Psychology - Psychology Help from gamegene perspective.
The Two Most Important Emotions
Cool
Cool people are opposed not by nerds but by intense people,
by meta-players, self-conscious people or by losers. The cool people play games like
conversations or driving a car without
showing how or why they do it. They fit into the fashion
of the moment as though life was always that way. The fraud is never acknowledged.
Sucker
The most horrifying belief one can have
about oneself is to feel like a sucker, or a loser by one's own stupidity. As there is "neither
good nor bad but that which thinking makes so",
a victim can only come into being when they are somehow made to believe that they are a sucker.
Self Massage is not possible.
Two must play that game my friend.
Geoffrey Hamilton
November 12, 2005
When I lightly massaged my wife's eyebrows it made her swoon. When she tried to do so
with her own fingers she said it didn't feel all that good and asked me why. I answered
that massage is a particular game. Here's how. It has a goal - a profound sense of relaxation -
rules (someone else must do it, not too hard, etc.), play, strategy, emotional rewards: everything a game needs. But
this game called massage means more.
The overt goal of a massage is a profound
sense of relaxation, but the actual goal is a profound state of touch - this is the game.
The most basic emotional need in mammals is the genetically induced goal of touch.
Babies of all kinds need it as much as food. As adults we still need it, but we have
more options regarding how we can obtain it.
Unlike sex, which can be self administered,
touch massage is achieved only though another life form's game of giving touch. If we
believe the contact on our skin is part of someone's game of touching 'me' then we
will have neurotransmitters like oxytocin and
dopamine released which feeds a matching 'mouth', so to
speak, inside our brain.
With this self-regulating game cycle we feed ourselves, if others help us. But
this only works provided there are these three conditions. First, we must believe a seperate game player, like a pet or spouse, is on the other side of that contact.
Secondly, the touch must, like another game called dance, have an artistic quality that is
beyond rationality or description. Finally, it must be touch made by an approved game player, or it will not be played. Massage is still touch just more ritualized, like ballroom dancing.
There is a great need for more touch in the world, but there are a lot more inhibitions than advocates. The game of massage will always be a good excuse to touch someone, as will dance, but for those hung up on other kinds of games, like monasticism, or fridgedism, there are few other options to hope for.
Gh
Psychology
A continuum exists in all aspects of biology including
psychology. The are no deseases or pathology or healthy minds.
The labels attached are context manipulation by those whose games are
on the go and who want to win. Whether the label is "ant" or "Doug on Wednesday" or
"Doug on Saturday" an arbitrary choice is being made for an arbitrary game and anything can be
labeled in any direction. Psychology
will gain as an investigation when it accepts this and takes its labels less seriously.
For a full article regarding the counter-productive use of ethics go to
Psychology and the Interference of Ethics
Time is a sense equal or more important than the so called 5 senses
Time senses livescience.com
Prisoner Games
: In Spandau Prison Albert Speer and Rudolph Hess show what the brain needs and doesn't need.
Geoffrey Hamilton
Blog, March 7, 2006
A new documentary on Albert Speer called
SPEER & HITLER
played on HistoryTelevision this week. In it we are shown reenactments
of Speer's time in Spandau Prison with among other prisoners
Rudolph Hess. The key events of that time in prison were Speer's particular kind of
activity and Hess' peculiar non-activity.
More exactly Speer's games in a reduced context and Hess' lethargy.
This situation is important because it illustrates what happens in reduced
contexts to anyone. A context here is what is typically and usually defined as a context, but it is moreover
a game that an individual plays with as a reference point for
all actions and thoughts. The context as reference point can be a cultural norm like a national constitution for example. A reduced
context is the above cultural norm that is made smaller in some way.
In Spandau prison
the options and norms are minimized and in a very documented way so the context reduction
of Speer is a useful example for understanding this important aspect of human psychology.
Albert Speer was a talented architect and manager who willingly led the constructive
side of the Nazis and so was jailed for 20 years. During his first few years in jail Speer was
unable to accept his newly reduced context and slowly had a psychological meltdown.
Finally he gave up his thoughts of a grand past,
stopped relating his games to the whole world and instead made his small context the whole world. He
built a stone garden with temporary stackings of brick that looked like skyscrapers.
He would surround a green the size of a bed with these faux buildings
and lie down to then imagine a city growing up around himself.
Like a child he used his imagination here, but unlike a child, who can't actually make cities like
he can, he was not allowed to use his
manifest skills and build the real thing.
When he got over his middle age highbrow pomposity and accepted his reduced context he was
able to be satisfied practicing this architecture game however it could be accomplished. This
playing like a child was not about learning, it was about creating new meanings, happy meanings.
Speer's second reduced context game illustrates the same point but
involves Hess. Speer would sometimes walk laps in the prison yard. One day he said to Hess that he was
going to walk east around the world. He measured the laps and said seven laps equaled a kilometre.
Hess suggested that Speer use a tree's seeds to count laps by putting a handful in one pocket and
transferring one to the other pocket for each lap completed. Speer could keep track afterwards
in his cell.
Speer immediately got into the spirit of the game and traveled via his imagination
and his knowledge of geography as far as Mexico before being released in 1968. Even in his
letters he maintained this game and had his friends outside prison interested in all his adventures.
Speer was mentally healthy after jail as a result of all these games and went on to write
his memoirs which made him a rich man for a second time.
Hess, in contrast, never did more than mope around. After helping Speer to begin his
faux journey he just munched on the tree's seeds, or stared at walls and waited to get out. That
day finally came for Hess after forty years - but only through his own suicide.
The reduced context of a prison may seem like an unusual situation in which to discover a common
human nature, but, as with brain damage people whose actions indicate what a missing brain part does, the
study of prison life indicates what is missing and what is still there. What is missing in Spandau are
big goals and grand designs. What is there is that the satisfaction that can be found in the smallest
of goals and tiniest of playing fields feels the same and is the same.
Let's, for the sake of a fair well mind experiment, think of the future
expanded, gigantic, huge, spectacular context as the normal for today with
its futuristic teleportation and
telepathy, and
think of what you have now in your real life with your primitive cars and cell phones as
a reduction of that futuristic setting.
By thinking this way it turns out you live in a kind of prison life and can be equally contented to
have it so as you were before you realized it was a prison. Really, it turns out all eras are
prisons that cut us off from greater possibilities.
All nations, cultures and cliques are prisons of reduced contexts which most people never think
to challenge and so they travel to their imaginary Mexicos and toy skyscrapers and are as
happy and healthy as Speer in Spandau.
Gh
Mike Douglas character: "You like playing games, don't you?"
Sharon Stone's character: "I have a degree in psychology, it goes with the turf. Games are fun."
Basic Instinct, 1992
"...it is for a man to have a good opinion of himself, give himself a bit of a boost to win
his own self-esteem before he can win that of others. And since for the most part happiness
consists in being willing to be what you are, my
{the goddess of stupidity's] Self-love has provided a short cut to it..."" Erasmus, Praise of Folly (36), 1509
"good friends avoid each other after they've been humiliated.
Great friends pretend nothing happened in the first place"
Gabrial, Desperate Housewives 2005
"There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go.
I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that
it whittles the world down to a more manageable size." Adaptation
2002, Nic cage Reading Streep's book.
"Son, this is the game. I'm playing his ass.... This shit's chess, it ain't checkers....
The sooner you can match what's in your head with what's going on in the real world, the better
you're gonna feel. ...Make detective, you play the game, you grow wise, and then you can change things."
Denzel Washington to Ethane Hawke in Training Day 2001.
A Red Balloon Died
How emotions do not always have a history.
November 22, 2005
The episode of Desperate Housewives first broadcast November 20, 2005 has a scene where
"shallow" Gabrielle
is confronted by an unconventional therapist who tells her that a red balloon he hands to her
is going to represent her miscarried baby and she is supposed to let it soar into the sky.
Often Gabrielle has denied that she is grieving for the baby, but now the mere
presentation of this game to her has
made her think of the balloon as her unborn child and that
this will now be a symbolic way to say goodbye.
She struggles to let the balloon go until she cries.
Ostensively she cries about the baby which seems to be the writer's point.
But this is
a thought experiment who cares what the writer thinks......
continued
all essays
