"I'm currently reading a book that I had read a little while back. I
decided to read it again and go through the exercises since my anxiety
levels have been high. I wanted to point out some things that were
mentioned in the book concerning out "thinking self" verses our
"observing self". I think it would be helpful to others here, and may
even help with those who experience health anxiety as well.
To
sum it up, your thinking self is the part of you that thinks, plans,
compares, judges, daydreams, analyzes...etc. Your observing self
however, does not think and is responsible for attention, awareness and
focus. Your observing self can pay attention to your thoughts but it
cannot produce them. Both, however, are two distinctive aspects of what
we commonly refer to as "the mind".
The example given in the
book to describe this, is to imagine you are playing tennis. If you are
focused on the game, then your attention (observing self) is directed at
the ball. Now imagine that while you are playing, you start having
different thoughts...I better hit this...I hope I don't get hit in the
face...etc. Those thoughts would be your thinking self. Now, if you were
to start paying attention to your thinking self, then your observed
self would be distracted from the game, as it would now be paying too
much attention to your thinking self and your performance in the tennis
match would now be affected. (I hope that makes sense!)
So, we
really have two aspects of our minds at play, both of which interact and
communicate with one another every day for all of us. Your observing
self is aware of what you are thinking or feeling at any given moment
and your thinking self (as described in the book) is....
"like a
radio playing in the background. Most of the time, it is the doom and
gloom show, broadcasting 24 hours a day...reminding us of bad things
from the past...warning of future dangers...and giving updates of all
that's wrong with us".
What we need to realize though is that the
radio will never turn off and the more we try to tune out the
"broadcast" or turn it off, the worse it gets. The thing is though, that
it isn't only those of us with anxiety who have these crazy thoughts
broadcasting 24/7 in our minds. We do, however, react to these thoughts
in an unhealthy manner. And that is where your observing self comes into
play.
One needs to practice techniques where the observing self
will not show these unhelpful thoughts from our thinking selves much
attention. Actively trying to just ignore the thoughts doesn't work.
Er...it may work actually, but only for a short while, until you succumb
to the same thoughts later down the road. The point is to teach you how
to gain the ability to let the thoughts from your thinking self come
and go as they please, while acting on those thoughts, ideas, or what
have you, that are helpful, and acknowledging the thoughts that are
unhelpful then turning your focus/attention i.e...your observing self,
elsewhere.
I was doing some of the breathing exercises
recommended in the book. The suggestion is to take 10 deep breaths...you
can start with a lower number...as slowly as you can. As your doing the
breathing, focus on the movement of your body as you inhale and again
when you exhale. (the rise and fall of the ribcage, expansion of your
lungs, etc.) Try to focus completely on only these exercises. While you
are doing this try to let any thoughts that pop into your mind (which
they will) come and go as they please while continuing to keep your
focus/observing self on the breathing exercises...which is much easier
said than done!
When doing this exercise, it allows one to see
how easily we can get roped into certain thoughts, while letting others
just pass on by. I also found it to be very helpful in recognizing just
how damn crazy my thinking self can be at times! Lol."
The Human Givens Foundation exists to promote the understanding of and access to established knowledge about the 'givens' of human nature and to help people and communities thrive by raising support for projects that further the practical application of these organising ideas within mental health, the family, education and the workplace.
Friday, 13 April 2012
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Problems with working out how the brain works from fMRI scans
More analysis problems with brain scanning research have come to light in a new study just released in Nature Neuroscience and expertly covered by the BPS Research Digest.
It demonstrates that the common practice of using the same data set to
identify an area of interest and then home in on this area to test
further ideas can lead to misleading results.
This usually occurs when brain activation is compared between two conditions where participants are doing different tasks. A whole brain analysis looks for statistically significant differences at every point in the brain.
It’s very complete, but because of the large amount of data, but the data also contains a large amount of noise, so it’s hard to find areas which you can confidently say are more active in one condition than the other.
An alternative approach is to only look at activation in one area of the brain, perhaps an area where it is most likely to occur based on what we already know about how the brain works. This is called region of interest analysis (often done with the wonderfully named ‘MarsBaR‘ tool) and because the data set is much smaller, it is more likely to find a reliable difference.
However, some studies do a whole brain analysis to find likely areas, and then home in using region of analysis tools to examine them ‘more closely’. This ‘magnifying glass’ metaphor seems intuitive, but because your using the same data set to create and test hypothesis, it can be problematic.
It’s like shooting arrows randomly into a wall and then drawing a target around ones which landed together. Someone looking at wall afterwards might think the archer was a good shot, but this impression is caused by the after-the-event painting of the target, and the same problem could affect these brain imaging studies.
After the recent furore over the ‘voodoo correlations’ study, this new study is markedly more measured in its language and doesn’t list individual offenders.
Indeed, the ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ paper was actually retitled on publication to ‘Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition’, presumably to avoid stirring the pot any further.
However, this new study takes a similar tack, demonstrating through several careful simulations that ‘double dipping’ a data set is likely to distort the results just due to statistical problems.
From the BPS Research Digest:
Link to PubMed entry for study.
This usually occurs when brain activation is compared between two conditions where participants are doing different tasks. A whole brain analysis looks for statistically significant differences at every point in the brain.
It’s very complete, but because of the large amount of data, but the data also contains a large amount of noise, so it’s hard to find areas which you can confidently say are more active in one condition than the other.
An alternative approach is to only look at activation in one area of the brain, perhaps an area where it is most likely to occur based on what we already know about how the brain works. This is called region of interest analysis (often done with the wonderfully named ‘MarsBaR‘ tool) and because the data set is much smaller, it is more likely to find a reliable difference.
However, some studies do a whole brain analysis to find likely areas, and then home in using region of analysis tools to examine them ‘more closely’. This ‘magnifying glass’ metaphor seems intuitive, but because your using the same data set to create and test hypothesis, it can be problematic.
It’s like shooting arrows randomly into a wall and then drawing a target around ones which landed together. Someone looking at wall afterwards might think the archer was a good shot, but this impression is caused by the after-the-event painting of the target, and the same problem could affect these brain imaging studies.
After the recent furore over the ‘voodoo correlations’ study, this new study is markedly more measured in its language and doesn’t list individual offenders.
Indeed, the ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ paper was actually retitled on publication to ‘Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition’, presumably to avoid stirring the pot any further.
However, this new study takes a similar tack, demonstrating through several careful simulations that ‘double dipping’ a data set is likely to distort the results just due to statistical problems.
From the BPS Research Digest:
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and colleagues analysed all the fMRI studies published in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Journal of Neuroscience, in 2008, and found that 42 per cent of these 134 papers were guilty of performing at least one non-independent selective analysis – what Kriegeskorte’s team dub “double dipping”.Link to BPS Research Digest on the fMRI analysis problems.
This is the procedure, also condemned by the Voodoo paper, in which researchers first perform an all-over analysis to find a brain region(s) that responds to the condition of interest, before going on to test their hypothesis on data collected in just that brain region. The cardinal sin is that the same data are used in both stages.
A similarly flawed approach can be seen in brain imaging studies that claim to be able to discern a presented stimulus from patterns of activity recorded in a given brain area. These are the kind of studies that lead to “mind reading” headlines in the popular press. In this case, the alleged statistical crime is to use the same data for the training phase of pattern extraction and the subsequent hypothesis testing phase.
Link to PubMed entry for study.
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