“Il peut s'agir d'une hypersensibilité aux émotions, ou une hypersensibilité sensorielle.
En tout cas, tout ce qui va se traduire par une augmentation ou un haut niveau de sensibilité aux mouvements émotionnels internes, ou alors aux sons, aux stimulations visuelles, qui peuvent survenir dans l'environnement.
Il s'agit vraiment d'une augmentation quantitative des émotions, de la perception des stimulations.
Et également l'hypersensibilité peut inclure ce qu'on appelle un traitement cognitif: une manière de traiter les émotions et sensations par le cerveau qui est plus profonde, intense, détaillée.
Selon l'étude anglo-saxonne dont je parlais en début d'épisode, il existe trois grands niveaux de sensibilité dans la population:
Le niveau très sensible: 30% des personnes interrogées. Elles ressentent avec plus d'intensité les émotions positives et négatives. Ce sont aussi des personnes plus introverties. Là se situent les hypersensibles.
Le niveau peu sensible: 30% des personnes interrogées. Elles ressentent moins fort les émotions aussi bien positives que négatives. Elles seront généralement les plus extraverties et les moins anxieuses.
Le niveau moyennement sensible: 40% des personnes des répondants. Elles se situent entre les deux autres groupes. Ni très introverties, ni très extraverties. (…)
Les causes génétiques (à l'hypersensibilité) sont des causes qui sont présentes dès le stade fœtal, dès la naissance, ce sont des causes qui sont héritées. Ou acquises, mais très précocement.
On a découvert qu'il y avait certaines variations de récepteurs dans le cerveau.
Des récepteurs qui reçoivent de l'adrénaline, de la dopamine, de la noradrénaline, de la sérotonine.
Ils font faire fonctionner le cerveau d'une certaine manière.”
“Nabokov was describing an extreme case of apophenia, or the tendency to experience events as meaningful, even when they shouldn’t be.
Also called patternicity, ‘it refers to essentially anytime that you are seeing patterns in the world that don’t exist,’ says Colin DeYoung, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. (…)
The word ‘apophenia’ comes from a German neurologist, Klaus Conrad, and his 1958 book about the symptoms of schizophrenia.
While an epiphany is a sudden realisation of a true connection or meaning, an ‘apophany’ is the false realisation of one.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung used what is perhaps a better-known term, ‘synchronicity’, to describe instances of apparent connection between co-occurring events with no clear causal relationship.
More than just coincidences, they take on powerful meaning in a person’s mind and appear to be a result of more than chance.
In one example, Jung’s patient dreamt of a golden scarab and, as she described the beetle, Jung heard a tapping on the window of his office.
There, he found a live scarab beetle, which he grabbed and handed to her.
Psychologists have found an association between apophenia and openness to experience, one of the ‘big five’ personality traits.
Openness to experience reflects a general tendency to be curious about the world.
As a 2020 paper by DeYoung and colleagues explained, one aspect of openness to experience ‘encompasses fantasy-proneness and aesthetic interests’, whereas another aspect, sometimes called ‘intellect’, reflects ‘intellectual confidence and intellectual engagement’.
In many contexts, openness is beneficial and can contribute to creativity.
But the component of the trait related to aesthetic and fantasy engagement also seems to be associated with increased risk of some of the symptoms of the psychosis spectrum, such as unusual perceptual experiences, DeYoung and colleagues have found.
They report evidence that apophenia could be ‘an important cognitive mechanism at the core of what is shared between openness and risk for psychosis.’
Seeing connections all around you can also be predictive of belief in conspiracy theories and the supernatural, a study from 2017 suggested. (…)
There is always a trade-off.
People need to be able to detect important connections in the world, rather than missing them, and being sensitive to patterns helps with that.
People who are high in openness and more prone to perceiving patterns ‘might see things that other people might not notice’, DeYoung says.
But sometimes, a sensitivity to patterns can fool us. Minimising the risk of the false positives would inevitably lead to more false negatives, DeYoung notes: ‘You’re always stuck with some kind of balance.’”
“Masculine domination, which constitutes women as symbolic objects whose being (esse) is a being-perceived (percipi), has the effect of keeping them in a permanent state of bodily insecurity, or more precisely of symbolic dependence.
They exist first through and for the gaze of others, that is, as welcoming, attractive and available objects.
They are expected to be ‘feminine’, that is to say, smiling, friendly, attentive, submissive, demure, restrained, self-effacing.
And what is called 'femininity’ is often nothing other than a form of indulgence towards real or supposed male expectations, particularly as regards the aggrandizement of the ego.
As a consequence, dependence on others (and not only men) tends to become constitutive of their being.
This heteronomy is the principle of dispositions such as the desire to draw attention and to please, sometimes perceived as coquettishness, or the propensity to expect a great deal from love,
which, as Sartre says, is the only thing capable of providing the feeling of being justified in the particularities of one’s being, starting with one’s body. (…)
The influence of these institutions is undeniable, but they do no more than reinforce the effect of the fundamental relationship instituting women in the position of a being-perceived condemned to perceive itself through the dominant, i.e. masculine, categories.
And to understand the 'masochistic dimension’ of female desire, in other words the 'eroticization of social relations of domination ('for many women, dominance in men is exciting,’ as Bartky puts it),
one has to hypothesize that women look to men (and also, but secondarily, to the 'fashion-beauty complex’) for subterfuges to reduce their 'sense of physical inadequacy’;
and it can be assumed that the gaze of the powerful, which carries authority, especially among other men, is particularly able to fulfill this function of reassurance.”
“My favorite game designer Reiner Knizia says that the most important thing in his game design toolbox is the point system.
Because the point system tells the player what to care about during the game. It sets their desires.
I put on my philosophy hat and immediately think: holy shit that’s right, games tell you what to want.
Game designers can shape alternate selves for us.
That’s wonderful in the very limited context of a game, this temporary secluded environment.
But in other contexts, where you gamify the rest of our lives,
when you offer us clear metrics and points and scores for our actual lives — in Twitter, in education, in research —
Something else happens: value collapse.
When you try to make your values very explicit, try to connect them to metrics that make them clear and easy to measure, something weird happens.
(…)
My core argument is that our values drive our attention. When you make explicit values, they place clear boundaries on the attention.
They tell you that what’s inside of this clear boundary is worth paying attention to, and what’s outside is absolutely not.
This narrows your attention. This focus functionally encourages closed mindedness about value.
It puts you in a kind of relationship with the world where you’re not actively looking for or open to new signs of value in the world that you’ve missed.
It locks you in to whatever conception of value you had.
The phenomenon I’m calling “value capture” is when an agent — I mean a person, a group, an institution, a university, a company.
That agent enters an environment that presents simplified, typically but not always quantified, version of those values. And those simplified values come to dominate the agent in their thinking.
For example, going to school for an education, and getting obsessed with GPA.
Or started on social media for connection, and getting obsessed with likes and retweets. Or exercising for health and getting obsessed with BMI and step counts.”
I’m crying. Here’s a photo of a sailor from the Götheborg watching over the little sailboat in tow:
From the story:
We repeatedly emphasized that we were aboard a small 8-meter sailboat, but the response was the same each time: “We are a 50-meter three-masted sailboat, and we offer our assistance in towing you to Paimpol.” We were perplexed by the size difference between our two boats, as we feared being towed by a boat that was too large and at too fast a speed that could damage our boat.
The arrival of the Götheborg on the scene was rapid and surprising, as we did not expect to see a merchant ship from the East India Company of the XVIII century. This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it? The Götheborg approached very close to us to throw the line and pass a large rope. The mooring went well, and our destinies were linked for very long hours, during which we shared the same radio frequency to communicate with each other.
The crew of the Götheborg showed great professionalism and kindness towards us. They adapted their speed to the size of our boat and the weather conditions. We felt accompanied by very professional sailors. Every hour, the officer on duty of the Götheborg called us to ensure everything was going well.[…]
This adventure, very real, was an incredible experience for us. We were extremely lucky to cross paths with the Götheborg by chance and especially to meet such a caring crew.
Dear commander and crew of the Götheborg, your kindness, and generosity have shown that your ship is much more than just a boat. It embodies the noblest values of the sea, and we are honored to have had the chance to cross your path and benefit from your help.
“Our destinies were linked for very long hours” is just knocking me out.
“However, gender imbalances persist among those entering and staying in the teaching profession: on average in OECD countries, 70% of all teachers are women, with large differences across levels of education.
Female teachers are especially over-represented at lower levels of education.
In 2019, 84% of primary teachers in OECD countries were women on average, compared to 64% at secondary level and 44% at tertiary level.”
—
“Historically, teaching has been one of the few skilled professions that has been accessible for women because it closely fitted the traditional stereotype of women as caregivers of children.
While such gender stereotypes are less prevalent today than they were a few decades ago in many OECD countries, they might still be an important reason for the high share of female teachers, particularly at lower levels of education.
However, other factors beyond gender stereotypes also contribute to skewed gender ratios.
Teaching may be an attractive career option for working mothers because it provides the flexibility to combine work and family responsibilities.
Teachers in many countries have considerable flexibility in organising their non-teaching working hours.
For example, in 24 out of 31 OECD countries and economies with available data, teachers at the lower secondary level can spend part or all of their non-teaching working time outside of school premises (OECD, 2021).
Ideally, this would make teaching similarly attractive to working fathers, but in many countries child rearing responsibilities still fall predominantly on women’s shoulders (Craig and Mullan, 2011).”
—
“Because of these standardised wage setting processes, the actual salaries of male and female teachers are nearly identical on average across OECD countries (OECD, 2021).
However, the welcome absence of wage discrimination in teaching implies that careers outside teaching will be financially more attractive for men than for women.
Male teachers earn on average 20% less than other tertiary-educated men.
In contrast, female teachers earn on average 3% more than other tertiary-educated women, who often face wage discrimination in other professions.
Thus, gender wage discrimination in sectors outside of education also has negative implications for the gender balance within the teaching profession.
As it is financially less attractive for men than for women to become teachers, men are discouraged from entering the profession (Allegretto and Mishel, 2016).”
“These strategies, which are not strong enough really to subvert the relation of domination, at least have the effect of confirming the dominant representation of women as maleficent beings, whose purely negative identity is made up essentially of taboos each of which presents a possibility of transgression.
This is true in particular of all the forms of soft violence, sometimes almost invisible, that women use against the physical or symbolic violence of men, from magic, cunning, lies or passivity (particularly in sexual relations) to the possessive love of the possessed,
that of the Mediterranean mother or the mothering wife, who victimizes and induces guilt by victimizing herself and by offering her infinite devotion and mute suffering as a gift too great to be matched or as a debt that can never be repaid. (…)
Because their dispositions are the product of embodiment of the negative prejudice against the female that is instituted in the order of things, women cannot but constantly confirm this prejudice.
The logic is that of the curse, in the strong sense of a pessimistic self-fulfilling prophecy calling for its own validation and bringing about what it foretells.
It is at work, daily, in a number of exchanges between the sexes: the same dispositions that incline men to leave women to deal with menial tasks and thankless, petty procedures (such as, in our societies, finding out prices, checking bills, asking for discounts), in short, to disencumber themselves of all the behaviours incompatible with their dignity,
also lead them to accuse women of ‘petty-mindedness’ and 'mean- spiritedness’ and even to blame them if they fail in the under takings that have been abandoned to them, without giving them any credit if things go well.”
staying close w people long distance really is about the mundane stuff. i get texts like “made quesadillas” “spilled mop water all over the floor :(” “lady on the bus has not one not two but three tiny dogs in her purse” andits like wow. i love you more than words can express
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Annie Murphy Paul, 2021)
“The conventional, and widely ineffective, approach to teaching physics is based on a brainbound model of cognition: individuals are expected, like computers, to solve problems by applying a set of abstract rules.
Yet the fact is that—very unlike computers—humans solve problems most effectively by imagining themselves into a given scenario, a project that is made easier if the human in question has had a previous physical encounter on which to base her mental projections. (…)
The world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, reportedly imagined himself riding on a beam of light while developing his theory of relativity.
“No scientist thinks in equations,” Einstein once claimed. Rather, he remarked, the elements of his own thought were “visual” and even “muscular” in nature. (…)
Virologist Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, is another scientist who brought his body into his research. He once described how he went about his work in this way:
“I would picture myself as a virus, or a cancer cell, for example, and try to sense what it would be like to be either.
I would also imagine myself as the immune system, and I would try to reconstruct what I would do as an immune system engaged in combating a virus or cancer cell.” (…)
Adopting a first-person perspective doesn’t mean we become limited by it; indeed, using the movements of our own bodies to explore a given phenomenon seems to promote the ability to alternate between viewing it from an internal perspective and from an external one, an oscillation that produces a deeper level of understanding.
Rachel Scherr, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington, has devised an educational role-playing program called “Energy Theater.”
One attribute of energy that students find difficult to grasp, Scherr notes, is that energy is always conserved—it doesn’t get “used up,” but instead is converted to a different form, as when the energy in the coiled spring of a pinball plunger is converted into the energy of the pinball’s motion.
Students may read about the conservation of energy in a textbook without truly grasping its implications; when, as part of Energy Theater, they embody energy, they begin to understand such implications in a visceral way.
“Students who use movement to ‘become’ energy can fall back on the feeling of permanence and continuity conveyed by their own bodies,” says Scherr.
“They don’t get ‘used up,’ and so they’re better able to understand that energy doesn’t, either.”
Scherr’s research shows that students who have taken part in Energy Theater develop a more nuanced understanding of energy dynamics.”
“The videos attest to the apparent universality of twitching: not only do many animals twitch in REM but they start before they’re born.
After finding that sleep twitches in early development aren’t caused by activity in the cortex, Blumberg increasingly wondered whether it might be the other way around—perhaps the twitches were sending signals to the brain.
Hardly anyone had considered this possibility, because it was assumed that the blockade would keep sensations out.
It took Blumberg and his team years to build equipment capable of getting clean brain recordings from tiny, wriggling pups, but eventually, they were able to implant electrodes into rat pups’ brains, recording their neural activity while high-speed cameras captured their twitching. (…)
An electrode readout made the order of events clear: first the pup moved, then the brain responded.
Bursts of activity in the sensorimotor cortex, which coördinates movement and sensation, followed the twitches.
The body and brain weren’t disconnected. The brain was listening to the body.
In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body.
You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies; we can’t be, because our bodies change by the day, and because the body a fetus ends up becoming might differ from the one encoded in its genome.
“Infants must learn about the body they have,” Blumberg told me. “Not the body they were supposed to have.”
As a human fetus, the thinking goes, you have nine months in a dark womb to figure out your body.
If you can identify which motor neurons control which muscles, which body parts connect, and what it feels like to move them in different combinations, you’ll later be able to use your body as a yardstick against which to measure the sensations you encounter outside.
It’s easier to sense food in your mouth if you know the feeling of a freely moving tongue; it’s easier to detect a wall in front of you if you know what your extended arm feels like unimpeded.
In waking life, we don’t tend to move only a single muscle; even the simple act of swallowing employs some thirty pairs of nerves and muscles working together.
Our sleep twitches, by contrast, are exacting and precise; they engage muscles one at a time.
Twitches “don’t look anything like waking movements,” Blumberg told me.
“They allow you to form discrete connections that otherwise would be impossible.”
While he spoke, I stared, mesmerized, at the rat pup’s twitching paw. Blumberg suspects that it was twitching “to build its sense of self.” (…)
Twitches could add to the confusion in another way.
In waking life, our brain easily identifies sensations created by our own movements because it sees those movements coming.
But, when we dream, we stop anticipating, and we have no way to figure out what’s coming from where.
Perhaps we don’t want to anticipate those sensations because, according to Blumberg, the whole point of twitching is to learn what those sensations are, so that we can find out what it feels like to move our own bodies.
A dreamer is in a situation akin to someone suffering from schizophrenia—an illness often marked by a profound difficulty in distinguishing between self and other.
Healthy people can’t typically tickle themselves, but people with schizophrenia can; yet researchers have found that, if healthy people woken from REM sleep tickle themselves, they often respond to their own touch as if it’s someone else’s.
We seem to be confusing self with other. “That’s at the core of dream experience,” Windt said. (…)
A stuck robot might be better off not moving—and yet it can’t get out of danger until it figures out what’s happened to it.
The roboticists came up with a clever solution: twitches.
When it’s stuck, their four-legged robot, nicknamed the Evil Starfish, moves the mechanical equivalent of one muscle at a time.
Input from the twitches is used by its software to create different interpretations of what is happening; the software then orders new twitches that might help disambiguate the scenarios.
If the robot finds that it’s suddenly tilting thirty degrees to the left, it might entertain two interpretations: it’s either standing on the side of a crater, or missing its left leg.
A slight twitch of the left leg is enough to tell the difference.
In work published in Science, in 2006, the team showed that their Evil Starfish robot could essentially learn to walk from scratch by systematically twitching to map the shape and function of its body.
When the team injured it by pulling off its leg, it stopped, twitched, remapped its body, and figured out how to limp.
Watching the robot twitch, a fellow-researcher commented that it looked like it was dreaming.
The team laughed and thought nothing of it until the fall of 2013, when Bongard met Blumberg when he gave a talk on adaptive robots.
Suddenly, the idea of a dreaming robot didn’t seem so far-fetched. “Dreaming is a safe space, a time to try things out and retune or debug your body,” Bongard told me.
Are the robots really dreaming? If to dream is to make sense of ambiguous bodily signals, then the answer is yes.
But, for us, dreams are a deeper kind of synthesis. As she sleeps, it’s as if a person, her brain, and her body converse imperfectly; their delirious miscommunication is the dream.”
Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (Martin Seligman, 1975)
“I believe that motivation and emotion are more plastic than cognition, more shaped by the environment.
I am no longer convinced that special, intensive training will raise a child’s IQ by twenty points, or allow him to talk three months early, or induce him to write piano sonatas at age five, as Mozart did.
On the other hand, I am convinced that certain arrangements of environmental contingencies will produce a child who believes he is helpless— that he cannot succeed—and that other contingencies will produce a child who believes that his responses matter—that he can control his little world.
If a child believes he is helpless he will perform stupidly, regardless of his IQ.
If a child believes he is helpless he will not write piano sonatas, regardless of his inherent musical genius.
On the other hand, if a child believes that he has control and mastery, he may outperform more talented peers who lack such a belief.
And most important, how readily a person believes in his own helplessness or mastery is shaped by his experience with controllable and uncontrollable events. (…)
Controlling the environment is powerfully pleasurable to a developing infant.
Lack of control does not produce pleasure and may even be aversive, even if the environment is "interesting” and contains spinning mobiles.
Why does the sound of a rattle please an infant?
Not because of the physical properties of the sound, its novelty, or its familiarity, but because the infant himself makes it rattle.
The basic evolutionary significance of pleasure may be that it accompanies effective instrumental responses and thereby encourages those activities that lead to the perception of control.
Boredom, on the other hand, may drive the child away from stimulation that he cannot control, into games in which he can learn that he is an effective human being. (…)
As I mentioned in my discussion of lowered IQ in depression, successful cognitive performance requires that two elements be present: adequate cognitive capacity and motivation to perform.
To the extent a child believes that he is helpless and that success is independent of his voluntary responses, he will be less likely to make those voluntary cognitive responses, like scanning his memory or doing mental addition, that result in high IQ scores and successful schoolwork.“
Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (Martin Seligman, 1975)
“Learned helplessness is caused by learning that responding is independent of reinforcement; so the model suggests that the cause of depression is the belief that action is futile.
What kind of events set off reactive depressions?
Failure at work and school, death of a loved one, rejection or separation from friends and loved ones, physical disease, financial difficulty, being faced with insoluble problems, and growing old.
There are many others, but this list captures the flavor.
I believe that what links these experiences and lies at the heart of depression is unitary: the depressed patient believes or has learned that he cannot control those elements of his life that relieve suffering, bring gratification, or provide nurture— in short, he believes that he is helpless.
Consider a few of the precipitating events: What is the meaning of job failure or incompetence at school?
Often it means that all of a person’s efforts have been in vain, that his responses have failed to achieve his desires.
When an individual is rejected by someone he loves, he can no longer control this significant source of gratification and support.
When a parent or lover dies, the bereaved is powerless to elicit love from the dead person.
Physical disease and growing old are helpless conditions par excellence; the person finds his own responses ineffective and is thrown upon the care of others.
Endogenous depressions, while not set off by an explicit helplessness-inducing event, also may involve the belief in helplessness.
I suspect that a continuum of susceptibility to this belief may underlie the endogenous-reactive continuum.
At the extreme endogenous end, the slightest obstacle will trigger in the depressive a vicious circle of beliefs in how ineffective he is.
At the extreme reactive end, a sequence of disastrous events in which a person is actually helpless is necessary to force the belief that responding is useless.
Consider, for example, premenstrual susceptibility to feelings of helplessness.
Right before her period, a woman may find that just breaking a dish sets off a full-blown depression, along with feelings of helplessness.
Breaking a dish wouldn’t disturb her at other times of the month; it would take several successive major traumas for depression to set in.
Is depression a cognitive or an emotional disorder? Neither and both.
Clearly, cognitions of helplessness lower mood, and a lowered mood, which may be brought about physiologically, increases susceptibility to cognitions of helplessness; indeed, this is the most insidious vicious circle in depression.
In the end, I believe that the cognition-emotion distinction in depression will be untenable.
Cognition and emotion need not be separable entities in nature simply because our language separates them.
When depression is observed close up, the exquisite interdependence of feelings and thought is undeniable: one does not feel depressed without depressing thoughts, nor does one have depressing thoughts without feeling depressed.”
ALT
