Glider

I don't think animals commit suicide. I think for something to be able to commit suicide, that thing requires a) Awareness of self as an entity separate and distict from other members of the species and b) An understanding of mortality. I think for the act that results in the death of an individual to be classed as suicide there needs to be a) choice and b) the primary intent to end one's own life. Without these, although the actions of an animal may lead to the death of the animal, I don't think it can be classified as suicide.

We don't have raccoons in the UK (unless one escaped from somewhere). The closest thing we have are badgers. Neither are rodents and neither have prominent incisors. Badgers don't have long tails either, nor do they make high-pitched squealing noises. Otters have long tails and make high-pitched noises, but don't have prominent incisors (nor do any member of their family; weasels, stoats etc.). We don't have many large rodents at all in the UK. Rabbits and hares are about it. Neither of those have long tails. Grey squirrels are another, but they're hard to mistake. If it's not an otter, it doesn't sound like any native animal.

It's not just red cells they're after. Packed red cells is only one product. There's also products such as whole blood, plasma, defibrinated plasma, platelet poor plasma, fresh frozen plasma, granulocyte concentrates, lymphocytes, monocytes, and platelet concentrates (and others).

I understand the walking in circles thing to be down to lateral dominance/asssymetry. Left dominant and right domonant individuals will tend to walk in right and left circles respectively, which suggests the spin of the earth has no influence. Of course, this won't happen if the objective is in sight, or if the person walks in stages and marks a point to aim for at each stage.

It will break down, but feeding during coma is usually via NG (Naso Gastric) tube if short term, or through a line inserted directly into the stomach or upper small intestine through the abdomen for longer term. IV feeding is only used if the gastric system cannot be used for some reason (e.g. severe collitis, some kind of trauma, GI haemorrhage etc.). Long-term use of IV feeding can cause liver disease due to the build up of fats in the liver.

No, it's not ‘a metaphor of a chess move’. It’s a metaphor for disassociated thinking. It refers to pathological thought processes, not chess. What has examples of people who subscribed to the philosophies of Nietzche got to do with the philosophies themselves? I have no idea what you’re talking about here. It doesn’t connect to anything else apart from your constant whining about ‘brilliant minds’ (like yours, no doubt) being put down by ‘anal retentive types’ (i.e. anyone who does not recognise your brilliance, no doubt). I doubt that. I suspect yours is the only opinion you consider worth listening to. Either way, your respect for my opinion (or lack thereof) is irrelevant. I don’t know what that means. I imagine it would, if there were such a thing. In any event, I suggest you take iNow’s advice. This is a pointless thread and if you do not present a case worthy of discussion, I’ll close it.

Look it up. Knight's move thinking has nothing to do with chess. "Knight's move thinking. This is thought disorder denoting a lack of connection between ideas. Links between ideas may be illogical or the speech may wander between trains of thought ... ... Loosening of associations is also called knight's move thinking. The move of the knight in chess is used as a metaphor for the unexpected, and illogical, connections between ideas." (From GP Notebook. Bold added.). You said "Maybe I should discuss the nature of Nietzsche... ", and instead go straight back to anal-retentiveness (again) introducing Manson, Hitler and Mussolini, presumably as examples? There is nothing coherent here on which to comment. That's not a strawman, it's an Ad hominem attack. My thesis stands or falls on its own merits. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Another example of Knight's move thinking; another thought presented that has no logical association with anything that preceded it.

True, but irrelevant.

Maybe you should. That would at least be a coherent topic, but the evidence suggests you couldn't stay on that topic for more than a paragraph. I couldn't ask for a better example of knight's move thinking.

For me to create a strawman would mean I'm taking an opposing position to your argument. You haven't presented an argument, just a blog. The only thing I have an issue with is your insistance that ARB is a personality type or a valid behaviour classification. I say it isn't. I say it's a pseudo-psychological, made-up term that you use to describe people who have done things you disagree with. That's not a strawman. As far as the discussion on ARB goes, it's for you to present some supporting evidence for your assertion that it is a recognised behaviour/personality type. These are observations concerning your personal history (about which, which by definition, other members of this forum can have no knowledge). The only part of your blog open for discussion is your misunderstanding of personality types. Again, it is for you to show how what you post can form the basis of a discussion or debate or is in any other way relevant to a science forum. Just present a case.

I agree with this, and without taking issue with any of it, I'd like to use the bolded statement as an example of what seems to be a common assumption throughout this thread. It seems to me that people consider 'offence' as some objective entity, like a bullet, and like a bullet, that people can get hit by it whether they want to or not. I don't think this is true. It's very much like stress, insofar as there is no such thing as a stressor. If there were, everybody exposed to it would become stressed. This is not true. Stress is a response and different people produce it under different circumstances. That can be changed so that people do not produce a stress response under circumstances that would previously have resulted in stress. It's not the situation that's stressful, it's how people respond to it that results in stress and a response is a matter of choice and can be learned. In a similar way, but with even less objectivity, offence is a response, not some objective entity that can be thrown at somebody. I don't believe a person can 'give' offence (only offer it), but only that offence can be taken and whether or not offence is taken is entirely a matter of choice. It is a learned response. I say it's even less objective than stress, because offence depends upon beliefs (which in themselves are learned and are a matter of choice) and there is no hard-wired system for offence. This being the case, I would say of the statement "a right to free speech can't really coexist with a right not to be offended", that the right not to be offended is absolutely immutable. It exists irrespective of the right to free speech. People have to voluntarily give up that right in order to be offended. When kids get teased, a common response by adults is 'ignore them, they'll get bored and go away'. It's ironic that so many of the same adults are so easily offended.

Yes, even ignoring that fact, the above is incorrect. It's essentially to do with way in which parents approach toilet training (punishment for getting it wrong, Vs reward for getting it right). Freud believed that the infant's 'libidinal energies' were concentrated on the anus and bladder at this stage. The infant has to successfully navigate the anal stage or risk becoming fixed as an anal expulsive personality (messy, overly generous, low conscientiousness, destructive) or an anal retentive personality (obsessive, orderly, perhaps repressed). Whether or not an 18 month old infant has 'libidinal energies' is questionable. I have to admit, I'm not sure about the possibility of a link between anal retentiveness and liking it up the bum. It's a bit beyond my scope of research

There's 15 minutes I'm never getting back. You say I have 'failed to provide an argument against the subject'. What subject? What is the subject of this rambling monologue? I say ARB is not a recognised personality type, you provide a disjointed diatribe relating to your personal life experiences. This is a science forum. It's not appropriate for you to use it as a personal soapbox. If you have an opinion on something science related that you wish to discuss or debate, please state it. If you merely want to write a personal journal concerning your own life experiences, please do it somewhere else, because nobody can participate in this.

Of course it doesn't: Nope, nothing there that sounds like bitterness or anger. Because, of course, you know so much better than the rest of them. I have no idea what you're saying here. Are you saying you have been prescribed Zyprexa? Is a person's 'inability to to go forth boldy' a well defined clinical condition? Is suing the source of purturbations an effective treatment for puturbations? (IMO it sounds more like what an angry person would do to whomever he considered the cause of his problems). And thinking. There are still no grounds to consider 'anal retentive behaviour' a personality type or even a class of behaviour. For all practical purposes (in the context you use it) it's just an insult to a buch of people who have pissed you off. You're calling them assholes. That's fair enough, but don't wrap your opinion in pseudo-Psychology to give it more weight. It may well be justified, but it's still only an opinion. Don't try to make it sound like a diagnosis. Okay. What's your point? You've tried transactional analysis and it didn't solve your problems? Why would you think I'm in a position to take patients? What do you think I am? I'm not a therapist or a counsellor. I'm an Academic Psychologist (i.e. psychological scientist) and Chartered Health Psychologist. I've never written anything that would lead you to assume I was in a position to take patients, so I get the impression that you don't really know what a Psychologist is, or does, outside of the stereotypical lay perception of all Psychologists as Freud clones, getting people to lay on big leather couches, talking like Dr. Ruth and charging people extortionate fees for a chance to unload their woes. It's possible, but not sufficiently probable for me to worry about it. To 'think outside the box' you at least have to be able to define the box. As far as Psychology goes, I don't think you can. You haven't shown that you know what a Psychologist is, or that you can tell the difference between a Psychologist, a Psychiatrist or a therapist or a counsellor. Further, your 'pop Psychology' use of 'ARB' as a personality type that you use to insult people who have obviously pissed you off tells me that you have no choice but to think outside the box because you can't even find it. Your story is becoming clear, but this is still a science forum. The issues you have with your previous employers and the problems you may have had with any subsequent attempts at dealing with those issues are still not really relevant here.

Well, to test that idea, take a page of text, pick a word and focus on the centre letter of that word so you can read the word. Do not move your eyes from that letter and see if you can read the words to either side of it. As long as you don't move your eyes, you'll find that you won't be able to read the words to either side of that word if they are longer than about 3 letters. This is because although we think we have fairly acute vision, our visual acuity is limited to the centre of our visual field; the tiny focal point on the retina (the fovea) with the highest concentration of cone cells. Outside of that point, there are fewer cone cells and more rod cells. There are many rod cells to each retinal ganglion cell and so peripheral vision lacks the acuity required to read text. It can't detect enough detail. So, given that human eyes can detect enough detail to read, only in a point large enough to allow us to read one average length word at a time, I doubt that any human, autistic or otherwise, can read two whole pages simultaneously. So the assertion that these individuals can read two whole pages simultaneously contradicts the basic physiology of the human eye. What they might be able to do however, is to scan across pages, encoding text to memory as they go. As for listening to two different things simultaneously, the same thing applies in priciple. We can hear two monologues at the same time, but we cannot listen to both at the same time (i.e. focus sufficiently to discern the full meaning of both). What we may be able to do (with practice) is to switch quickly from one to the other, picking up a sufficient number of words in each to allow us to 'fill in the blanks' to make each monologue seem contiguous and make sense. This essentially is the same thing speed readers do. They scan lines of text, working on the 'shapes' of sentences and relying on their brain to fill in the detail (as it tends to do). They only need to detect sufficient detail to reduce the probability of error to whatever they consider an acceptable level.

This is where most of these debates go wrong. That was not the original question. You added an 'a'. The difference between the questions "Is a human embryo human?" and "Is a human embryo a human?" is profound. They are entirely different questions.

Basically, what Bascule said. Learned motor skiils (e.g. playing a guitar, riding a bike, driving a car etc.) are known as automaticities. These are ballistic patterns of motor function that are cpontrolled by the cerebellum and, once initiated, can be carried out to completion without any conscious input from the individual. Conscious input is only required to modulate the action. Exactly. The brain processes huge amounts of information in parallel, but can only deal with novel incoming information consciously in a linear way. I'm not sure about the schizophenic thing though. Whilst a person with schizophrenia may not recognise the 'inner voice' as their own, and that inner voice may even even take two opposing positions (as in a debate), I think the situation where two separate voices overlapped (i.e. 'spoke' at the same time) would require a fundamental rewiring of neural architecture. In the same way as when drunk or after suffering a blow to the head, a person might see double (as the eyes lose ocularmotor coordination with each other), but the TV/Hollywood 'comedy' depiction of a person seeing three or more of the same image is not possible as we have only two eyes. To see more than two images would require more than two eyes. But, as I say, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about the condition.

Possibly, but leaving flawed and inaccurate models out of discussions of Psychology and personality can only be helpful. Forgive my brutal editing, but I’m only interested in the psychological aspects of your post and so most of your business anecdotes are not relvant. I don’t think that really qualifies you to take an outdated proposed stage of psychosexual development and turn it into a personality type and apply that type to other people. It is true that personality is predictive of behaviour, it is not true that ‘anal retentive’ is an accepted personality type with any predictive power at all. Do you have any evidence for any of this? Do you have any empirically based classification criteria for this ‘ARB’ type? Bullshit. So ARB is a factor in depression and divorce too? But nothing. Psychoanalysis is a Freudian school of therapy. It’s a bit crap and not very effective. Psychoanalysts aren’t necessarily even Psychologists. They’re often just people who’ve done a course in psychoanalysis. What you’re doing is observing a behaviour that pisses you off and giving it some pseudo intellectual label in order to convince others that the behaviour is wrong. For all its basis in reality, you might just as well call it ‘navel fixation syndrome’. As I said previously, you are one of those who are using the term ‘anal retentive’ as a euphemism for asshole. I don’t care that you consider all the people you list below assholes. You might even have good reason, but don’t try to tell me that any of this has any grounding in Psychology. Ok, so, a bunch of people have done a bunch of stupid stuff (in your opinion) that has pissed you off. That’s fine. We don’t really care. It’s obvious you have a grudge against them (justified or not) but this isn’t really the place to vent your spleen against them. This is a science forum and you need to present something relevant rather a list of complaints about the unfair treatment you’ve had at the hands of people who wouldn’t listen to your wisdom, wrapped up in some made up psychobabble as an attempt to justify your belief that these people are assholes. What? No. No more. I say again; Bullshit. You might want to read up on some actual Psychology beforehand. I’ll be watching for you.

The idea that some humans can multitask is a myth. Humans have one focus of attention. They may be able to switch that focus quickly between tasks (some better than others), but nobody can split it between two tasks in parallel. To test this, take a book and turn on the radio to a talk show. Try to read a paragraph and listen to the chat at the same time. You'll find that if you are successfully reading (i.e. reading and understanding), then you won't be hearing the conversation (i.e. you won't know what has been said for the time you were reading). If you are hearing the conversation, then you won't be able to follow the text.

That’s not true. Pain is a psychological state (International Association for the Study of Pain). It is an experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, but the experience depends not on the stimulus, but on the interpretive ‘equipment’ (i.e. higher CNS functions). There is no dedicated ‘pain centre’ in the brain. The experience of pain is a function of circuitry and so the ultimate experience will depend upon the components of that circuit. In humans, the experience of pain involves three components: The sensory discriminative (a/w locating the sensory experience in time and space and estimating relative intensity), the cognitive-evaluative (a/w evaluations of the meaning of the experience and probable outcome) and the affective-motivational (a/w negative affect and avoidance motivation). In humans, the medial and lateral divisions of the pain matrix both play a role in the experience. The lateral division involves the primary somatosensory cortex and accounts fully for the sensory-discriminative component of pain. The medial division projects incoming nociceptive signals through medial thalamic nuclei into the limbic brain and prefrontal cortex (a/w Scheme Retrieval, motor inhibition and attention Supervision) and anterior cingulate cortex (a/w Emotion/Memory, attention and response selection), also the hippocampus, the insula and the periaqueductal grey area. The medial division is responsible for the cognitive-evaluative and affective-motivational components of the experience. Not all animals possess all these ‘components’ (fish in particular), so it cannot be said that the experience of being stuck with a needle is the same for everything because not everything possesses the same neurological ‘equipment’. In short, it doesn’t matter if a TV broadcast is high-definition and colour, if your TV set is an old black and white set, then you’ll just experience a low definition black and white image. You might even be able to pick up TV signals on your radio, but you'll only hear the sound, you'll never see the picture. Learning is the most basic adaptive function of pain. Through a very basic association mechanism even fish learn to avoid places/behaviours that result in pain (or, shall we say, nociceptive activity). The exception is feeding. If a fish gets caught on a hook that will trigger activity in the nociceptive system, but it would be maladaptive for the fish to develop an aversion to feeding behaviour, so it doesn’t happen.

I wouldn't worry about it. According to Freud, everything had a basis in sex (or parents, or both). To be fair, he was very clever, and a lot of the ridicule he comes in for is due to people unfairly viewing his work through 21st century eyes. If you look at it in the context of the time, it makes more sense.

Yes, I know. I was just making the general point that the whole thing is based on the movement of ions, not electrons.

The differences have always been a bit hazy, but there has been some recent work on the topic. “ Personality disorders are described in the International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders (ICD-10) as ‘deeply ingrained and enduring behaviour patterns, manifesting themselves as inflexible responses to a broad range of personal and social situations’; they represent ‘either extreme or significant deviations from the way the average individual in a given culture perceives, thinks, feels, and particularly relates to others’ and are ‘developmental conditions, which appear in childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood’ (World Health Organization, 1992a). They are distinguished from mental illness by their enduring, potentially lifelong nature and by the assumption that they represent extremes of normal variation rather than a morbid process of some kind.” (Kendall, 2002). (see here) I think it’s the ‘judgemental’ part that most people (including Psychologists) squeal about. There is a difference between making observations and making judgements. Freud’s methods were flawed and as there is so little evidence to suggest that infants universally go through five fixed stages of psychosexual development (as Freud proposed), there are no grounds to make the assumption that adult personalities stem from fixation at any of these stages. In any event, the lay-usage of the term ‘anal retentive’ seems usually to be based more on the word ‘anal’ than any in-depth understanding of the term. It’s simply become a pseudo intellectual way of calling somebody an asshole. There are better models and measures of personality available and these generally avoid classifying people as ‘this type’ or ‘that type’. Rather, they concentrate on a number of reliable personality traits and then measure the degree to which people possess these traits. For example, the Five-factor Model (Otherwise known as the Big Five) has established five reliable factors in personality: Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism. Each of the factors is a category made up of constituent traits (i.e. relatively stable, long-term characteristics). For example, Agreeableness encompasses traits such as compassion and tendency towards cooperation. The Big Five as a measure of personality has several strengths. It is empirically based (e.g. Goldberg, 1993). It has high test-retest reliability, a number of the factors have a biological basis and there are a number of meta-analyses that confirm the predictive power of the model (predictive power is crucial to any measure of personality). However, rather than classifying individuals, it assumes these five factors are universal, and all individuals possess all of them, but in different proportions. Imagine a mixer board with slides for each of the factors where each person has all factors, but the slides are in different positions for each person. It’s not a perfect model and there are some criticisms, largely to do with the fact that the Big Five does not explain all human personality (e.g. religiosity, gender traits, sense of humour etc.), but it is fairly robust as far as it goes. Again, OCD is a clinical classification for a characteristic that everybody possesses. We all have obsessive-compulsive tendencies to a degree (e.g. many people develop little rituals in their daily lives that would cause anxiety if they did not perform them), but it’s only when they begin to interfere with normal function does it achieve clinical status. However, even OCD can be explained by the Big Five model. People who measure high on the conscientiousness and Neuroticism factors have a tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviours, but as I said, it’s only when these begin to interfere with normal function would they meet the diagnostic criteria for OCD. People who have to do exacting and repetitive work, often on their own, would ideally (according to the Big Five) score high on conscientiousness and low on extroversion and openness.

Is anal retentiveness a mental illness? You answer your own question. No it isn't. It's one of a the (proposed) stages of psychosexual development. Freudian stages of psychosexual development are: Oral (0-1 year), Anal (1-3 years), Phallic (3-5/6 years), Latency Period (5/6 –Puberty), Genital (puberty – maturity). The anal stage is one of those that has sub-stages. It passes through the anal-expulsive stage into the anal retentive stage. Broadly, the idea was that an individual had to successfully resolve the issues presented at each stage, or risk becoming fixed at the stage that was unresolved, which would then form the basis for the individual's personality type. It's a bit crap though. Proposing a causal link between normal life events (i.e. not significant events like abuse or other severe trauma) at 1-3 years of age and adult personality is pretty much a waste of time. Most modern theories of individual differences don't take Freud seriously. Coffee-shop readers of pop psychology still do though. There is no Oedipal stage of development. The Oedipal complex (Electra complex for females) is said to stem from the conflicting emotions they feel at puberty towards their parents (same and opposite sex). Failure to resolve the conflict means getting fixed as an Oedipal (or Electral) personality type. This happens during the Phallic stage of development. Anyway, short answer is no. Anal retentive is a personality type (according to Freud), not a mental illness. However, Freud's system of classification is flawed and of little use these days. Aww dude, come on! How come anybody with nothing to say but who happens to mentions Freud gets to post in Psychiatry and Psychology? Freud has bugger all to do with modern Psychology. He's only taught these days because introductory Psychology courses have to include an element of history (where modern theory came from; myth and method kind of stuff).

Are embryos human? That's a very strange question. Human embryos are human. Chicken embryos aren't. Nor are cat, horse, shark, hamster or camel embryos, nor any other embryo that isn't human. If your questionnaire is phrased the same way, you'll probably find that everybody considers a human embryo human. It's what differentiates human embryos from embryos of other species. Whether or not they consider a human embryo a human being is an entirely different question. I agree with Phi. You'd get a much better response rate if you were to post your questionnaire online (include a link to it). As Phi indicates, you do sound a bit sarcastic, and if you thought that might have been the case, it may have been wise to adjust your phrasing. Remember, you are trying to attract respondents. You are asking them to give you some of their 'precious lives' for nothing more than good will. It would serve you better to generate some good will to begin with.