Schizophrenics immune to optical illusion?
April 8th, 2009
Photo by MeLa de Gypsie
According to this article at Wired.com, the illusionist David Copperfield (not to be confused with the Dickens character) can’t pull over on people with schizophrenia, as they “are undeterred by implausibility.”1
Using the In the “hollow mask illusion” test (in which a sculpture of a concave face appears to be a normal face), healthy participants, even if they are aware of the illusion, remain optically tricked by it. Schizophrenics, in contrast, see “hollow face for what it is. About seven out of 1000 Americans suffer from the disease, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and poor planning. Some psychologists believe this dissociation from reality may result from an imbalance between bottom-up and top-down processing — a hypothesis ripe for testing using the hollow mask illusion.”
The article also says that drunk or high people are also able to perceive the concave reality of the mask as well, which tends to cause one to see a potential connection between Schizophrenia and substance abuse, which has been asserted by more and more scientists.
Diagnosis of alcohol use disorders in schizophrenia – Drake
Alcohol Use and Abuse in Schizophrenia: A Prospective … – Drake
Prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in schizophrenic … – Soyka
- Understanding why patients with schizophrenia do not perceive the hollow-mask illusion using dynamic causal modelling” by Danai Dima, Jonathan P. Roiser, Detlef E. Dietrich, Catharina Bonnemann, Heinrich Lanfermann, Hinderk M. Emrich, Wolfgang Dillo, NeuroImage, In Press, Available online 24 March 2009 ↩
If all celebrities are really just narcassists what does that say about the rest of us who pore over the tabloid stories about them?
Back in days of old I remember watching Love Lines on MTV with Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla. Teens used to call in with sex and/or drug questions, Adam would use them as comic fodder for ridicule and then Dr. Drew would kick in with some sage pop-psych advice in the course of a few minutes. Did it help these kids? Who the heck knows. But it was good watching to keep up with the the state of teen angst. That was a long time ago. I sort of thought Dr. Drew’s 15 minutes were up.
Not so, as it turns out. According to this story at Wired, Pinsky is back with a new book which asserts that:
1) Most all celebrities are suffer from narcissistic personality disorders even before they becomefamous;
2) Hollywood, the press and basically you and I encourage them to become even more mentally unbalanced by the attention we collectively heap on them;
3) All this irresponsible behavior becomes normalized in society and replicated by other budding narcissists who post similar drunken, drugged or sexed-up antics on their Youtube videos and Bebo profiles. Read the rest of this entry »
Deconstructing Psycho Killer Clowns
February 7th, 2009
“there’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” — Lon Cheney
Self portrait by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy
Mark Dery has posted on Scribed his essay on “clownaphobia and the Evil Clown as cultural icon” from his 1999 book, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic).
Dery looks at the strange obsession with evil clowns across the frantic landscape of American pop culture covering violence caused by clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, The Joker Stephen King’s IT, and Quentin Tarantino among others topics related to depictions of clowns, perceptions of clowns, and actual psychotic clowns themselves.
As someone who still remembers clown-with-hatchet nightmares from childhood (c’mon, who didn’t have these) reading this kept reminding me of The Simpsons episode where Bart lays awake in bed muttering, “can’t sleep, clown will eat me” due to the macabre Crusty the Clown headboard. Why people so easily see the dark side of clowns is one thing. Why so many disturbed people are drawn to clowning is another.