For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part Three)

After five years and an amount of tuition money that will forever turn up in my nightmares, I am the proud holder of a psychology degree. It might not be the most practical degree, but it does have one benefit (other than the full-time, gainful employment it got me in my chosen field): it sometimes lets me know when strangers are wrong about things on the internet. 

It happens sometimes. Shocking, I know.

Every now and then, I find enough bullshit psychology on the internet to write an entire post about it. This is one of those times. Enjoy. 

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For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part Two)

Last week, I stumbled on the motherlode of bad psychology information floating around my Facebook newsfeed. I went to school for a long time to study psychology. I have a full-time job in psychology. There are millions of people around the world who have been helped, directly or indirectly, by the field of psychology. And it's posts like this that convince the general public that psychology is nothing more than hypnotism and voodoo.

The original post was such a massive load of steaming bullshit that I had to break it into four smaller, equally steamy loads of bullshit to get through the whole thing. This is part two.

Origin of the original post.

I know it's awfully disappointing that psychology used to make astonishing claims about dream interpretation and subliminal messaging, when today it mainly just sits in the corner playing with graphs, but that's what happens when a scientific discipline grows up and gets a real job. The bullshitty email forwarders of the world don't seem to want to accept that human psychology is way more boring than you think it is, and so they twist scientific studies or straight-up invent facts to spread amongst their equally bullshitty friends. But no more. I am on the case.

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For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part One)

If you've read this blog for any substantial length of time, you'll know that I love psychology enough to hold a shiny degree in it (followed by an actual, honest-to-god full-time job in it), and I absolutely fucking hate it when my field of choice gets reduced to a series of glib 'fun facts' that haven't been considered true since Freud was still prescribing cocaine as a cure for opiate addiction.

For real, he killed his best friend with it. Look it up.

And since it's hard enough for psychology majors to be taken seriously without our entire field of study being reduced to a series of semi-fictional email forwards, you can imagine my immense, crushing disappointment when several of my Facebook friends littered my page with one massive dump of half-true psych facts and hilariously untrue fictions. Like, c'mon, they even superimposed them over stock photos to look legit. Since there's no greater force known to man than 20-something-year-old Nerd Rage, I am dedicating the next few posts to untangling the scientifically-backed probably-truth from the definite lies. Links will be provided throughout the post, but they'll be really hard to see, because I'm a hell of a lot better at writing than designing websites. 

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Psychology "Fun Facts" That Are Driving Me Insane

Hey, you. You in the body.

You might think of yourself as a complete human being, with arms, legs, fingers, toes and butt cheeks, but it really comes down to it, everything that makes you 'you' - your hopes, dreams, quirks, personality traits, memories, goals, haunting recollections of that body you buried in the woods - are all contained within a 3lb chunk of flesh inside your skull.

This is you.

But as important as our brains are, most people don't seem to know a heck of a lot about them. Most of my regular readers probably know that I'm an undergraduate psychology student, and that I am all about brains. Love 'em. Big fan. The only problem is, now and then someone finds out what I study, and they hit me with some piece of brain-related trivia to see if I knew it. Most of the time, I did not. But it has nothing to do with holes in my education - an overwhelming amout of psychology 'fun facts' floating around are just straight-up wrong. 

So before I push someone in front of a train for bombarding me with tidbits of bad information, let me shed some light on common email-forward facts like:

We only use 10% of our brains. 

Here's a quick question: how much of your brainpower do you suppose it takes to coordinate every single muscle in your body, maintain spacial awareness, interpret visual information, process audio information, deal with touch signals from every inch of your skin, hold on to the definitions, pronunciations and spellings of the roughly 20,000-35,000 words in your vocabulary, assemble your nebulous thoughts into sentences, comprehend human speech, recognize the tens of thousands of items in your environment, keep track of time, experience and cope with emotions in response to environmental and internal stimuli, recognize human faces, store memories of lifetime events and facts you've memorized so that they can be recalled at a moment's notice, hang on to handy skills like the ability to tie your own shoes and drive your car without mowing down the neighbour kids, identify smells, and keep all of your internal organs functioning properly?

How about all of it?

You need this.

Your brain has a strict 'use it or lose it' policy; if your neurons stop firing, they die. After all, why should your body work so hard converting all those Cheetos and Kit-Kats you eat into energy, just so you can fuel lazy, freeloading brain cells? It would much rather let the useless cells die and use that excess energy to construct a third chin for you. If you really allowed 90% of your brain to die off, you'd be little more than a vegetable with a functioning brain stem. I mean, think about it - if you only used 10% of your brain, having a stoke would be no big deal. Yeah, a chunk of your brain dies, but so long as you've still got the 10% you needed, you'd feel no effects.

Look at that, he's got way more than 1/10th of his brain left. Bet he won't even notice.

I'm completely baffled as to where this little 'fun fact' even came from, because it has two horrible possible implications:

a) No matter how hard you strive and strain and push yourself, you're still way too lazy to even begin to access your full potential. Everyone on earth is harboring Mensa-caliber intellect that they could use to cure all known diseases, make great contributions to the arts and increase the efficiency of all the systems we rely on, but ensh, that takes work and Duck Dynasty is on.

b) Mother Nature chose to endow us with immense brain capacity that we're somehow capable of detecting, but entirely incapable of accessing. All of humanity is essentially carrying around a 50 exobyte external hard drive, but no one has the mini-USB cable needed to actually connect it. 

Either way, it's total crap.

Left-brained people are logical, and right-brained people are creative. 

Chances are, if you ever managed to draw a straight line on a graph without getting confused and falling down a flight of stairs, someone quickly labelled you 'left-brained' - you favor the left side of your brain, and in exchange, it grants you the power to compile lists, do calculations, and bore the ever-loving crap out of everyone you encounter. Likewise, if you took a magic marker to your own face as a child, someone might have popped up to call you 'right-brained' - you favor the right side of your brain, which enables you to paint masterpieces, compose symphonies, and see the merits of wearing maxi dresses and skinny jeans. If you're curious to find out which side your talents lie on, don't worry! There are hundreds upon hundreds of online quizzes that will tell you. There's just one little problem.

This. This is the problem. 

Remember that thing we were just talking about? About how you rely on your entire brain to do things? That still applies here. It's true that your left hemisphere and right hemisphere do have slightly different functions; in most people, language and verbal abilities lie on the left, while music and non-verbal abilities fall on the right. That said, there is considerable overlap. Consider this - young children with catastrophic epilepsy will occasionally, as an absolute last-ditch effort, have an entire hemisphere of their brain removed. After an initial period of recovery, during which their squishy, adaptable little brains do some rewiring to adjust for the missing hemisphere, these children retain their full range of cognitive abilities. Kids who have had the left side of the brain hauled out have gone on to get graduate degrees in language, and kids whose right hemispheres were removed can still sculpt, sketch and figure out that Nicki Minaj is just awful. 

If you're really desperate to figure out where the functions in your brain are located, all you need to do is pick up a pen.

One of those hands is about to drag itself through wet ink. Poor lefties.

Handedness has a bigger impact on the orientation of your brain than personality or hobbies ever will. If you're right-handed, as most people are, there is a 95% chance that you have the "language on the left" orientation. The other 5% of you have this either reversed, or your functions are shared between the two sides. But if you're a lefty, there's only a 70% chance that your language is originating from your left; for 15% of you, it's on the right, and for the other 15%, it's split. The proportions aren't always exact - but they're a hell of a lot more scientific than the left-brain, right-brain personality divide.

Learning styles are a thing.

Little Tommy likes to read, so he must be a visual learner. Suzie remembers what her teacher said in class, so she must be an audio learner. Timmy likes to chew on keys and gargle paint, so, uh, he must be a tactile learner.

Dammit, Timmy. 

Teachers swear by learning styles, and if you went to school in a year that starts with a 2 (assuming you're not a time traveler from the 200's), you were probably evaluated for learning style at some point during your school days. The results likely had absolutely no impact on your education, but at least you knew. And if you were tested multiple times, you might have found that you had a different learning style each time. Did your learning style change? Why is that?

Samantha was shocked to discover that she learned best by taste.

A large part of it is that no one can find a model that holds up to scientific testing. 71 different models of learning style have been proposed, and not a single one has actually been shown to have any validity in psychological experiments. Fundamentally, all humans learn in similar ways - the reason that Jack might prefer to read while Jill would rather listen to a lecture is far too complicated to attribute to an abstract, stable trait like a 'learning style'. Maybe Jill's entire family was bludgeoned to death by books, you don't know. When it comes down to it, we all learn best by doing, and putting our skills to work. So all you apprentices in the trades, you're in luck! To those of you studying theoretical mathematics... good luck with that.

People with concussions need to be kept awake. 

First, some clarification: if your loved one has just miraculously survived a head-first tumble down an elevator shaft and is incapable of seeing, thinking, walking, talking or refraining from vomiting, do not let him or her go to sleep. It's notoriously difficult to evaluate brain damage when someone is asleep, since you have no way to tell if their symptoms are getting better. Worst case scenario, they'll slip into an irreversible coma. Best case scenario, they'll choke on their own vomit and go out like a rock star. Either way, it's not good.

This is not necessarily a man you want to emulate.

But if your friend just got a little bump on the head as they were walking through low doorframes or scoring a touchdown during the 9th inning of their hockey game, and they're coherent enough to stomp over to you and declare that they're going to bed, you should let them sleep. Contrary to popular belief, your brain doesn't make you sleep so that it can put its feet up and have a little 'me' time until it's ready to entertain you again. Sleep is the only time you stop using your neurons long enough for them to be tuned up and repaired. 

She's about two hours away from restoring her brain to its pre-college state.

You might recognize 'brain repair' as something that's pretty important for a person who's just bounced their brain off the inside of their skull. So unless you have a vested interest in seeing the concussed patient's IQ drop, so long as they're coherent and not vomiting, you are safe to let them sleep. In fact, you should command it.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test will tell you exactly what you should do for a living.

If you've ever been on a dating site, or worked at an overzealous workplace, you might have seen people identifying themselves by a four-letter string that looks something like 'INFP', or 'ESTJ'. These are the shorthand codes for the Myers-Briggs personality types, which measures personalities on four dmensions: Introversion vs. Extroversion; Intuition vs. Sensing; Feeling vs. Thinking; and Perception vs. Judgement. And once you know which side of each dimension you fall on, you should be able to use that personality score to determine your dream job. It's that easy! Holy crap, why isn't this test mandatory?

This man. This man is why.

The Myers-Briggs test is based on the work of Carl Jung, who in turn spent his academic career licking the hypothetical feet of Dr. Sigmund "Mom sure is lookin' good" Freud, a man who simultaneously founded the field of clinical psychology and made it difficult for anyone to take it seriously. The problem with Freud was that his work was scientifically flawed from the get-go; it's one thing to claim that males live their entire lives terrified of being castrated by their fathers and that all healthy three-year-olds are obsessed with their own buttholes, but if you can't actually come up with an experiment to test your ideas, they're worthless. 

Also, he prescribed cocaine for, like, everything. 

All of the problems with Freud's work show up in the Myers-Briggs test. How is anyone supposed to evaluate the test? 'Personality' is not something that shows up in a blood test or an MRI, and following so-called 'Feeling' types around to see if emotions really do run their lives is hardly feasible. This is the reason why the Meyers-Briggs test never pops up in psychologists' or psychiatrists' offices; they have far stronger, more reliable personality inventories that aren't available to the general public. In any case, official indexes of personality mostly look for major disruptions that indicate you have a whopping personality disorder going on; they don't tell you that you would be just the best oral hygienist that Western Canada has ever seen. 

And that's why the Myers-Briggs has continued to thrive. It'd be so convenient to fill out a questionnaire and figure out exactly what you should do with your entire life. The alternative is to spend years getting to know yourself, making mistakes, and trying out things that might be new and scary to you. 

And really, who wants to do that?

What other psychology myths have you heard floating around? Let me know!

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Five Fascinating Rare Psychological Disorders You Need to Know About

As I mentioned in my earnest, self-disclosing first post, I'm a university student working on a degree in psychology. Since I'm aiming for a career in Forensic Clinical psychology, most of my classes are devoted to the study of psychological disorders; I spend my time learning how to recognize the classic signs of schizophrenia and coax hyperactive patients off the ceiling. Learning to classify and diagnose patients is an important first step in learning how to treat them someday.

Before starting my degree, I assumed that this was the only therapy technique I'd need.

Of course, even if you have no formal background in psychology, you can probably name most of the major disorders off the top of your head. Bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia. Major Depressive Disorder. Social Anxiety Disorder. Tourette's Syndrome. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. ADHD. The list goes on, and on, and on, and with recent pushes for mental health awareness, you've probably been exposed to these disorders more than you ever have before. 

The portion of my audience that is made up of struggling writers and avid readers is probably especially aware of mental disorders. They pop up everywhere in literature, from the oh-my-God-my-son-shot-everyone novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, to the adorably clinically depressed donkey, Eeyore, in Winnie the Pooh. Finding something original to say about mental illness is tough, and approaching such a heavy topic without drinking yourself into a sadness coma isn't easy. Luckily for you, hypothetical struggling writer, there are still plenty of fascinating, non-heinously-debilitating disorders out there that are still waiting to be mentioned in literature. 

Regrettably, 'drunken sadness comas' have not yet been recognized as disorders.

So whether you're here for psychology facts, writing inspiration, or just plain old curiosity, enjoy reading about:

1. The Capgras Delusion

This has 'delusion' right in the name, so you already have some idea of what's involved here. By definition, delusions are beliefs about the world that have absolutely no basis in reality, and the belief involved in the Capgras Delusion - also known as Capgras Syndrome - is a real doozy. It's simple really; people with this disorder are just completely convinced that someone close to them has been replaced with a physically identical imposter.

Pictured: Your life with Capgras Delusion. Enjoy.

Obviously, living through the plot of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers every day of your life is less than ideal, and people afflicted with the disorder have very different methods of coping with it. Some people just accept the imposter and continue to go about their lives, having apparently come to the realization that their loved one's good looks are their only important quality. Others employ equally reasonable measures like pulling guns on their loved one and having standoffs with the police. Regardless of how you cope with it, treatment is tricky - simply pointing out to the sufferer that they sound like a fruity History Channel program doesn't work. Instead, you've got to point out how reality works, and wait for the patient to discover their loose screw all on their own.

"Imposters"

A disorder like Capgras Syndrome is far too much fun to restrict to just one possible cause - it can result from brain injury, stroke, schizophrenia, dementia, migraines, diabetes, migraines, hypothyroidism, drug reactions, normal human aging and hitting your head really, really hard until aliens inhabit Grandma's body. There are three female cases of Capgras Syndrome to every two male cases, which means if you wake up in the middle of the night to find one of your parents trying to peel your face off to see who you really are under there, chances are, it'll be your mother.

It's worth noting that Capgras Delusion has already made a very successful literary debut - the 2006 novel The Echo Maker by Richard Power is about a man whose car accident causes him to believe his beloved sister has been replaced by an imposter. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, elevating kooky brain disorders to literary gold. 

2. Jerusalem Syndrome

The city of Jerusalem has dominated world headlines for the last, oh, five thousand years or so, and in that time it's become a very important place for every religion that traces itself back to Abraham.

Jerusalem is significant to everyone except Greenland, China and North Korea. Make of that what you will.

Needless to say, if you're a big fan of this "God" person and his bestselling adventure novels, visiting Jerusalem is a pretty big deal. Different tourists show appreciation for the holiness of the city in different ways. Some people join scheduled, guided tours, to make sure they don't miss any attractions. Some people photograph everything they see. Some people might even choose to wander the city by themselves, taking in the culture and history of the five-millennia-old city.

Oh, and some people like to tear off their clothes and preach to random passersby on street corners.

Jerusalem Syndrome refers to a phenomenon wherein tourists with no diagnosed mental health issues descend into shoelace-eating lunacy after arriving in the city of Jerusalem. Symptoms range from funny to hilarious: sufferers commonly wander away from whatever group they arrived in, fashion themselves togas out of stolen hotel linens, declare themselves to be Jesus 2.0, and preach garbled, lukewarm sermons about the merits of 2nd-century lifestyles at the increasingly jaded public. Other fun symptoms include compulsive bathing and nail-clipping, uncontrollable reciting of hymns and psalms, and spontaneous pilgrimages to Jerusalem's holiest sites. 

Just think - debilitating lunacy is only a plane ride away.

While the syndrome is known for appearing in people who are otherwise healthy and stable, closer examination has revealed that many of the 100 people who are diagnosed ever year have 'unusual thoughts' prior to the onset of the disorder. 'Unusual thoughts' is such a delightfully vague term that it could encompass everything from an insistence on always eating pizza on Wednesdays, to a deep-seated belief that moon-dwelling space leopards planned the 9/11 attacks. Just to be on the safe side, you should assume that if you have any personal quirks or irrational beliefs whatsoever, a trip to Jerusalem would see you standing on a sidewalk, hollering at strangers to forsake the modern evils of cell phones and elastic waistband underwear.

Repent, sinners!

The good news about Jerusalem Syndrome is that it's relatively easy to treat. The city has a designated hospital - the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital - that authorities drag all sufferers to, and the staff there find that only 40% of patients need to be tranquilized and pumped full of anti-psychotics. Usually, the most effective treatment is also the simplest - just leave the city. When sufferers return to their country of origin, they return to normal, with no lingering signs of psychosis. The entire process of onset and recovery takes as little as five days, making this psychotic syndrome actually preferable to the common cold. 

Though Jerusalem syndrome has not yet had its moment in the literary spotlight, it was the focus of an episode of The Simpsons, and that's just as good. 

3. Boanthropy

Those of you who paid enough attention in school to recognize the meanings of the Latin derivative "bo" and the Greek root "anthropy" probably don't need to be told what this is all about. For the rest of you, I'll spell it out: boanthropy is a condition in which a human being firmly believes him- or herself to be a cow.

Timmy was determined not to let his condition prevent him from leading a normal life.

Though this sounds like a made-up disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to give them an excuse to shovel pills down the throats of any four-year-old who declares he wants to be a farm animal when he grows up, boanthropy has been around for quite some time. It's been happening for so long, in fact, that the most famous case of the disorder appears in the Bible - in the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar II abandons all of his responsibilities to live as a cow for seven years. After nearly a decade of grazing in random pastures, the king snaps out of it and resumes his reign, since no one apparently objects to being ruled by a man who spent a significant portion of his life as livestock. At the time, people attributed his insanity to the whims of a petulant, Old Testament God. Today, psychologists are slightly more inclined to treat it with pills than with the sacrifice of a firstborn son.

Boanthropy typically comes on suddenly, with no major head injuries or hallucinatory drug mishaps to mark its onset. The only thing sufferers seem to have in common is that they're extremely suggestible - in some cases, hypnosis may be all it takes to set the disorder in motion. Some people are also capable of developing full-fledged boanthropy by just telling themselves over and over again that they are a large, grazing bovine. It's also one of the only disorders that has been linked to dreams; many cases have been found to begin after sufferers have a dream of being turned into a cow, proving that not quite everything Freud said was sex-crazed, cocaine-fueled nonsense.

"Hooray." - Sigmund Freud

Because of its rarity and bizarre qualities, boanthropy is one of those disorders still waiting to make its literary debut. Well, unless you count the Bible. 

4. Cotard Syndrome

This disorder is also commonly known as the Cotard Delusion, which should instantly alert readers that this is going to be a good one. Like individuals with Capgras Delusion, people with the Cotard delusion have irrational beliefs and a diagnosis that starts with the letter "C". However, these people don't believe that their loved ones have been replaced with impostors. That would be crazy. No, people with Cotard Syndrome simply believe that they themselves are dead.

If you start dressing like this every day, other people will wish they were dead too.

The syndrome was first discovered in Paris in the late 19th century, by neurologist James Cotard, for whom, you may have noticed, the disorder was named. Cotard first encountered the syndrome in a patient named Mademoiselle X, who believed that she had been damned to hell, and become incapable of dying a natural death; this belief was severely tested when she died of self-inflicted starvation. Since then, cases of Cotard delusion have followed roughly the same path. Patients initially suffer with bouts of depression, which somehow progress into a thinly-rationalized belief that they are somehow no longer alive. If a patient happens to live alone, or with a family who doesn't consider any of the preceding symptoms to be sufficient reason to see a doctor, the patient's delusions progress until he or she completely stops meeting all physical needs and winds up as dead as they think they are.

You may recognize the disorder from AMC's hit documentary series.

Luckily, Cotard delusion can't sneak up on just anyone out of the blue. It only appears in people who suffer from schizophrenia, incredibly severe epilepsy, or other variations of crossed wires and psychosis. And for such a complex and potentially-fatal disorder, treatment is incredibly simple; the only thing needed to resurrect patients is an anti-psychotic prescription, sparing therapists from having to have long, frustrating, one-sided talks with patients who firmly believe themselves to be disembodied corpses. 

To my knowledge, you can't yet pick up a novel and read about Cotard Syndrome. But you can always just purchase a copy of Richard Matheson's I am Legend and pretend.

5. Foreign Accent Syndrome

Some medical conditions have confusing or misleading names, but this one is exactly what it says on the tin: Foreign Accent Syndrome causes sufferers to develop, well, a foreign accent. Keep in mind, "foreign accent" could be any foreign accent; there's no telling if you'll get a posh English accent, a throaty German accent, or an accent found only amongst the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. Some accents associated with this disorder are so convincing that people with genuine accents commonly mistake sufferers for being one of their own - one English-speaking patient who wound up with a Russian accent made the exact same grammatical errors common to Russian ESL speakers, leading the patient to be babbled at in rapid-fire Russian whenever he encountered a native speaker.

Changing your name to Boris is optional, but recommended.

Of course, not everyone afflicted with this disorder is lucky enough to get a recognizable accent; many patients end up pronouncing their words in a way that "just kinda sounds foreign" to native speakers of their language. Hilariously enough, people with Foreign Accent Syndrome can end up passing their altered pronunciation on to their young children or siblings, forcing an entire family to explain their unique medical history to every single person who asks them where they're from. 

Now, Foreign Accent Syndrome doesn't just show up unannounced one day; it's usually the result of some kind of head injury, which means that the only thing standing between you and a potentially sexy accent is a heinous motorcycle accident. If getting a motorcycle licence sounds like too much of a hassle, you can also develop the disorder as the result of a stroke, developmental abnormality, or as a consequence of severe, pervasive migraines. Even if you've gone to the effort of brain-damaging yourself to a new accent, your efforts might all be for naught; the brain is an incredibly resilient thing, and - especially amount younger patients - the accent may disappear on its own after just a few weeks or months.

Sticking a bandage on it is known to really speed recovery.

Unfortunately for my aspiring writer audience, Foreign Accent Syndrome just doesn't seem like the sort of that that would be interesting to write about. There's no way that it could ever lead to an interesting story. Oh, unless you count the story of that Norwegian woman in WWII whose life went to pieces after a shrapnel wound gave her a German accent. She's kind of interesting.

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Which other fascinating disorders did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

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Hello, World. It's me, Janel.

Starting a blog is tricky.

On the one hand, I want readers to have enough information about me to care about what I say and eventually lapse into healthy, occasional worship of me. On the other hand, I don't want to give out so much information that a potential stalker could show up at my door with my favourite kind of cheesecake and five of my least-hated romantic comedies on DVD. Since I'm terrible at finding that kind of balance, I'll just start by letting you know that I like Oreo cheesecake.

My hobbies include pretending internet privacy is still a thing in 2013.

Since, I am not, to my knowledge, some kind of sentient fungus, I come complete with a back story. I was born twenty-one years ago in Moncton, New Brunswick, which, despite being a 'major' Canadian city, is the sort of place that you can only find on a map if you grew up near it. 

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