Wednesday, January 30, 2008

1/30/08

I know this is going to sound wierd, but lately, I've been wondering how the human brain works. I've been pshyco(is that you spell it)-analyzing people and stuff. I just want to know why we all think so differnetly. I know, genes and stuff. But, what makes some people smart and others stupid? What makes two people compatible? What causes our phobias? It just really annoys me. See, I'm sort of smart I guess, and afraid of everything. I think I'm smartish because everyone in my family on both sides is smart and stuff, so I guess it's blood. But my fears? I'm afraid of everything! Spiders, bugs, everything!!!!!!! I'm paranoid, and I know that my fear of needles is a phobia (it's called aichmophobia, and I know it's a phobia not a fear because phobias are irrational to the point where even the mention of a needle scares you). I just don't get it. I'll update later! I need to leave! Bye!!!!!!!

2 comments:

Snickers said...

That's an interesting thought...scroll down and see my other comment...also, you should post something about how I'm your only reviewer!!!!!!! SNIFF!!!! UBER SNIFF!!!!!! Hu-no for now!!!!!

Anonymous said...

I'm looking through your archive, and I found something I can explain. *glasses shine*

You see the first thing, intelligence is pretty hard to explain, but still doable (is that two words or one? spelling doesn't count on intelligence but it bugs me that I can't spell anything). We’ve all heard of IQ tests right? (Well average people couldn’t tell you exactly what they are but we know what they are generally.) They measure the degree your brain can understand patterns and reason out logic. This is actually the encouraged behavior in our school (which gives left-brained people a disadvantage, think back to that lesson). I don’t encourage you to use IQ as a strict way to measure intelligence (because it’s the ratio to a person’s mental age to their chronological age) but you can see what’s considered intelligence in our world. Intelligence to me is both the potential a person shows, and the potential a person has. You know those idiots in your science group? They actually do have a very high potential, but our society discourages that, so that is dimmed down to the potential they show. So to me, intelligence is measured two ways. Going in even further, their potential they have was dimmed down by the pressures of society, so intelligence is influenced by environment, as is many things. You covered the other thing I consider a factor, genes. Potential should be passed down from generation to generation. (Of course this probably isn’t exactly true since my mom’s an accountant and my dad’s a rocket scientist but I still got kicked out of math honors, but then again sometimes I doubt I’m related to them…)

Your next question: what creates a phobia? Of course you know what the conscious and the subconscious are. Phobias in my opinion, as I have never been taught in psychology but go only by observations and research of my own, register subconsciously. I have talked to many people about why they fear a particular thing. They could never give me a straight answer. Usually it was something around the lines of “I don’t know. They’re just scary”. I cannot give a straight reason for my fear of heights as well, but I know it has something to do with the thought of the unpleasant sensation of being crushed upon the ground by gravity after falling many feet from a tall platform. The fear of blood (or hemophobia) can be connected perhaps to a fear of pain. (This being said I have no idea why my dreams have presented to me a fear of squid. Freud just refuses to give me an answer to this. I have an answer to immoral dreams though I – and I’m not bragging here – have never had an immoral dream.) Oh and phobia does mean fear, it doesn’t have to be irrational.

You can find more detailed answers on an article on strange fetishes. Everything from the extremely common breasts, to the slightly strange urine, is a sexual fetish. People just have something that they enjoy seeing on the opposite (or same) sex. Urolagnia, the aforementioned fetish of urinating or watching someone urinating, is apparently attributed to that feeling of relief. Emetophilia, a fetish of vomiting, is pleasing to those who have it because it is “arousing or frightening to emetophiles at some point…it aroused powerful emotions”. (If you thought those were disturbing, there is coprophilia, a love of feces (I won’t go into much detail here, it’s pretty graphic), and “crush fetish” which is a love of crushing small animals and insects, and let’s not forget the classic necrophilia, a love of corpses, which sometimes leads to robbing graves of bodies and…this is where it gets uncomfortable.) Traditional fetishes such as breasts or muscles are easy to explain. We have to remember that before we were born, our ancestors who carried our genes lived and adapted to a different world than we live in now. Life was hard for the common person, and it all depended on your partner in life being able to supply whatever they were expected to. Breasts now would be looked at because 1000 years ago life was hard for a newborn baby and it would have to feed off the mother. Muscles on men and women are arousing to modern day people because when humans had to hunt for food, the strongest brought back the most. It was all about providing, and to this day, it stays.

Glasses fetish FTW! ^^

*ahem* Anyway from here I’ll just mention that good emotions like happiness and hopefulness are designed by our wonderful brain to reward us, and to make us feel it again. Bad emotions such as sadness and anger are supposed to punish us by doing something stupid to make us learn from our mistakes. Now don’t cite me on this, but I’m pretty sure the brain does this by either releasing chemicals that make us feel emotions itself or by ordering some other organ to do it.

Anyway let’s talk about paranoia and other unusual states of the mind since you mentioned it. Like music emotions have different pitches and durations. If an emotion has too high or low a pitch you have over or under reaction. If an emotion has too short or long a duration you have either brooding or a multi personality disorder. Paranoia itself is probably the state of over sensitivity of stimuli received by the brain. (Or something like that, remember I’m only saying this on my own untaught research.)

This is all I can say about the matter, if you have more questions, maybe I can answer. I’m actually just typing this because I want to reach 1000 words. (I’m counting on Microsoft Word.) This is 962…so yeah. Um just email me or ask me in person at school (like during Firestone or something) and I’ll try my best to answer. I know when I write it’s confusing so that might be best.) 1000! YAY!