“Previously in a letter to Schiller of 9th August 1797, he had pointed out at least one of the causes of the decline: in the larger cities men lived in a constant frenzy of acquisition and consumption and had therefore become incapable of the very mood from which spiritual life arises.” Hans F. K. Günther on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Month: August 2019
M
We died at the end of that year.
The place was small and totally new in every sense; neatly prepared in white – to invite all the incoming light to reflect inside.
M was the first
gentle into that good night
So gracefully that took me with him.
B was coughing blood and had sparse but brutal seizures
His liveliness kept a part of me to take care of him till the very end – four months after M and me.
We are back to the inorganic.
The memories of our lives once infinite
will soon die altogether and our story disappear
The smallness of reality
Collaborative effects of bystander-initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation andprehospital advanced cardiac life support by physicians on survival of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a nationwide population-based observational study
Hideo Yasunaga, Hiromasa Horiguchi, […], and Tomoaki Imamura
Among 95,072 patients with bystander-witnessed OHCA, 7,722 (8.1%) patients were alive at 1 month, including 2,754 (2.9%) with good performance and 3,171 (3.3%) with vegetative status or worse.
More than 40% of 1-month survivors were classified as vegetative status or de facto brain death.
The combination of BCPR and ACLS by physicians was the best way to improve outcomes.
Life support by physicians without preceding BCPR increased the occurrence of vegetative status or worse.
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Dissociation debates: everything you know is wrong
Controversy about dissociation and the dissociative disorders (DD) has existed since the beginning of modern psychiatry and psychology. Even among professionals, beliefs about dissociation/DD often are not based on the scientific literature. Multiple lines of evidence support a powerful relationship between dissociation/DD and psychological trauma, especially cumulative and/or early life trauma. Skeptics counter that dissociation produces fantasies of trauma, and that DD are artefactual conditions produced by iatrogenesis and/or socio-cultural factors. Almost no research or clinical data support this view. DD are common in general and clinical populations and represent a major underserved population with a substantial risk for suicidal and self-destructive behavior. Prospective treatment outcome studies of severely ill DD patients show significant improvement in symptoms including suicidal/self-destructive behaviors, with reductions in treatment cost.
Ian Stevenson – Science, the Self, and Survival After Death: Selected writings of Ian Stevenson, edited by Emily Williams
Carl Sagan, a lifelong skeptic of paranormal claims, in his last book (1996) identified Stevenson’s research as one of three areas of potential significance (the others were psi tests with random number generators and under mild sensory deprivation, i.e., the ganzfeld).
Stevenson was drawn to extrasensory communications and phenomena suggestive of survival and reincarnation because, if these processes could be established, they would demonstrate that human beings were more than their physical bodies. Stevenson came to concentrate on reincarnation because he saw that it posed an especially keen challenge to materialistic assumptions. It also had clear implications for medicine. Reincarnation might help to explain, among other things, the origins of individual differences and why a given person developed a given disease, one of the “leitmotif” questions of his career.
Reasoning in Believers in the Paranormal – The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
Reasoning biases have been identified in deluded patients, delusion-prone individuals, and believers in the paranormal. This study examined content-specific reasoning and delusional ideation in believers in the paranormal.
A total of 174 members of the Society for Psychical Research completed a delusional ideation questionnaire and a deductive reasoning task. The reasoning statements were manipulated for congruency with paranormal beliefs. As predicted, individuals who reported a strong belief in the paranormal made more errors and displayed more delusional ideation than skeptical individuals. However, no differences were found with statements that were congruent with their belief system, confirming the domain-specificity of reasoning. This reasoning bias was limited to people who reported a belief in, rather than experience of, paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that reasoning abnormalities may have a causal role in the formation of unusual beliefs. The dissociation between experiences and beliefs implies that such abnormalities operate at the evaluative, rather than the perceptual, stage of processing.
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 192(11):727-733, Lawrence, Emma; Peters, Emmanuelle
Research on Experiences Related to the Possibility of Consciousness Beyond the Brain: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Scientific Output – The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
This study aims to conduct a search of publications investigating experiences commonly associated with the possibility of the existence of a consciousness independent of the brain held on the main scientific databases that are Pubmed, Web of Knowledge, PsycINFO, Science Direct, and Scopus.
Of the 9065 articles retrieved, 1954 were included (598 near-death experiences, 223 out-of-body experiences, 56 end-of-life experiences, 224 possession, 244 memories suggestive of past lives, 565 mediumship, 44 others). Over the decades, there was an evident increase in the number of articles on all the areas of the field, with the exception of studies on mediumship that showed a decline during the late 20th century and subsequent rise in the early 21st century. Regarding the types of articles found, with the exception of past-life memories and end-of-life experiences (mostly original studies), publications were predominantly review articles. The articles were published in journals with an impact factor similar to other areas of science.
The presentation of the mind-brain problem in leading psychiatry journals
Alexander Moreira-Almeida,1 Saulo de F. Araujo,2 C. Robert Cloninger3
1Departamento de Clinica Medica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Juiz de Fora, MG, Brazil. 2Departamento de Psicologia, UFJF, Juiz de Fora, MG, Brazil. 3Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA.
Objective: The mind-brain problem (MBP) has marked implications for psychiatry, but has been poorly discussed in the psychiatric literature. This paper evaluates the presentation of the MBP in the three leading general psychiatry journals during the last 20 years.
Methods: Systematic review of articles on the MBP published in the three general psychiatry journals with the highest impact factor from 1995 to 2015. The content of these articles was analyzed and discussed in the light of contemporary debates on the MBP.
Results: Twenty-three papers, usually written by prestigious authors, explicitly discussed the MBP and received many citations (mean = 130). The two main categories were critiques of dualism and defenses of physicalism (mind as a brain product). These papers revealed several misrepresentations of theoretical positions and lacked relevant contemporary literature. Without further discussion or evidence, they presented the MBP as solved, dualism as an old-fashioned or superstitious idea, and physicalism as the only rational and empirically confirmed option.
Conclusion: The MBP has not been properly presented and discussed in the three leading psychiatric journals in the last 20 years. The few articles on the topic have been highly cited, but reveal misrepresentations and lack of careful philosophical discussion, as well as a strong bias against dualism and toward a materialist/physicalist approach to psychiatry.
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One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External ghost
Than its interior Confronting
That Cooler Host.
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop
The Stones a’chase-
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –
Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our apartment
Be Horror’s least.
The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or More –
Emily Dickinson
“The therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.”
J. M. Coetzee, The Making of Samuel Becket
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill
Virginia Woolf
Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
Finally, among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the inhabitants of Babel did in the beginning) so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.
Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain
Jimo Borjigin, UnCheol Lee, […], and George A. Mashour
These data demonstrate that cardiac arrest stimulates a transient and global surge of synchronized gamma oscillations, which display high levels of interregional coherence and feedback connectivity as well as cross-frequency coupling with both theta and alpha waves. Each of these properties of gamma oscillations indicates a highly aroused brain, and collectively, the data suggest that the mammalian brain has the potential for high levels of internal information processing during clinical death. The neural correlates of conscious brain activity identified in this investigation strongly parallel characteristics of human conscious information processing. Predictably, these correlates decreased during general anesthesia. The return of these neural correlates of conscious brain activity after cardiac arrest at levels exceeding the waking state provides strong evidence for the potential of heightened cognitive processing in the near-death state. Though neurophysiology at the moment of cardiac arrest has not been systematically studied in human cardiac arrest survivors, surges of electroencephalographic activity (measured by bispectral index) have been reported in humans undergoing organ donation after cardiac death. The consistent finding of a high-frequency EEG surge reflecting organized neurophysiologic activity in nine of nine rats undergoing cardiac arrest should prompt further studies in humans. Importantly, the essential results of increased gamma power and coherence were confirmed with an alternative mode of death. Use of these unique experimental paradigms will allow detailed mechanistic dissection of neurophysiology of the dying brain in animal models, which could provide guidance for research on NDE after cardiac arrest in humans.
NDE represents a biological paradox that challenges our understanding of the brain and has been advocated as evidence for life after death and for a noncorporeal basis of human consciousness, based on the unsupported belief that the brain cannot possibly be the source of highly vivid and lucid conscious experiences during clinical death. By presenting evidence of highly organized brain activity and neurophysiologic features consistent with conscious processing at near-death, we now provide a scientific framework to begin to explain the highly lucid and realer-than-real mental experiences reported by near-death survivors.
(Source)
INQUIRIM VITAE 