of struggle between my conditioning and my instinct.

 

The Struggle

The society who taught me, value this preservation of “expecting the worst”. I cannot shrug that value off if I then say I appreciate the value of “not being rude” or “obeying rules of those in authority positions”. Hypocrisy is never a pretty sight.

Yet, in my heart I do have this glimmer of compassion for all; and of the knowledge that some people are inherently nice. And if I expect every human to be rude; in case they are that one rude person; I’m doing them an injustice.

 

Your Views

This is my wrestle; this is the reason for my search into compassion.
Am I the only one with this struggle? How do you deal with it?
What progress have you made over instinctive “we are all loving humans; family” versus “the world can be cruel, harmful and challenging”?
How does it balance in your eyes?
Is it difficult, or does it come naturally to you?

 

There are no right or wrong views here; and I’d like to request that we please be respectful of everyone in the comments.

– Rose –

Tuesday Tidbit – Week 14: Conscious Learning (& Frogs)

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Week four of Spring term. Getting tired of the lectures at the moment, so this is a good motivator.

This week I cover motion perception in frogs, consciousness in terms of learning and visual studies found in psychology that involve naked images.

So here is one Motor Perception lecture and one Implicit Learning lecture:

-          In terms of consciousness studies, the term for an automated action is often referred to “anti-consciousness”.

-          Frogs will not snap at a | lines moving sideways, but will snap at a – line moving the same way. I assume the frogs they tested were odd in that they hunted lines?

-          When we think something, this is called thought. When we go “oh, I just thought of X”, this is meta-thought.

-          Meta-thought is theorised to have a main brain area controlling it, known as the “HOT” box, or Higher Order Theory Box.

-          If you present different images to each eye, the image will appear to flip between the two every 3-4 seconds (even though both are present all the time and do not move”.

-          A moving image in one eye will hold attention for up to 30-50 seconds; and thus psychologists have actually put images of naked people in the other eye; and people have not consciously noticed but their attention chooses that side of the screen to focus on.

-          This seems to match their sexual preference, so the sex you’re not attracted to, you react neutrally to seeing naked.

-          Psychologists clearly have too much time on their hands, and little respect for human beings sensibilities =P

-          When you play a game over and over again, that’s implicit learning. My tutor played Mario-Kart in between writing his dissertation on implicit learning. He got better over time. (He also did really well in the dissertation…)

-          When you walk through a supermarket isle; you’re implicitly learning all the brand names, even when you don’t attend to them. Next time you see that brand name, you’ll rate it as more “likeable”.

Next week, I’ll likely be filling this space with all my Anatomy revision as my exam is next Thursday and my lectures are on Visual Space Perception and Plasticity of Consciousness.

– Rose –

Tuesday Tidbit – Week 13: Bwainz

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Third Week of University.

Once more this is a “top ten” format, and summarises three lectures; as I was ill and missed my Sensory and Motor Function lecture. Our fMRI lecture also had nothing of any significant value to anyone, unless you want to know how to select participants in order to get published in Nature.

So here is one Visual Consciousness lecture and one Neuro-Anatomy lecture:

-          The white matter in your brain (connections between regions) decreases 10% every 10 years.

-          Your pre-frontal cortex (planning & reasoning) deteriorate faster.

-          It’s fairly accepted that as we age, we lose consciousness.

-          The working memory used to be thought to store 7 -/+ 2 items. It’s now thought we can hold 4 blocks of information. “Oh there’s a car driving, that dog’s looking angry, what shall I have for dinner, that flower’s pretty”

-          The spinal cord has the same layers protecting it as the brain has: dura mater, arachnoid layer, subarachnoid space and pia mater.

-          The neurotransmitter GABA turns part of the brain off. Glutamate turns bits on.

-          A neurotransmitter called Noradrenaline (Norepinephrine if you’re American) controls your fight/flight response, and is the main reason heroin withdrawal gives you fight/flight symptoms.

-          There are 12 types of cranial nerves; one of each type on each side of your head. Thus there are 24 cranial nerves, all of which are either sensory or motor.

-          There are two types of pain-information fibre: the A-delta fibre, which gives you sharp, strong pains, and the C fibre, which causes your dull aches.

-          Opiates stop this pain response at the spinal cord; stopping the fibres from going up to tell your brain that you’re in pain.

 

That’s this week’s key lecture notes. Next week my MRI lecture will still be difficult to get in, and my Anatomy lectures have finished; so it’ll be all about motion perception and implicit learning.

– Rose –