Wednesday, August 15, 2012

What is wrong with my cognition?

Someone came to the post about Impaired Metacognition: Part II and I got to revisit the following paragraphs:

Quote 1
"On the other hand, the so-to-speak breakdown in the self-controlling mechanism is manifested in one’s inability to make appropriate adjustment to one’s interpretation about events, provided one’s self-monitoring capacity remained intact.
In plain English, I might agree with the notion that there is some impairment in the controlling component of the metacognitive model when I can not change how I interpret my experiences despite of my awareness of the biases and irrationality in my frame of references.
However, is this really impairment in my metacognition?
I don’t really think so. But, of course, that is but my really tired and loco interpretation."
Quote 2
"At the same time, as I have elaborated in previous postings, just like Rome, delusions are not built in one day. At the micro-level, as time goes on, it is inevitable for the delusional to develop a propensity to attribute observations in a way that is deviated from the norm. As a result, provided with the same environmental cues, delusionals might gradually develop a pattern in attending and interpreting environmental inputs that is different from that of a normal person.
In other words, both the normal person and the delusional are capable of performing metacognitive tasks, namely, self-monitoring and self-controlling.
However, a context is required for one to exercise his or her metacognitive skills and the context contains both the environmental inputs and one’s past experiences. Given the same environmental inputs, provided adequate ability capability of performing metacognitive tasks for both the delusional and the normal person, I feel it should be one’s past experiences that result in differential experiences, rather than the impaired metacognition." 

From where I stand today I would say, I agree and disagree with these comments- though it is sort of difficult to agree or disagree since some part of the texts seem a bit ambiguous to me.

Starting from the second part of the quote, past experiences do not necessarily destine one to think in a particular fashion although learning does promote the strengthening of cognitive pathways, as per cognitive processing doctrine, and this is why old habits are hard to break- especially in the context of automaticity.  In the context of the discussion, what is missing is the component of the present.  For the normal, there is one set of reality and the limited numbers of hypotheses to entertain.  For the psychotics, there is more than one set of reality with them realities entangled.  As a result, there are far more hypotheses to be entertained while hypotheses beget more hypotheses- and this is why psychotic like me live a living trying to not get drown in the sea of hypotheses.  8-O lol sigh

The notion of da sea of hypotheses brings me back to the first quote...

Am I still in agreement with the comment that I don't have metacognitive impairments as per "Is this really impairment in my metacognition? I don’t really think so"?

I disagree despite of the word "really" in da quote.   Coming right out of, if not still coming out from, a state of institutionalizable grade of psychotic symptoms bench-marked by telepathy (i.e., the sum of thought broadcasting, thought insertion and I can read you mind), I can tell you for sure that there are huge problems in the "control" department.

This is not the "let go of control" or "illusion of control" kinda control I am speaking of... (or is it the same thing? 8-O)

It is the phenomenon of, given the equal strength of verbal and non-verbal stimuli in the background, you brain is biased to attend to and interpret the inaudible verbal stimuli despite of your attempt to focus on the non-verbal stimuli such as music in the background.  

That is an impaired department of "Control."

Regarding monitoring, well, though possible to achieve, the one major confounding variable would be simply- How do you tell what is real and what is real?  Sounds like a chicken and egg question here... 8-O lol

At the same time, it appears to me that when it gets really "positive" (amazing grace that I could outsource 100 mg of Seroquel and a whole lot of rest to save myself my the cuckoo's nest while still kick at large), a huge part of the department of control seems to go on a vacation, possibly went on to Mars with Curiosity- leaving only an understaffed division working with the exponential increase in "biased observations."  Sort of like.. I guess.. the scenario of the arrival of Fallen and them excessive number of Decepticons when Optimus Prime was "on leave" in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? 8-O lol 

(Oops... hope my symptoms don't get aggravated by my describing them as decepticons.... 8-O 8-X lol)

Just an updated thought.


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