Mid-morning. Carol is eating cereal and blueberries
for breakfast and reading the Saturday morning paper; you are upstairs with
Jadah who is presently content with settling in a sunbeam. You find you are
disengaging yourself from buying a car anytime soon because you just bought a
car not that long ago plus you already know what one of three hybrids you will
buy, the best of the line (last your lifetime) of an Accord, Camry or Fusion. –
Amorella
0923
hours. I have the stats on all three and have compared them with the stats of
the 2005 Accord we now have; anyway, no more car searching. I need to take a
nap then do my exercises.
There’s
more than one way to skin a cat, boy; figurative speaking. Post. - Amorella
0929
hours. I don’t know what that means in context.
You
had your nap and did your forty minutes of exercises and feel better for it.
You have been reading Quora for curiosity and fun and Carol has been doing her
special prep exercises for knee surgery. Smashburgers looks to be the eventual
location for lunch. Routine is what you are good at. – Amorella
1242
hours. I really want to see where chapter nine is going to go. I’m tired of not
working on GMG.2. I still don’t understand the context of skinning a cat. Was
it about getting exercise or sleeping?
It was about buying a car, boy. – Amorella
1245
hours. The only thing I am going to do is make sure the Accord looks good and
runs well for trade in time. That’s my focus – sometime in the next year.
Unless of course something needs fixing then I should get it done so the car’s
in decent shape to trade in. I’ve ruled out a plug in electric because they are
too expensive and an all-electric Leaf because of limited range and Carol wants
a midsized sedan for comfort. I think buying a car this time is not going to be
fun. Part of the excitement for the Avalon was/is that it is a hybrid. Another
hybrid is still a hybrid – all well and good – but not so exciting other than
looking for the good mileage, etc. That is always a fun experience to check and
keep records of.
Post. – Amorella
Mid-afternoon.
You are at Kroger’s on Tylersville waiting on Carol for essentials. You had a
good leisurely lunch at Smashburgers. The manager himself came out to say hello
and exchange pleasantries as they were in a lull, which soon ended. The food
was especially good to both of you. – Amorella
1430
hours. Carol has clothes to finish washing and drying and I am going on a
couple errands for better watering the landscape. I also took the time to clean
up my MacAir – the outside was looking a bit grimy. While eating I casually
said that I should pay more attention to my cognitive skills. Carol found this
quite amusing to hear coming from my own mouth. I wasn’t thinking obviously,
which made it even funnier. I saw the reference on the latest cover of the AARP
magazine and felt I needed to read it. When she laughed however I realized I
should have been working on the cognitive skills back when I was four or five
as I was already absent-minded. I don’t know how many minutes of the day I am
‘not conscious’ but it happens. That’s the main reason I always try to drive
professionally when I am behind the wheel. Mostly it is a matter of
concentration, it always has been. Below are several related selections from
Wikipedia Offline.
** **
Absent-mindedness is where a person shows inattentive or forgetful
behaviour. It can have three different causes:
A. a low level of attention
("blanking" or "zoning out")
B. intense attention
to a single object of focus (hyperfocus)
that makes a person oblivious to events around him or her; or
C. unwarranted distraction of attention
from the object of focus by irrelevant thoughts or environmental events
Absent-mindedness
is a mental condition in which the subject experiences low levels of attention and frequent
distraction. Absent-mindedness is not a diagnosed condition but rather a
symptom of boredom and sleepiness which people experience in their daily lives.
When suffering from absent-mindedness, people tend to show signs of memory
lapse and weak recollection of recently occurring events. This can usually be a
result of a variety of other conditions often diagnosed by clinicians such as
ADD and depression. In addition to absent-mindedness leading to an array of
consequences affecting daily life, it can have as more severe, long-term
problems.
Conceptualization
Absent
Mindedness seemingly consists of lapses of concentration or "zoning
out". This can result in lapses of short or long term memory, depending on
when the person in question was in a state of absent-mindedness.
Absent-mindedness also relates directly to lapses in attention. Schachter and
Dodsen say, that in the context of memory, “absent-mindedness entails
inattentive or shallow processing that contributes to weak memories of ongoing
events or forgetting to do things in the future”.
Causes
Though
absent-mindedness is a frequent occurrence, there has been little progress made
on what the direct causes of absent-mindedness are. However, it tends to
co-occur with ill health, preoccupation, and distraction.
Consequences
Lapses of attention
are clearly a part of everyone’s life. Some are merely inconvenient, such as
missing a familiar turn-off on the highway, while some are extremely serious,
such as failures of attention that cause accidents, injury, or loss of life.
Beyond the obvious costs of accidents arising from lapses in attention there
are: lost time; ; personal productivity; and quality
of life. These can also occur in the lapse and recapture of awareness and
attention to everyday tasks. Individuals for whom intervals between lapses are
very short are typically viewed as impaired.
Given the prevalence of attentional failures in everyday life, and the
ubiquitous and sometimes disastrous consequences of such failures, it is rather
surprising that relatively little work has been done to directly measure
individual differences in everyday errors
arising from propensities for failures of attention. Absent-mindedness can also
lead to bad grades at school, boredom, and depression.
Absent-mindedness in
popular culture
The absent-minded
professor is a stock character
often depicted in fictional works, usually as a talented academic whose focus
on academic matters leads them to ignore or forget their surroundings. The
stereo-typical view can be traced back as far as the philosopher Thales, who it is said
"walked at night with his eyes focused on the heavens and, as a result,
fell down a well".
. . .
Related Topics
Absent-mindedness
can be avoided or fixed in several ways. Although it can be accomplished
through medical procedures, it can also be accomplished through psychological
treatments. Examples include: altering work schedules to make them shorter,
having frequent rest periods and utilizing a drowsy-operator warning device.
Absent-mindedness
and its related topics are often measured in scales developed in studies to
survey boredom and attention levels. For instance, the Attention-Related
Cognitive Errors Scale (ARCES) reflects errors in performance that result from
attention lapses. Another scale, called the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale
(MAAS) measures the ability to maintain a reasonable level of attention in
everyday life. The Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) measures the level of boredom
in relation to the attention level of the subject.
Absent-mindedness
can lead to automatic
behaviors, or automatisms.
Additionally, absent-minded actions can involve behavioral mistakes. A
phenomenon called Attention-Lapse Induced Alienation occurs when a person makes
a mistake while absent-mindedly performing a task. The person then attributes
the mistake to his or her hand rather than their self, because they were not
paying attention.
From Wikipedia
Offline
*** ***
Automatic behavior
can also be exhibited whilst in the REM
state—subjects can hold conversations, sit up and even open their eyes. Those
acts are considered sub-conscious as most of the time the events cannot be
recalled by the subject. It is most common when the subject has had under 10
hours sleep within a 36 hour period.
From Wikipedia
Offline
*** ***
Automatic
writing or psychography
is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or
spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.
History
George
(Georgie) Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler
Yeats, claimed that she could write automatically. In 1975, Wendy
Hart of Maidenhead
claimed that she wrote automatically about Nicholas Moore, a sea captain who
died in 1642. Her husband, who did research on Moore, affirmed that this person
had resided at St Columb Major
in Cornwall during the English Civil
War.
William Fletcher
Barrett wrote that "Automatic messages may take place either by
the automatist passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper, or by the planchette,
or by the "ouija board". In spiritualism, spirits are
claimed to take control of the hand of a medium to write messages,
letters, and even entire books. Automatic writing can happen in a trance or
waking state. Arthur Conan
Doyle in his book The New Revelation (1918) wrote that
automatic writing occurs either by the writers subconscious or by external
spirits operating through the writer. As a spiritualist Doyle chose
to believe in the spirit hypothesis. Many psychical
researchers however such as Thomson Jay
Hudson have claimed that no spirits are involved in automatic
writing and that the subconscious
mind is the explanation.
Alleged
examples of automatic writing via external spirits include Helen Schucman's A
Course in Miracles (1975) and Neale Donald
Walsch's Conversations with God (1996).
Criticism
A 1998
article in Psychological Science described a series of experiments
designed to determine whether people who believed in automatic writing could be
shown that it might be the ideomotor effect.
The paper indicated, that "our attempt to introduce doubt about the
validity of automatic writing did not succeed." The paper noted that
"including information about the controversy surrounding facilitated
communication did not affect self-efficacy ratings, nor did it affect the
number of responses that were produced. In this sense, illusory facilitation
appears to be a very robust phenomenon, not unlike illusory correlation, which
is not reversed by warning participants about the phenomenon."
Psychology
professor Théodore
Flournoy investigated the claim by 19th-century medium Hélène Smith
(Catherine Müller) that she did automatic writing to convey messages from Mars
in Martian language. Flournoy concluded that her "Martian" language
had a strong resemblance to Ms. Smith's native language of French and that her
automatic writing was "romances of the subliminal imagination, derived
largely from forgotten sources (for example, books read as a child)." He
invented the term cryptomnesia
to describe this phenomenon.
From Wikipedia
Offline
***
Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being
recognised as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original.
It is a memory bias
whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a
joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism
but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.
Early use
The word was
first used by the psychiatrist Théodore
Flournoy, in reference to the case of medium Hélène Smith
(Catherine-Élise Müller) to suggest the high incidence in psychism of
"latent memories on the part of the medium that come out, sometimes
greatly disfigured by a subliminal work of imagination or reasoning, as so
often happens in our ordinary dreams."
Carl Gustav Jung
treated the subject in his thesis On the Psychology and Pathology of
So-Called Occult Phenomena (1902) and in an article, Cryptomnesia
(1905), suggested the phenomenon in Nietzsche's
Also Sprach
Zarathustra. The idea was studied or mentioned by Géza Dukes,
Sándor Ferenczi and Wilhelm Stekel as well as by Sigmund Freud in speaking of
the originality of his inventions.
Experimental
research
In the first
empirical study of cryptomnesia, people in a group took turns generating
category examples (e.g., kinds of birds: parrot, canary, etc.). They were later
asked to create new exemplars in the same categories that were not previously
produced, and also to recall which words they had personally generated. People
inadvertently plagiarized about 3–9% of the time either by regenerating another
person's thought or falsely recalling someone's thought as their own. Similar
effects have been replicated using other tasks such as word search puzzles and
in brainstorming sessions.
Research has
distinguished between two kinds of cryptomnesia, though they are often studied
together. The distinction between these two types of plagiarism is in the
underlying memory bias responsible—specifically, is it the thought that is
forgotten, or the thinker? The first type of bias is one of familiarity. The
plagiarizer regenerates an idea that was presented earlier, but believes the
idea to be an original creation. The idea that is reproduced could be another's
idea, or one's own from a previous time. B. F. Skinner describes
his own experience of self-plagiarism:
"One of the most disheartening experiences of old age is
discovering that a point you just made—so significant, so beautifully
expressed—was made by you in something you published long ago."
The second
type of cryptomnesia results from an error of authorship whereby the ideas of
others are remembered as one's own. In this case, the plagiarizer correctly
recognizes that the idea is from an earlier time, but falsely remembers having
been the origin for the idea (or, having lost the specific memory of
encountering it in print or conversation, assumes that it "came to"
the plagiarizer as an original idea).
Various
terms have been coined to distinguish these two forms of plagiarism —
occurrence forgetting vs. source forgetting and generation errors vs.
recognition errors. The two types of cryptomnesia appear to be independent: no
relationship has been found between error rates and the two types are
precipitated by different causes.
Causes
Cryptomnesia
is more likely to occur when the ability to properly monitor sources is
impaired. For example, people are more likely to falsely claim ideas as their
own when they were under high cognitive load at the time they first considered
the idea. Plagiarism increases when people are away from the original source of
the idea, and decreases when participants are specifically instructed to pay
attention to the origin of their ideas. False claims are also more prevalent
for ideas originally suggested by persons of the same sex, presumably because
the perceptual similarity of the self to a same-sex person exacerbates source
confusion. In other studies it has been found that the timing of the idea is
also important: if another person produces an idea immediately before the self
produces an idea, the other's idea is more likely to be claimed as one's own,
ostensibly because the person is too busy preparing for their own turn to
properly monitor source information.
Value
As explained
by Carl Jung, in Man and His
Symbols, "An author may be writing steadily to a
preconceived plan, working out an argument or developing the line of a story,
when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to
him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what
prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even have
noticed the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh
and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown
convincingly that what he has written bears a striking similarity to the work
of another author — a work that he believes he has never seen."
"The ability to reach a rich vein of such material the unconscious
and to translate it effectively into philosophy, literature, music or
scientific discovery is one of the hallmarks of what is commonly called
genius." — Carl Jung, Man
and His Symbols.
"We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of
science itself. For example, the French mathematician Poincaré
and the chemist Kekulé
owed important scientific discoveries (as they themselves admit) to sudden
pictorial 'revelations' from the unconscious. The so-called 'mystical'
experience of the French philosopher Descartes
involved a similar sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the 'order of
all sciences.' The British author Robert Louis
Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his
'strong sense of man's double being,' when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a
dream." — Carl Jung Man and His
Symbols
Jorge Luis
Borges's story, "Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote," is a meta-fictive enactment of
cryptomnesia. This work is written in the form of a review or literary critical
piece about (the non-existent) Pierre Menard. It begins with a brief
introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work:
Borges's
"review" describes this 20th century French writer (Menard) who has
made an effort to go further than mere "translation" of Don Quixote,
but to immerse himself so thoroughly as to be able to actually
"re-create" it, line for line, in the original 16th century Spanish.
Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the
nature of accurate translation. Or, in this case, the hermeneutics of
cryptomnesia.
Cases
Nietzsche
Jung goes on
to list more specific examples. Friedrich
Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke
Zarathustra includes an almost word for word account of an
incident also included in a book published about 1835, half a century before
Nietzsche wrote. This is considered to be neither purposeful plagiarism nor
pure coincidence: Nietzsche's sister confirmed that he had indeed read the
original account when he was 11 years old; and Nietzsche's youthful
intellectual prowess, his later cognitive degeneration due to neurosyphilis, and his
accompanying psychological deterioration (specifically, his increasing grandiosity
as manifested in his later behavior and writings) together strengthen the
likelihood that he happened to commit the passage to memory upon initially
reading it and later, after having lost his memory of encountering it, assumed
that his own mind had created it.
Byron
In some
cases, the line between cryptomnesia and zeitgeist may be somewhat
hazy. Readers of Lord Byron's
closet drama Manfred noted a strong
resemblance to Johann von
Goethe's Faustus.
In a review published in 1820, Goethe wrote, "Byron's tragedy, Manfred,
was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This
singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from
it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of
the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one
of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot
enough admire his genius." Byron was apparently thankful for the
compliment; however, he claimed that he had never read Faustus.
Keller
Helen Keller seriously compromised her and her teacher's credibility with an
incident of cryptomnesia which was misapprehended as plagiarism. The Frost King,
which Keller wrote out of buried memories of a fairytale read to her four years
previously, left Keller a nervous wreck, and unable to write fiction for the
rest of her life.
Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson refers to an incident of cryptomnesia that took place
during the writing of Treasure Island,
and that he discovered to his embarrassment several years afterward:
Precedent in
United States copyright
law as of 1976 is to treat alleged cryptomnesia no differently from deliberate
plagiarism. The seminal case is Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music,
where the publisher of "He's So Fine",
written by Ronald Mack, demonstrated to the court that George Harrison borrowed
substantial portions of his song "My Sweet Lord" from
"He's So Fine." The Court imposed damages despite a claim that the
copying was subconscious. The ruling was upheld by the Second Circuit in ABKCO
Music v. Harrisongs Music, and the case Three Boys Music v. Michael
Bolton, upheld by the Ninth Circuit, affirmed the principle.
Viswanathan
An example
of the difficulties in determining whether a situation is cryptomnesia or
plagiarism occurred in the case of How Opal Mehta
Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan.
Numerous passages of the novel were found to be similar to passages in other
novels, but Viswanathan insisted it was due to her photographic memory and not
to any deliberate desire to plagiarize.
Eco
In Interpretation
and Overinterpretation, Umberto Eco
describes the rediscovery of an antique book among his large collection, which
was eerily similar to the pivotal object in his novel The Name of the
Rose.
***
The above articles
were selected and edited from Wikipedia Offline
** **
1503
hours. The above articles each have circumstances I can personally relate to
and have done so throughout this blog.
1528
hours. I’m glad Carol came out as I finished “blog”. It is very hot. The other
car gets warm too, but it takes longer because of the UV tint on all the
windows. I put up ‘window screens;’ in the back windows of the Honda and Carol
has one in her front window so I opened the sunroof about an inch and dropped
my front side window for air to escape.
The above articles intimate some personal
truths to your inner world boy. Obviously you are not alone. You shared none of
your ‘version’ of reality to anyone until you saw the psychologist who focused
on the esoteric. Then you shared your inner life with Fritz Milligan and later
with your group of friends and relatives mentioned in the Merlyn’s Mind
trilogy, and later still with those who read your blog. You are better minded
for the sharing, 'Space Commander' (your faculty nickname from Indian Hill school days). Post. – Amorella
1548 hours. I forgot all about that. Jim Powers got that started if I remember right.
Use it as your title. Capitalize please. - Amorella
1551 hours. You're funny, Amorella.
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