Monday, May 27, 2013

Metacognition

Was doing some literature review on metacognition...  and I came across the book titled... "Early Detection and Cognitive Therapy for People at High Risk of Developing Psychosis : A Treatment Approach."

Though I don't have the time yet to read through it, the notion itself... is one I would strongly endorse... though who gives a rat's ass about my endorsement... especially like... the psychotic chick with faulty metacognition endorsing the notion of metacognition in action? 8-X lol

I don't know how the detection could be done prior to the psychotic onset... Yet, since existing research has found metacognition to be beneficial for learning in general, at an early stage, teach them to think metacognitively and give them the tools to learn to think metacognitively... everyone... 

Surely, today, I have come to embrace the notion of how I am metacognitively wrong.  Yet, it's also my current "belief" that metacognition could be a tool to help us live psychotically... to monitor and control/regulate our disordered thinking... albeit with the reality that it is defective and some days it works better than others... to allow us to think less disorderly, if not simply to prevent us from thinking more disorderly each every day.

Why emphasizing the notion of "the tools to learn to think metacognitively"?  It's because psychotics have to be the one to derive metacognitive knowledge and skills from our own the metacognitive experiences in order to come up with the best strategies to intervene the outcome of our disordered-thoughts and out-of-whack metacognition. Although I have only the limited amount of conversation with other psychotic patients in more stabilized state about our psychotic experiences, I have heard people spoken of metacognitive experiences... like... "it's so funny that your think the people on TV are talking about you,"  which points to the knowledge that "what my reality is not the so-to-speak reality shared by the others.

This is something most of us (if not all of us) already do although we might not always get it done as well as we would like to, and we (at least mes myselves) just need to get better at it... the antipsychotic department of metacognition... as time goes on... as we keep on kicking...

Of course, the reason why I speak of metacognition is because it happens to be a word in my dictionary and part of my educational background.  For someone else, it could be called anything else relevant to their background... such as... my doing the "hells kitchen" thing.

It is my belief.  Yes.

My two cents before going nite nite.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Google stats and metacognition

I check google stats on a daily basis...  It is sort of fun to check out the postings people visited because, all too often, I would be lol by what came out of my mouth.

It is training though... the stats to check... because I have a tendency to generate theories and, many a time, the posts visited actually coincide with thing happened or outta my mouth earlier on in the day.

I check out the demographic info of the users... but... just for the fun of it cuz God knows where visits really came from though... God knows why I am endowed with this propensity to even entertain this notion.  8-O lol

I check the page view... seeing the fact... the limited number of page views on a daily basis... also taking into consideration that some people might simply browsed through the site without stopping or some might have been accessed by bots to entice me to visit their website.  I am surely aware that the contents can also get accessed through RSS feeds... but I have to refrain myself from continuing with that line of thinking since... what good does it do for me.










So, I have been reading up them articles about metacognition because in the writing I have been doing, I also talked about the metacognition kind of stuffs since I think it is something that has helped me to live psychotically.

There are times when I wondered though... why spending all the energy trying to learn to intervene from the metacognitive level?  Wouldn't it be but impose extra amount of stress?

Then, I realized that I was not thinking straight... the psychotic kind of straight...

Without the metacognitive intervention, the stats for my blogs--let along everything happens everywhere else in my everyday life--already provide more than abundant contents for the disordered processing at the cognitive level, which can lead to the fortification of my almighty delusional system.

In a sense, the act of checking out google stats itself is a daily training activity.  How do I do it?  I look at the stats and I have the metacognitive experience that... oopsy... I am thinking delusionally... and find a way to neutralize if not negate the way of thinking.  This is something I do on a daily basis and sometimes more than once a day since the release of google stats for blogger...  Is there a practice effect and do I get better at it after drilling myself on this same task for years? 8-O lol

I would say... yes... I think there is a practice effect... and the reality is that... I could feel that there is this part of my head that is about to fire up to participate in the collaborative activity of information processing... with its specialization in the department of delusion generation... except, at this point, this dosage, and this mental state, I can somehow block it if not stop it from joining in... at least at the conscious level.  Although, of course, I am far from 100% sure.  lol

Can what I learned be transfer to other context especially when knowledge transfer usually do not occur automatically?  Can't quite tell you either... whether my handling with other events in my everyday life is the result of transferring what I learned from the google stats training, independent learning, what I do with google stats is the outcome of transferring what I have learned from other scenario, etc.

Well, regardless, since the unrest mind doesn't feel like to rest any, guess... try to assign it to do something else if possible? 8-O

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen

Was chatting with this friend the other day... someone I might have seen last on commencement day in 2005... a point, though mental, I was almost certain that, with hard work, I would be able to make myself someone of some kind though, to date, I remain to be in the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder. (So said the experts, the feel of knowing might be reliable but might not have predictive validity. 8-X lol)

Somewhere along our conversation, I told her that what I do everyday could be simply put as "walking" or "stop walking."

Though, in between and within the states of walking and stop walking... with the minor inconveniences in life as the inevitable background noise... carrying my private inferno on my back or not... trotzdem... das leben... for Ratology at walk affords me Handicapped at large (while simply incapable, you, all to tell).

Since nothing's new under the sun, your own Ratology at move shall also afford you your own version of at large... n'est pas?


P.S., I don't have the audacity to use Frankl's "Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen" since I ain't got no clue what it be like to do the Ja sagen in the concentration camp.  Therefore... Trotzdem, das Leben.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Tactics: Defects and workarounds

In working with that DWM and beyond book of mine, I came up with "tactics" to offer Princessa Ratonssita at all points on the time dimension (mes, myselves, and Is).  These tactics fall either under the "It's physical" or "In your head" categories.

The tactics are composed of the defect and the workaround components.  The defects are not equivalent to symptoms; rather, the defects are the unbearable weakness manifested in our symptoms.  The workarounds are the ways that I have identified to live with the disordered thoughts so as to minimize their impacts.  For you who live beyond June 19th of 2007, you have to attend more to the defects at both the physical and mental level as well as their interactions.  So they say, know thy enemy and, admit it, we are our own worst enemy.  What is to be presented are just some examples of our defects and the means to work around them—just it would take too many more words to cover them all.  lol 8-X

 An example of the tactics under the "In your head" category is...


Defect: Visions of the future | Workaround: Flight 1549: What you see might not be the end result.
Visions of mishaps are one of the most annoying and intrusive symptoms.   They come into your mind either unannounced or get triggered by certain topics or sights of objects.
For a long time, I had this vision and delusion of air crash.  The heavy traffic over the Manhattan sky didn’t help.  Still remember vividly how it felt, one day, when this acquaintance told me, “I have joined the air force!”  The first thing came to my mind—crash.  While it makes me feel scared to “foresee” bad things, it also makes me feel bad because it is as if I were wishing bad things to happen to people.  Then, there came this day when that gentleman landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson, sort of next door, while all on board miraculously walked on water safe and sound.

From then on, when visions and delusions of horrors alike occur, I thought of Flight 1549.

For all these years, I still could not break the associations between the accidents and the whole flight chapter in my life—regardless the dosage of Seroquel I was/am on, and my mental state.  Yet, Flight 1549 offered me an alternative way to work with symptoms alike.  Essentially, well, even if I cannot defy the impact of them visions and delusions, I can always think of Flight 1549 and say to myself, “Even you really have some strange capability to see what lies beyond, look at Flight 1549, it’s not until after the event will you know the actual outcome.”

Sort of like... "there is more to them than meets the eyes..." So said the huge truck of my dream... my octopus prime (possibly your Uptimus prime).