Hyperactive

These are becoming increasingly tenuous.  Maybe i should abandon this for another method of naming the entries which actually refer to the content directly, but why change the habits of a lifetime?

Here's yesterday's main channel video:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/zT08U .  Mental illness is of course controversial, but i'm not planning to discuss that just now.  Right now, i want to point out that there is a much better way of understanding mental illness than in terms of delusion, including disorders seen as delusional.

Most psychoses involve delusions, including psychotic depression, bipolar, paranoia (or so-called "delusional disorder") and schizophrenia.  However, it's quite hard to pin down what makes a delusion distinctive.  They are generally defined in terms of false beliefs which persist in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but the trouble with that definition is that it applies to everyday false beliefs, many of which persist in the face of contrary evidence well beyond all reason.  It probably makes sense to adopt a tolerant attitude towards such beliefs, but this also indicates that delusion is probably not the best concept to use here.

Instead, i suggest that the overvalued idea is much more useful and inclusive of other mental health issues.  Overvalued ideas can be true and rationally held, but are the target of an unusually strong degree of focus.  Examples would include the rational but incorrect beliefs of paranoia, the irrational and incorrect ones of schizophrenia, and also the focus on self-blaming and negativity found with depression, the focus of fear in phobias, the unhealthy sexual desire for minors in paedophilia, the obsessive ideas in obsessive-compulsive disorder and so forth. In fact, it's hard to imagine any mental health problem, as opposed to organic brain dysfunction, which doesn't involve an overvalued idea.  As such, it's much more useful than the notion of delusion, which is really quite vague and has an "us and them"-type quality to it.

The thumbnail makes it look like i'm behind a glass door.  The idea was that unfocussed perception was akin to not seeing the world clearly, but in fact, given the subject of the video i think lack of focus is exactly what's needed sometimes.   People have, happily, taken this video and run with it on FB, and i like what they've said, but i want to take this in a somewhat different direction.  The overvalued idea works better, in my opinion, as a necessary condition for mental illness than delusion does.  The idea of delusion, to me, has a judgemental quality to it and includes the implication that there is an objective truth conferring authority, and it's also quite unhelpful when there is a symbolic meaning to a delusion, but aside from that, it tends only to work well for psychosis and not other areas such as paraphilias considered problematic, phobias, depression and the like.  Using the concept of overvalued ideas is far more productive than using that of delusion, which is not precisely definable and seems to imply that there are people out there who know the truth and others who don't.

Today's video is proving problematic, possibly due to the title, but i'm going to try to post it here anyway:

Yay!
! to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/lfi0w . The audio on this is unedited apart from a bit of amplification due to the subject matter.  This is about clicks, which are used by people all over the world but rarely in actual words.  The only languages which use clicks as ordinary speech sounds are the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa and the nearby though unrelated Bantu languages as loanwords, such as with Swahili and Zulu.  However, they do occur elsewhere, for instance one register of an Australian aboriginal languages uses an egressive click and around the Eastern Mediterranean, a tut represents the word "no" sometimes, so it can happen.  Apparently German also produces clicks on occasion, though i've never heard them.

Xhosa and Zulu therefore contain words with clicks in them, and in fact Xhosa (Nelson Mandela's mother tongue) has enough for a tongue-twister:  Iqaqa laziqikaqika kwaze kwaqhawaka uqhoqhoqha - the skunk rolled over and ruptured its larynx.  This is presumably a loose translation as the sentence does not seem to contain a Native American loanword and skunks are not native to Southern Africa.

Some clicks, such as the bilabial and retroflex clicks, are among the rarest sounds in human language, being found in only single languages.  Others are found in interjections and other utterances in English, such as the clopping noise, the "tsk" or "tut" of irritation, or the kissing sound.  They're unusually loud and, also unusually, can be pronounced while holding one's breath, although i exaggerate this in the video because in fact there are some other speech sounds which are like this.  The San people may also be particularly good at making clicks because their hard palates are higher than most other people's.

One of the reasons i spend so long fiddling with the audio on YouTube videos is my habit of inserting alveolar clicks at the start of words where other English speakers would use a glottal stop.  These are sometimes simultaneously articulated with other consonants such as S, and i often have to spend ages removing them from the audio files.  This demonstrates, however, that like other Germanic languages, Arabic and Hebrew, there are no words which always begin with a vowel in English.  However, English often elides the glottal stop in the middle of a phrase.  This does not occur in most other Germanic languages.  For instance, i once attempted to say "Das ist ein Problem" in German (That's a problem) but it got heard as "Das ist dein Problem" - "that's your problem".  Unlike German however, some English accents, including mine in a certain register, use glottal stops as phonemes, as in the Cockney "wo' a lo' o li'l bo'ls".  Danish also has a glottal stop as a phoneme but not in the same context.

A related subject is that of the pharyngeal plosives.  Just as it may be that the Bushmen of the Kalahari and their female relatives, in other words the San people, can pronounce clicks well due to their anatomical differences, the pharyngeal plosives are probably absent from all languages because many people lack the necessary muscles to pronounce them, a problem which is particularly pronounced in the Far East where something like one person in five cannot completely close their pharynx voluntarily.  This means that there would be a widespread unaddressable speech impediment in a large fraction of the population of speakers of any language which used pharyngeal stops, which is presumably the reason why they never occur.  However, other pharyngeal consonants are widespread in Afro-Asiatic languages such as Arabic, Egyptian and Biblical Hebrew, which raises the question of whether people from the Far East find it harder to pronounce them.

This is a kind of continuation of this:

There are certain things i can't seem to stop myself doing.  One of them is going "≠", which might look to you like a box, in which case sorry.  So, the answer, in time-honoured permacultural style, and possibly also martial arts style, though i wouldn't know, is to turn the problem into a solution.  It also gives me an excuse to give it a title which can't be detected by the YouTube search engine but which, in all probability, would make it the very first video on the site if they were put in alphabetical order, which is presumably never done.  It's a kill-or-cure approach really.

Yesterday's activities are tiring and time-consuming.  I still really want to do the pocket universes video but i'm going to have to find a way of doing the graphics.  In the meantime, i feel really that it proved to be surprisingly, how to put it, slack.  In case you're interested, here it is:

I'm not posting the doobly-do.  These are very time-consuming videos to make, so they make it harder to fit anything else in, so to speak.  As 'twere.  I'm quite happy with how the saturation changed the look of the velour.  Velour is nasty though, innit?

Unhappy and wrong :-)

A blog entry without a new video this time, in order to avoid getting ahead of myself.  More than one video a day means spam to a lot of people and it's bad enough as it is.  Nonetheless, there will be a rather old vid on here in a bit.

Just to clear up something else, this is not about me being unhappy, as i'm not.  Whether i'm right or wrong is another issue.  Anyway, Slartibartfast once said "I'd far rather be happy than right, any day".  I find this statement interesting because of what it illustrates about human nature and behaviour, except that it's more likely to be the other way round.  A whole load of people, possibly the majority, would seem to prefer a sense of certainty to happiness.

I'm sure we all have mental health problems and have friends with them because that's the nature of mental health, or perhaps the nature of the medical paradigm as applied to the human mind.  Even so, we shouldn't trivialise the problems which arise when people are frankly mentally ill in such a way that they believe major vendettas are being conducted against them personally by the government (when others disagree about that) or they find their situations so hard to deal with that they throw themselves off bridges, to give two examples.

Mental health is a huge and controversial subject of course, and i am going to have to avoid saying as much as i might want to in order not to go on and on to an even greater extent than i usually do.  As a result, much of what i'm about to say is likely to look simplistic, and i apologise for that in advance.  One thing which does strike me as a unifying feature of most mental illness is the presence of an idea on which the person is unusually strongly focussed, without reference to its truth-value.  That is, it can be correct but is intrusive or one feels a compulsion to pay attention to it which others tend to see as excessive.  However, i don't want to talk about that now.

There are many examples of false beliefs and belief systems which restrict people's ability to be happy, and of course many true beliefs and belief systems which do the same.  When the set of beliefs is false, however, one sometimes has the impression that the person holding them is so attached to them that they would in fact prefer to continue believing them than become happy, even if they are intellectually pretty convinced they're wrong.  My interpretation of this is that people prefer the sense of conviction that they have that the world, or their world, is a particular way to a world or life which seems more positive but is based on shakier foundations - they tend to screen out the sense of inherent uncertainty with which we could all be living if we could escape from our own world views.  It also seems that they sometimes identify quite strongly with their beliefs, and also that they have proceeded down a long tunnel of beliefs which reinforce each other until they want to hang onto them just to feel they haven't wasted their time or spent a long time being wrong.  The beliefs become entrenched and their removal becomes quite threatening.

That's one aspect.  Another is that the nouns can be wrong but the verbs right, i.e. the literal truth of what someone believes can be false but there is a deeper and in a sense more meaningful level on which it's true.  The mistake, if it is one, is to mistake the metaphor for reality.  For instance, one might feel that one's partner is trying to take over the world and is secretly in control of all governments.  That's a belief which would be incorrect for most or all people (I would say "all" because of my view of the nature of power).  However, it may also express that person's impression that their partner is dominating them unduly, and that may in fact sometimes be so.  Therefore, on many occasions the question of whether something is literally true or not, by which i mean whether i agree with that perception or not, is completely beside the point and a complete blind alley.  That doesn't mean one should agree with the person - confirming such a belief would often mean, for instance, that they have received external corroboration for a very frightening possibility and that won't do them any good - but it would at the same time often be inappropriate only to engage with what they're saying in terms of a medical model because that amounts to a failure to listen or take that person seriously.

This is not even always about mental health.  Belief systems which are entirely false and unsupported by evidence in literal terms, which all of us probably have, can still be true in an important non-literal sense, and it's not always productive to get fixated on the idea of whether they're literally true.  That in itself would be an example of the kind of exactly the kind of excessive focus which characterises mental illness itself.

OK, so today's video is old.  It dates from the time before i attempted to keep this channel's videos short and sweet, it's on a cruddy camera (for video - it's a nice stills camera) and there are probably a load of other problems with it, but i humbly crave your attention.  Here it is: