Repression and its impact

Psychology was not separate from philosophy until the late 1800s.

• During the 17th century, philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism - that the mind and body were two entities that interact to complete the human experience.
• While early philosophers relied on methods such as observation and logic, today's psychologists use scientific methodologies to draw conclusions about human thought and behavior.
• Physiological research on the brain and behavior also contributes to psychology.

• During the mid-1800s, a German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt outlined many of the major connections between the science of physiology and the study of human thought and behavior.
• He viewed psychology as the study of human consciousness and tried to apply experimental methods to study internal mental processes.
• His processes are known as introspection and seen as unreliable and unscientific today, but it helped to set the stage for future experimental methods.
• The opening of his psychology lab In 1879 is considered to be the official start of psychology as a separate scientific discipline.

Aphantasia was first described in the early 1800s by Francis Galton in a paper on mental imagery. It was not until 2015 that the phenomenon was further studied and the term was coined.

One of the major studies was with a patient who had undergone a minor surgery in 2005 and later could no longer generate visual images within the ‘mind’s eye’. The details of the study were published in 2010, which led to many others coming up with similar symptoms.

This was a technique used by the researchers to help test the image forming inside the brain of the individuals.

The experiment led to the finding that a recent viewing of an image had no correlation with the imagining of the image.

Mechanism motto: I’m going to stay as far away from that stressful thing as possible.

The problem with avoidance: Things don’t go away just because you ignore them. That assignment will still need to get done. That conflict with that co-worker will need to be resolved eventually.

Mechanism motto: There’s no way that’s going to happen.

The problem with denial: Denial is more than just avoiding a potentially threatening thought or circumstance—it involves vehemently denying the fact that it even exists. It blinds you with unrealistic optimism.

Unconscious actions serve an evolutionary purpose. And they make our lives easier in many ways.

*When you're reading something for example, your mind is also filtering a huge amount of sensory information, scanning the environment for relevant stimuli (food starting to burn on the stove or someone screaming), and even processing internal stimuli like thoughts and emotions related to previous meetings and discussions. All of these processes occur simultaneously, some more automatically and with less conscious awareness than others. If we were to give all of them the same amount of focus and attention, they would overwhelm us.

William James described in the the late 19th century how mental processes that are abundantly practiced and rehearsed escape our awareness and begin operating autonomously and without conscious intentionality.

This post-conscious automaticity that James studies ensures that with practice, we can master new skills to a degree that we can eventually execute them with efficiency without having to overthink their every aspect.

Changes in consciousness can result in changes in perception, thinking, and interpretations of the world.

• Some different states of consciousness include dreams, hallucinations, hypnosis, meditation, sleep, and states induce by psychoactive drugs.
• Altered levels of consciousness can occur and may be caused by medical or mental conditions that change awareness, e.g., coma, confusion, delirium, disorientation, lethargy, and stupor.

Changes of consciousness may be a sign of medical conditions, for example, aneurysm, brain infection, brain tumor or injury, dementia, drug use, epilepsy, heart disease, heatstroke, low blood sugar, poisoning, or shock.

If you think you are experiencing changes in consciousness, talk to your doctor.

Many people are in a state of emotional distress due to a situation like boredom, frustration, or being overwhelmed.

Food seems soothing to them in this state of dissociation, causing them to eat mindlessly, something called ‘stress eating’. This is a way to mentally escape or detach from the existing unpleasant situation.

Food is a temporary and suboptimal substitute for any emotional requirement. To break this pattern, one can try to express their emotional problems to an empathetic person from one’s inner circle of friends and loved ones.

Emotional pain can be corrected if it is expressed to a listener who is able to understand and acknowledge the same.

1. Thoughts like "what if there actually are ghosts" create excitement.  Seeking this kind of experiences may be a kind of logical reality-check.

2. Such experiences may evoke different types of repressed complexes or ideas that we may wish to process.

3. Freud claims that most people are never completely freed from the fear of darkness, loneliness and silence. 

Trust between two people at the beginning of a relationship enables the kind of sharing that can create a soulmate.

After analyzing 5.5 million daily records of how office workers are using their computer (based on what the user self-identified as “productive” work), they found that the top 10% of productive workers all worked an average of 52 minutes before taking a 17 minute break.

Intense focus actually makes us less focused in the long run. Instead of thinking about the problem without stop, we need to create distractions that take our attention away from the task at hand so we can come back at it with a fresh mind.