This article is a great read: Eight Myths about Video Game Play.

Video game playing has been attacked by the media (among others) as something which promotes violence in youth. This is just wrong. If you look at the statistics, far more non-violent people play video games than do violent people. Or rather, most of the people who play video games are not violent people and most likely won't bring a gun to school and shoot up their friends because Counterstrike made them believe it was cool.

It irks me when the media blames violence on media. I also find it ironic.

I normally wouldn't include NSFW videos, or use NSFW language on my blog -- but this is a definite exception. And this why I love these celebrities:

I can't stress enough how important it is that people vote in this upcoming election. This is our future that we're talking about. And whichever candidate you think has what it takes to run this country, then vote for them.

Also, the VP debate is on tonight at 6:00 (PDT). Watch it, learn from it, and think about it.

This is from a paper I wrote for a peace and conflict studies class. It's not strictly psychology, but I did talk a little bit about the Milgram Obedience Study in making my point. I edited the original copy upon finding some grammatical errors, but that was the extent.

Before I paste my paper in, I do want to clarify my religious position. I am an atheist, specifically a secular humanist. I follow the Buddhist philosophy of living life. I do not think any one religion is superior to all other religions. For one thing, I do not know enough about religion to make that kind of claim. What I do believe, however, is that religious interference into politics and public interactions can and often does create large problems. I firmly believe that no one religion has the right answer and that, without God(s) coming down and showing themselves to us, pointing at a specific religion as the right one, it is impossible to know which religion is the right one. I do respect people's right to be religious; I do not think people have the right to inflict their religion and beliefs upon others out of moral superiority.

The thesis of my paper is: Religion is not the problem; rather, it acts as an enabler, giving rise to preachers asking for blind obedience instead of embracing an intellectual process. The problem lies in the adherents of the religion buying into absolute truth claims and blindly obeying.

“Authentic religion engages the intellect as people wrestle with mystery of existence and the challenges of living in an imperfect world,” (Kimball 82). Religion starts out as a new, often progressive, way of thinking, usually with morals of how people should live and treat each other. In its infancy, Christianity was revolutionary with Jesus’ teachings of peace and love for the enemy as well as the neighbor. It began as religion centered upon a pacifistic mind-set before it was legalized in the 4th century by Constantine. After that, Christian warriors began appearing in the Roman army. More and more, Christians became missionaries obsessed with spreading the word to world, convinced of the rightness of their religion over any other religion. This is counter-intuitive to the foundational basis of religion. In my personal experience, religion has served simply as a lens for understanding the world and coming to terms with our inevitable deaths. I have not encountered a religion which I have felt to be the right religion, or even the best religion. The only differences I have seen is the way in which the followers of the religion react to people of other religions, and what the leaders of those religions demand from their followers. Modern Christianity’s adherents strive to rebuke the theory of evolution simply because it is not in line with its doctrine of Genesis. Instead, they invented Creationism and attempted to make it more scientific sounding by calling it Intelligent Design in order to co-opt those members who may be more scientifically oriented. On the opposite side, the Dalai Lama once said that if science and Buddhism clash on ideologies, then it is Buddhism which should reform—not science (Gyatso). In this sense, Christianity and Buddhism reflect polar opposites of the obedience coin: blind and authentic. “Authentic obedience is never blind” (Gray 1) whereas “blind obedience is a sure sign of corrupt religion,” (Kimball 82). The difference between these two religions is one of absolutes. Buddhism has a deep suspicion of absolutes (Gyatso). Incidentally, Gyatso was the Dalai Lama who declared “if the words of the Buddha and the findings of modern science contradict each other, then the former have to go” (Paine). Creationism, on the part of Christianity, does not exemplify the Dalai Lama’s perspective that religion should conform to the empirical findings based on research. Rather, creationism is an underhanded attempt to modify reality to fit a doctrine; it is not an attempt to modify belief in the face of evidence. This is only one way in which Christianity asks for blind obedience from its adherents. However, it is probably one of the most publicized examples and sparks wide-ranging debates in the media and government as to whether or not creationism has a basis in science. While it may be the leaders who may choose to encourage blind obedience, it is the decision of the adherents to go along. “When individual believers abdicate personal responsibility and yield to the authority of a charismatic leader or become enslaved to particular ideas or teachings, religion can easily become the framework for violence and destruction,” (Kimball 82). So how is it that people choose to blindly follow orders given by authority figures? Milgram’s Obedience Study enlightened the world about how peer pressure, particularly from authority, can be very effective. Milgram said that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” (Rupert). One of the most potentially important findings from Milgram’s experiments on obedience is that people easily succumb to peer pressure. In other words, “just say no” is not always enough. This can have an exponential effect: the more people there are who blindly obey, the more likely any given individual following the same doctrine will blindly obey. Blind obedience cannot be blamed on charismatic leadership. “On the contrary, [charismatic leadership] is a vital and central feature of every religious tradition … [Ghandi and King] did not command total obedience to their deeply held beliefs and teachings … Those who embraced their movements did so voluntarily,” (Kimball 93). Charismatic leadership only becomes bad when those leaders demand blind obedience. It becomes worse when people follow. With all of that, where does the rising problem of blind obedience fully come into play? The number of people in the religion does seem to really have an impact, except as a cascading effect. I would say that the majority of the blame for this particular problem lies in the acceptance of absolute truths. Religions which preach absolute truths can rapidly degenerate into religions which demand blind obedience. However, the two are not mutually exclusive; having said that, absolute truths and blind obedience do hang together. Buddhism strives to stay away from and be suspicious of absolute truths, much like science – something the Dalai Lama finds awe-inspiring (Gyatso). According to the Dalai Lama, Buddhism and science share, at the heart, significant commonalities: a deep suspicion of absolute truth, a preference to account for evolution and the “emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect” (Gyatso), and the role of empiricism as a method of learning and understanding. The key here is the suspicion of absolute truth rather than the acceptance of it. This is what ultimately forms the difference between an open and intellectually inspiring religion, and one which rejects other forms of thought and does not embrace ideologies which do not conform to the absolute truths central to that religion. The problem does not necessarily lie in blind obedience. It would seem that blind obedience is a symptom of absolute truths found within a religion. If the religion does not adhere to absolute truths concerning human behavior, creation, and other ideas, how can it demand blind obedience? It cannot.

References: Kimball, Charles. When Religion Becomes Evil. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Catholic Canon Law (Gray) Mind and Life Institute (Gyatso) Boston News (Paine) New Life: Milgram (Rupert)

This post won't exactly deal with psychology (if at all), but instead Too Human, which I started playing recently. And by recently, I mean 2 days ago.

I haven't finished the game yet, so I don't know how it ends. So far, however, I have found the plot to be adequate. There are some things which, if you don't pay close enough attention, may confuse you later in the game. The premise of the game isn't stated too clearly, and I didn't really know that I was participating in an ongoing war until about an hour in the game. You start out in middle (end?) of the war. However, despite that, it's decent as far as plot goes and I have enjoyed it. It's not as in depth as one of my most favorite games Mass Effect, but it's more than a lot of games seem to have. One of my selling points for games is the depth and intricacy of the plot. Otherwise, I feel like I'm simply playing a hack 'n slash and while those can be fun, they're not exactly stimulating. I like games that make me think.

One thing that irks me is the camera system. I simply don't like it. The player has no control over the camera aside from how close to the character they want it to be. Other than that, the angle (which is the more important aspect IMO) is essentially uncontrollable. It could be that I'm so used to controlling my camera angle and simply cannot handle not being able to control it. For the most part, the game is fairly decent at giving you a good angle. But sometimes, it flies way out to some funky angle or goes in front of you.

I'm obviously not a big fan of not being able to control me view. However, I think it's that much worse in Too Human because the game decides the angle for you. In Diablo II for instance, I am able to tolerate the lack of camera control because it's a static camera. If I can't control the camera, I'd rather have it static than move about of its own accord.

I recognize that this is slightly nit-picky.

Other than that little bit, I've found the game to be overall enjoyable. The difficulty can be taxing sometimes when it seems like the only way to defeat an enemy is to pound him till you die, then come back and pound some more. However, learning some combat strategies can help mitigate that. I do love that there is an achievement for dying 100 times.

Hopefully, the good plot continues to the end. Though apparently it's going to be a trilogy? I heard that somewhere, and I could be wrong.

I'm still waiting for Mass Effect II to come out.

I decided to condense parts IV and V of the UFO debunk series since both are relatively small and required little explanation. Here are the last two symptom requirements:

4. “Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them.” 5. “Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.”

The first one can be relatively easy to negate due to the second half of the sentence: without knowing what was causing them. Ignorance shouldn't count as a qualifier for a potential abductee symptom. Nor should it be used as one. There are a lot of things of which a lot people are ignorant, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily abducted, or that their chances of having been abducted are now greater.

Ignoring the second half of the sentence and just dealing with the first, there are a couple of reasonable explanations:

• Ball lightning, though controversial, is one potential candidate
• An aura, before a migraine
• An actual migraine
• Some sort of retinal injury, like a tear
• And, on the more severe end, multiple sclerosis

There are other causes, such as being smacked in the eye or the head, but there are too many to list. Most of the causes on this list indicate that the seeing of lights is hallucinatory in nature, due to something malfunctioning. "Flashes of light can be a symptom that just about everybody will experience at some time in their life. Seeing flashes of light can be one of the many annoyances that go along with an aging body," (mothernature.com).

The fifth symptom is, IMHO, completely ridiculous. Unless it's a surgical scar and you've never gotten surgery, and no one you know remembers you getting surgery, and no hospital has record of you getting surgery, and you're not secretly Jason Bourne with multiple identities and amnesia... well, then, chances are you ran into something, got a small cut, and didn't think it worth remembering. I have quite a few scars on my knees and arms--and I couldn't tell you how I got all of them. My only indicator is where they are: knees means I probably fell, arms means I probably hit something or ran into something.

This pretty much concludes my UFO series. If I left anything untouched, feel free to comment, and I'll address it right away.

Again, just so my position is clear (in case people haven't read the Part I of the UFO Series), I do believe the chances of there being extraterrestrial life are extremely good. In fact, I would be surprised if I ever found out that there did not exist other life in the universe. What I am doubting is the chances of said extraterrestrial life making it here to earth and then hiding from us instead of greeting us. Part I of the series has a more detailed explanation of my beliefs on the matter.

In this post, I'm tackling the third item in the list of UFO Abductee Symptoms:

Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how.

The first thing, and the most likely explanation, is an hallucination. Hallucinations can also account for symptom one: feeling a presence in the room that is not really there. This is called an apparitional experience. Hallucination also encompasses OBE's, so this first one really counts as an over-arching category for the next two.

A second real possibility occurs during hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is the onset of sleep, though it has been extended to include waking up as well as falling asleep. Ironically, selective amnesia can accompany hypnagogia, making this a case for symptoms 2 and 3. The most common symptom during hypnagogia is some sort of falling/floating sensation (sometimes accompanied by a hypnic jerk, though not always). The one that I sometimes have is visual-related insofar as I sometimes see a pattern of dots floating, and usually only when my eyes are closed. It is interesting, however. Hypnagogic condition is characterized by a loosening of suggestibility in people, making us more open to our unconscious minds and, therefore, more suggestible. There have been studies linking problems during the hypnagogic stage, specifically hypnic jerks, to sleep anxiety.

(Sleep paralysis can also accompany hypnagogia.)

A third is an OBE, or out-of-body experience. OBE's can be induced by stimulating the temporoparietal junction of the brain. When this part is stimulated, people will suddenly feel as if they are floating outside of their own bodies. I have never personally experienced an OBE before, but I find it really fascinating that there is a part of the brain that can be stimulated in such a way that we feel as if we are separate from our bodies.

Some people experience OBE's when they are under anesthesia, whether awake or semi-conscious. Semi-conscious people without the influence of anesthesia may also experience OBE's as a consequence of trauma. Skepdic has some good information about OBE's and how they can come about. A lot of OBE's occur between the REM stage and waking. OBE's can be induced in this manner by attempting to maintain consciousness while falling asleep.

Aside from debunking this third symptom, I find OBE's to be fascinating. I do not believe in a spiritual explanation for OBE's without sufficient evidence. But at the same time, I cannot deny that they are quite a fascinating experience. They can be induced in a variety of ways, and the wiki article about OBE's has a lot of information on the variety of ways that they can be induced, and a nice reference section.

Of course, another more vivid reason is that the guilty party is high on acid or LSD. Or magic mushrooms.

I spent the last week moving to a new job and then to college, so I've been pretty busy these past few days. I still have a lot of things that I need to unpack so I can actually move about my room. Posting should become more regular as I settle into a routine.

As a side note, while doing research, I came across this small gem: Apophenia. It reminded me of John Nash. I've never heard of this before, and it sounds pretty intriguing. I'm going to have to look into it.

In continuation of the debunking of the UFO Abductions Series symptoms list, here is part 2! This part covers the second symptom of an abductee:

Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been.

This one was a little harder to gather data on, since it is so broad. Here is a short list of reasons I gathered:

• Amnesia
• Lacunar Amnesia
• Fugue, which I talked about earlier

Amnesia is the simplest of all: forgetting. Amnesia is medically defined as the loss of memory, usually resulting from bilateral damage to the brain vital for memory storage, processing, or recall. People whose primary symptom is memory loss usually retain their sense of self and remain lucid. Some people whose primary symptom is memory loss may not even be aware that they have this milder form of amnesia. This is the category under which I would place Abductee Symptom 2.

The causes for amnesia are typically shock, psychological disturbances, brain injury, or illness. For this specific instance, I would rule out brain injury, as that would typically preclude greater memory problems, and the person would undoubtedly be aware that their memory did not function properly. There are a lot of really interesting cases about various types of amnesia, which I will save for future posts in the interest of not getting side-tracked. The other 3, shock, psychological disturbances, or illness, do qualify for the Abductee camp because the person may not be aware that their memory is being impaired. Illness and shock especially.

When you're ill, especially if you have a high fever, you tend to not focus so much on remembering events rather than how miserable you're feeling. All the times that I've been seriously ill (which I can count on one hand) I have fleeting memories which probably account for maybe 1/3 of the time that I was ill. I've checked this out with a lot of my friends, and the consensus has been about the same.

Shock, specifically emotional shock, not the medical kind of shock, is an acute stress symptom due to some kind of traumatizing event. In this case, the brain may not be committed to making a detailed account of events, and some people have been known to wander aimlessly when in emotional shock. Symptoms of this may include anxiety, impaired judgment, confusion, detachment and depression. The confusion and impaired judgment are the key symptoms here when talking about the UFO Abductee camp. When we return to our baseline state (that is, not in shock) after having suffered from confusion and impaired judgment, we may vaguely be aware of having done things we normally wouldn't do, or being confused about everything that happened while we were in shock, and so unable to quite remember what really happened. It seems like some sort of dream to us because we were in an altered state of being, and not a healthy one at that.

Lacunar amnesia is a more specific type of amnesia. This was popularized in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but is nonetheless valid. Lacunar amnesia is amnesia about a specific event. The brain is designed to retain emotionally strong memories in some form or another, even if the semantic knowledge of the event was lost or destroyed. Amnesiacs, under the right circumstances, can remember their past feelings for events which they cannot recall.

This form of amnesia can also serve as an explanation for the memory loss symptom. It is a bit more radical, and suggestive of the person having done something with strong emotions which they cannot recall, but is still (IMO) tremendously more likely than being abducted by aliens.

I've already written a post on fugues, so I won't reiterate myself but will instead direct you to click on the link above in order to educate yourself.

There are other medical and psychological reasons for not remembering something. Sometimes, it's just plain forgetfulness. But, for the sake of not rambling on too much, I didn't list all of them. Instead, I listed the ones which I believed to be the most pertinent.

Of course, the simplest explanation for not remembering the previous night is getting hammered and waking up with a serious hangover and little recall as to what wild things you may have done, perhaps with a sense of dread because you woke up on the floor of your kitchen wearing someone else's clothes.

5 Psychological Experiments that Prove Humanity is Doomed

The link speaks for itself. I love how snarky the people at cracked are. It tickles me.