Why I am pro-procrastination?

I couldn't believe I had not been posting almost for two months.

It seemed I just procrastinated one day, each day, at last a bunch of days accumulated unattended. This habit of procrastination is a silent killer and imagine the collective procrastinations in evolutionary steps of humans... mmmm .... by this time we would have been super-humans... controlling everything by psychic power...!!!

O.k! fantasies apart... why i procrastinated so far? what kind of the genetic code nonchalantly inserted this habit into my trait? could we procrastinate the intent to procrastinate, so we would be much more productive or progressive? let's see!





Let us hear what Dr. Linda Sapadin saying about procrastination styles. There are basically six styles, I will check one by one to see what style fits me:
(you also check yourself)


1. The perfectionist... procrastinating all works in anxiety that he or she couldn't do it in the perfect'est' way! ( If i say this is my style that would be a perfect lie!) (my friend took time off and gathered his courage to propose his sweet heart, charted out enormous plan to propose perfectly ... at last he fixed a date and went to meet her...that's her date too ... she was screaming aloud... in labor pain.... oh! that 's painful isn't it?... certainly i am not the one who advised him to take time out... hee... hee... i mean that loooooooooong!)


2. The crisis maker... self-explanatory! (as a psychiatrist i should be a crisis breaker... but from a scientologist point of view i could fit into this style... as that point of view is quiet twisted... i dare not to get my neck sprained)


3. The dreamer... quenching all his thirst in dreams, hence able to procrastinate to go near a pot to take the tumbler of water. (I dreamed that people from all parts of world checking in to my blog and when I clicked on the link of comments, the computer angrily said it would take two months and 13 days to open up all the comments for the single post... do i fit here?)


4.The defier... ( why should i blog? why should i **** **** do that? why should i .... @#@&^$^^... hey! why are you closing my mouth? no! no! certainly not my style, it needs some guts to defy, you know!)


5.The worrier... what if that causes this and this leads to that and this 'that' and that 'this' combined together to do this and that and what if... ( psychiatrist always think 'what if not'...
what if not they have found prozac? from practice point of view that's horrible to think!)


6.The overdoer... saying yes to 'all' .

do you duty this week for me?

yes! ...

and one more small obligation do the next week duty too, i have lot of personal problems to attend to, you know !
(which psychiatrist didn't have a personal problem?)

yes...

you are the right one to treat that man with that particular personality trait... could you?

yes...

anyway why haven't you blogged so far?

(mmmm... whether this is called sarcasm!)


so i fit somewhere in between dreamer and over doer! where do you fit?

Style #1: Perfectionist. Reluctant to start or finish a task because they don't want anything less than perfect.

Personality Type: Critical Thinking Style: All or nothing Speaking Style: I should... I have to... Acting Style Flawless Psychological Need For: Control

Style #2: Dreamer. They don't like details. This makes ideas difficult to implement.

Personality Type: Fanciful Thinking Style: Vague Speaking Style: I wish... Acting Style: Passive Psychological need for: Being special

Style #3: Worrier. They have an excessive need for security, causing them to fear risk. They fear change, causing them to avoid finishing projects so they don't have to leave the comfort of the "known."

Personality Type: Fearful Thinking Style: Indecisive Speaking Style: What if...? Acting Style: Cautious Psychological Need For: Security

Style #4: Defier. A rebel seeking to buck the rules. By procrastinating, they are setting their own schedule -- one that nobody else can predict or control. More subtle forms are called passive-aggressive.

Personality Type: Resistant Thinking Style: Oppositional Speaking Style: Why should I...? Acting Style: Rebellious Psychological Need For: Non-conformity

Style #5: Crisis-Maker. Addicted to the adrenaline rush of living on the edge.

Personality Type: Over-emotional Thinking Style: Agitated Speaking Style: Extremes - "Unbelievable" Acting Style: Dramatic Psychological Need For: Attention

Style #6: Over-Doer. Says yes to too much because they are unable or unwilling to make choices and establish priorities. They have difficulty making decisions. Prime candidate for burnout.

Personality Type: Busy Thinking Style: Compelled Speaking Style: Can't say "no" Acting Style: Do-it-all Psychological Need For: Self-reliance

The God in the head

Only two kind of people say with a definite conviction they had seen God or affirmatively experienced the presence of God. One, those who attains deep meditation states and the other those experienced the temporal lobe epilepsy.

In trancedental meditation, there happens a sensation of unification with the universe, or in other words completely dissolved self. On imaging the Buddhist monks who attains this state, the pre-frontal cortex is very much active, but the parietal lobe seems to be in a trance. The parietal lobe is essential for our construction of the outer three dimensional world and our interaction and spatial navigation in that three dimensional world. When this lobe switches off temporarily almost your boundary to the outer world seizes to exist. This experience reinforces the belief of God in the meditators.

Coming to those who having temporal lobe seizures, there are myriad ways of presentation. Some would experience an uncontrollable rage but blessed few could experience the insurmountable pleasure, to which no worldly pleasure could be equated , even if you imagine a person is experiencing thousand orgasms put together. Those person obviously becomes more spiritual after the attacks and to them what they experienced, as couldn't be described in mere words, is God.

If you have the intense desire to experience God, you could contact Dr. Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University in Ontario.He is having a God helmet, you know. All you have to do to see God , is to knock his doors; he would put his 'God helmet' on your head.

It would create a magnetic field which would stimulate your temporal lobe and your chances of seeing God directly correlates with your belief system.

If you are a great believer, He would appear in the form you like, right in front of you or if you are a person of beliefs and doubts mixed together, you would feels as someone like God is standing far behind you, but unfortunately if you are an atheist , all you would feel is mild ache in your limbs and some respiratory difficulties.

Where resides the envy?

Now the science is scratching its head hard to find out brain spots for different complex emotions. Even it talks about God- spot in the brain and seperate branch called neuro-theology is brewing up.

Now the frantic search is for spots for our negative emotions. Those well-versed with the Indian epic Mahabharatha, would have known what was the chief problem of the eldest of the 100 sons, the embodiments of 100 sins. Duruyadhana suffered from Envy and he also found pleasure whenever he heard something really bad happened to the' good' five pandavas. This emotion of getting pleasure from other's misfortune is termed as schadenfreude.

Japanese scientist Takahashi, carried out an interesting experiment to find out the prime sites of these two emotions 'envy' and 'schadenfrude'. He had done fMRI to find out the activated areas in the brains of people who were given a hypothetical situations that would evoke these emotions.

For example, you are a college student who is good in studies and a cute girl(/smart guy) in your class has started showing some interest in you. Then, this handsome guy(/beautiful girl) enters the scene, who has a posh car, competitive in studies to you and in extra, he is good in sports and also has high connections with the college authorities. your cute girl's interest slowly sways towards him. Are you imagining the scene.... (even though the scene is a cliche, it often succeeds provoking the envy). Now if i do imaging to your imaging brain , the site obviously red hot in anger would be the spot of envy and that would be .... Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

This ACC is the conflict detecting part of the brain. when something happens exactly in contrast to what you have expected then this area would produce the alert signal. It also gets activated in psychic pains, for e.g, a loner's longing pain or another loner's empathetic pain of this loner.

Now imagine as a sequence of the 'cliche' story... the cute girl and that envy-provoking guy had a real nasty fight and you are hearing from all directions, the news about their fight and that guy was heart broken because he couldn't make amends with her later. Obviously you feel happy, (i.e schadenfreude) and now the hot-spot in your brain that produces this wicked pleasure is... Ventral striatum.

No surprise that Ventral striatum has a strong association with reward circuitries, hence the humans finds nothing more rewarding than the downfall of the persons they envy.

A suicide song

Music has the ability to meddle with our mood. The evolution of music itself is to express the emotions, which the concrete verbal words fail to deliver. If, almost apt words of emotions join hand with perfect mood-reflecting music, they both travel deep into our brain and take control of the emotion programming softwares.

Such a dangerous thing happened in 1933, at Budapest, Hungary. Rezso Seress, a talented musician somewhat gloomy about his eloping success and his friend Laszlo Javor, who had recently broken up with his girl friend, teamed up to produce the saddest song of the century. Both their anguish merged and vibrated in each words and the vocal cords that sung the song trembled in despair and soon the sadness of the song become infectious and the suicides become an epidemic. They named the song 'gloomy Sunday'.

As malicious H1N1 becomes rampant in a damp climate, the depressive pre-world war climate accentuated the spread of the anguish of the song. Most suiciders dedicated with passion, the act of suicide to the song, in their last note. The stories regarding the people commiting suicide with clutching the musical notes of the song were spreading across the world and the song formed its own urban legend. According to legends, one man drunk in a bar in Budapest, requested the local band to play the 'gloomy Sunday'. Immediately after the end of the song, he ran out of the bar and shot himself. And another boy, who heard the song sung by a street beggar, after he finished the song, he gave all the money he had to him and shortly afterwards he flung himself into the river nearby.

when the famous Billy Holiday ( the lady in the photo above singing the 'gloomy Sunday') sung the English version of the song, the epidemic blew out of proportion to a pandemic. Soon it became one of the few famous notorious songs banned by BBC radio. And the legend says, in London a policeman became suspicious when the song was been played again and again in a nearby apartment. When he broke into the apartment, he found out a woman dead with overdose of sleeping pills and by the side of her an automatic phonograph was playing the song again and again, after this incident the BBC banned even the instrumental of that song which it had played.

Although he got great fame from his song 'gloomy Sunday', the life of Rezso Seress was followed by a string of sorrows. All other song composed by him afterwards, only got little attention. Then he became one of those unfortunates seized by the horror of the Holocaust. He lost his mother in the Holocaust. And the composer of the suicide song, committed suicide himself, in a 'gloomy Thursday' morning, in January 1968, by jumping out of the window of his apartment.

psych,soul and the butterfly.

psychiatry is a word derived from the Greek phrase 'iatro tes psuches', which means 'healer of the soul'.

In Greek mythology 'psych' was the name of a beautiful girl, with a radiant soul, which made even the goddess of love Venus jealous. so the Venus send her son cupid (also called as Eros) with his love bow, instructing him to make her fall in love with a monster, but on the sight of her,cupid himself fell in love with her, truly madly deeply.

And the story deepens when Venus found out psych and cupid were in love, she started doing her best to separate the two, at last Zeus came to their love's rescue.

The 'psych' herself became the symbol of soul, with her exuberant animated beauty and the ordeal she had went through in finding her true love. 'psych' also represents the butterfly. Imagine a dead butterfly and the butterfly sitting on a flower with fluttering wings. The only difference between the two is the science eluding' spirit' or which is otherwise called as soul or its equivalent 'psych'.

Ultimately the 'psych' is nothing but which animates this mechanical biological body. when the animation exceeds, we call it as mania, when it slumps down we call it as depression, when it is irrational we call it as psychosis, when it dissociates from mechanical body we call it as dissociative disorders. So healing of the psych is the ultimate .

In this current paranoid world (especially the scientific world), the time tested, with 'instinct knows it is correct' type of phrase like , 'love heals psych' needs evidence.

I leave you with an open ended question... so open, so you will all open up I think!

Do love really heals psych?

Cats and Schizophrenia

Pet cats could cause schizophrenia in immuno-compramised adults, pregnant women and young children.

Cat lovers could conceive the above statement irrational. But anyway, the culprit is not the cat but the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The cysts of these parasites love to linger in the litters of the cat. The cats which love to poo on the sand pits which children maintain for their play are the most dangerous ones. Toxoplasmosis targets cerebral neurons to produce a schizophrenia like picture with predominant positive symptoms.

On talking about the cat lovers and schizophrenia, the great artist at the turn of twentieth century, Louis Wain comes to my mind. He had to support his mother and five sisters with the strokes of his brush, hence his art brush was always on an elegant rush. How he came to love cats was an interesting story. His wife fell ill of cancer, throughout her incurable pain, only her pet cat peter good-humored her.Wain also would dress peter up and put goggles on peter to make his wife laugh. After her death, he would have felt grateful towards the cat for taking some burden of her struggle with cancer. His 'human like Cat'-arts were very popular in late the 1880s and 1890s.

In the early 1900s he started developing schizophrenic illness and he was dumped by his sisters in a pauper asylum. With the help of popular writer H.G.Wells, he was committed into the Bethlehem royal hospital. Here he somewhat improved and resumed painting, as days progressed his paintings became more abstract. The popular speculation is that the deterioration of his illness had reflected in his increasingly abstract art. ( view the above pictures of Wain downwards... could you make out deterioration or increasing fineness?)

Whether Wain contracted the Gondii from one of his numerous cat friends... nobody knows! but latest researches say the odds ratio of schizophrenia associated with IgG antibody was approximately 5.0.

How can the risk of transmission of toxoplasma from a cat to its owner be reduced?

Interview with schizophrenia researcher Dr. E. Fuller Torrey on the issue of cats and schizophrenia

Antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii in Patients With Schizophrenia:

A Meta-Analysis

Now the question session: Could pet cats could be used as treatment for schizophrenia? what is AAT?

phantom music

I was writing my pharmacology exam... the question paper had started squeezing my temporal lobe... my memory circuits were frantic to download the eloping answers!

Everybody in the room seemed to be in the same state... and there prevailed an extraordinary silence in that room... as if everybody were in a transcendental meditation... then this thing happened... 

A music note was playing in my brain with a stunning clarity (the background music of the tamil song 'engenge engenge' from 'nerruku ner' movie)... it lasted only for few seconds, when i concentrated to hear it more clearly it vanished.

Still the clarity of the music note bedazzles me... is everybody having a hifi music recorder implanted in their brain?

Of late i am practising 'lucid dreaming'. At times in my dreams i could clearly notice a backdrop music playing in accordance to the mood of the scenes the dream machine creating.

I had seen a schizophrenic who had multiple phantom voices conversing to him... suddenly he would sing aloud... when enquired he said... one of the voices is of a lovely female... who sings to him in contrast to other mundane conversing (cursing) voices.. he would start singing to join in chorus with that girl...

I think he is a blessed schizophrenic. others who are blessed with this phantom music, technically called as Musical Ear Syndrome ( coined by Neil.G.Bauman ), are old people with hard of hearing.

Musical Ear Syndrome is almost an auditory equivalent of the visual Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in both insight is preserved.

It is feared that MES would be on the rise in future, in this i pod generation whose ear sockets are plugged with high octane music unplugged!

Musician Robert Schumann had developed this MES after slowly losing his hearing, he used to hear music of phantom Schubert, as he was taking dictation from Schubert's spirit.

Recent studies state that musical hallucination is much more common in sudden bilateral sensori-neural deafness. imagings shows increased activity in brodman's area 39 and frontal lobe middle gyrus.

you could share your views...

Iam going to leave you with one question after each post...

what is ringxiety?

a man's experience with phantom music.