Brain stuff
Thursday, 23 July 2015 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"So One Way Of Looking At It Is Simply Not To Look At It At All."*
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I'm listening to The Marshmallow Test, and I shouldn't be. My brain does not work like other people's, and I find it very upsetting listening to how things are "supposed to be" when I simply can't make them be that way. (This isn't the fault of the book; the author isn't talking about manic-depressives, so what he's saying isn't necessarily supposed to apply to me.)
One study they did was on how realistically people rate themselves socially, particularly how depressed people rate themselves, as opposed to other people with serious mental illnesses. The participants didn't know what the study was about, and there were outside observers also rating them, to compare how realistic depressives were about their social skills.
What they found was that while most people—including other seriously mentally ill people—give themselves unrealistically high ratings, depressives are incredibly accurate in their evaluations. Once again, depression is shown to be realism.
I say this stuff, and people think I'm somehow in favor of depression. I'm saying it because people tend not to listen to depressed people because we're depressed and not saying the things they want to hear. We're not pessimistic, we're realistic. It might feel good to have the optimists ruling the world, right up until their rosy plans crash and burn. That's why we need to listen to the depressives, who will point out the problems because depressives can see reality. We need optimism to see the future (because you can't build the future if you can't see it first), but we need depressives to keep it grounded.
By the way, I have excellent social skills. People talk to me, people like me, because I'm interested and engaged and amusing. They don't know that I'm mostly lying.
I keep wondering about these other seriously mentally ill people. Are we talking about schizophrenics? Maniacs? [I mean that literally, people in manic episodes.] Paranoiacs? God knows people in manic episodes can be very charming, but they can also be utterly insufferable, and how crazy were the schizophrenics? I can't imagine paranoiacs being very sociable. I'm thinking about this too much, but it's amusing the hell out of me.
The Marshmallow Test has to do with how we use our hot and cool brains, delayed gratification, and how it affects our lives. My cool brain methods are humor and logic; I find things funny, which cools them off. Or I find the flaw and just start deconstructing the thing until it's a small pile of rubble. Hell, I just did it here, now, while you were reading. I started off upset, but when my brain started picturing social interactions with seriously mentally ill people, it just went really funny.
*John Lennon
-:- -:- -:-
I'm listening to The Marshmallow Test, and I shouldn't be. My brain does not work like other people's, and I find it very upsetting listening to how things are "supposed to be" when I simply can't make them be that way. (This isn't the fault of the book; the author isn't talking about manic-depressives, so what he's saying isn't necessarily supposed to apply to me.)
One study they did was on how realistically people rate themselves socially, particularly how depressed people rate themselves, as opposed to other people with serious mental illnesses. The participants didn't know what the study was about, and there were outside observers also rating them, to compare how realistic depressives were about their social skills.
What they found was that while most people—including other seriously mentally ill people—give themselves unrealistically high ratings, depressives are incredibly accurate in their evaluations. Once again, depression is shown to be realism.
I say this stuff, and people think I'm somehow in favor of depression. I'm saying it because people tend not to listen to depressed people because we're depressed and not saying the things they want to hear. We're not pessimistic, we're realistic. It might feel good to have the optimists ruling the world, right up until their rosy plans crash and burn. That's why we need to listen to the depressives, who will point out the problems because depressives can see reality. We need optimism to see the future (because you can't build the future if you can't see it first), but we need depressives to keep it grounded.
By the way, I have excellent social skills. People talk to me, people like me, because I'm interested and engaged and amusing. They don't know that I'm mostly lying.
I keep wondering about these other seriously mentally ill people. Are we talking about schizophrenics? Maniacs? [I mean that literally, people in manic episodes.] Paranoiacs? God knows people in manic episodes can be very charming, but they can also be utterly insufferable, and how crazy were the schizophrenics? I can't imagine paranoiacs being very sociable. I'm thinking about this too much, but it's amusing the hell out of me.
The Marshmallow Test has to do with how we use our hot and cool brains, delayed gratification, and how it affects our lives. My cool brain methods are humor and logic; I find things funny, which cools them off. Or I find the flaw and just start deconstructing the thing until it's a small pile of rubble. Hell, I just did it here, now, while you were reading. I started off upset, but when my brain started picturing social interactions with seriously mentally ill people, it just went really funny.
*John Lennon