Anthropomorhism and culture.--how westernized we look at to things.

It is very easy to find programs to learn new tools, guidelines for making your life amazing, or developing "atomic" habits to achieve your best. 

But, there is not enough emphasize on the systems or rules  to teach you to forgive yourself when you are not able to follow the suggested program each and everyday, and programs to teach you to deal with self-doubts and guilt when you cannot follow these systems --which I believe is the most important part--.

I wish people would see that we are not machines that can follow the algorithms and set of rules EVERY day because we are humans. Our lives are not consist of us only, and life happens to us unexpectedly.  Therefore, being self-compassionate and forgiving toward ourselves is extremely important. I know so many people starting to a new diet, a new online course and then if they cannot follow it for one or two days, they think they do not have the ambition, or intelligence on them to make it; and withdraw from their schedule. If they would know any step counts, any improvement is a great improvement; it would facilitate their development and well-being.

As a person raised in a society with "fixed mindset," I would appreciate to know the truths behind each success which does not rely on doing the best or being perfect each and everyday but accepting your downs as you accept your ups and being able to forgive yourself when you cannot be the perfect. 

As a person who struggles to accept her downs, I am also trying to be more forgiving and I hope it would inspire whoever needs to hear this! 

Sometimes you do your best with your given circumstances, and it is "your" best, still counts towards your development!

Our minds are the unstoppable thinking machines that constantly recall and combine pieces of information, scenarios, events. 

We all find ourselves in a situation that we end up thinking about a completely irrelevant experience (e.g., last time what we ate before going to kayaking with a friend whom I have not seen for two years) and suddenly feel lost in the stream of thoughts coming after (e.g., what is my friend doing? I used to like her pink skirt, I had a bad taste in fashion during my highschool, what a bad picture I had in my family album, and how embarrasing it was when my parents showed it to my college roommate, oh what does she doing with her newborn? They named her Elisa, very AI chatbot like name ...). See my mind can wander ENDLESSLY! 

Since it is a constant and endless stream of thought, I have been lately interested in the dynamics of this phenomenon. What is the content about? Literature suggests  minds mostly wander about future (D'Argembeau, 2018) and it is mostly positive, which helps to plan the future. However, it can be very intrusive and negative as well. 

First, mindwandering was suggested to be related to negative outcomes about mood. A famous paper was written by Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) about how wandering minds are unhappy. However, researchers did not quit questioning the potential benefits of such a common and everyday life phenomenon.  Recent findings support mindwandering's benefits on future imagination and planning (prospective memory) (Girardeau et al., 2023) and they demonstrated that mindwandering is not the precursor of bad mood, but past-related (retrospective) mindwandering might be a result of sadness (Poerio et al., 2013). 

I am also curious about digging more into benefits and functions of mind wandering, specifically questioning whether having a wandering mind benefit the self concept and developing a narrative identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013) that eventually help us to have higher level of well-being. What is the balance between having in the moment vs. having a wandering mind? Hope to write about it in future as well!

D’Argembeau, A. (2018). Mind-wandering and self-referential thought. The Oxford handbook of spontaneous thought: Mind-wandering, creativity, and dreaming, 181-191.

Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932.

Girardeau, J. C., Ledru, R., Gaston-Bellegarde, A., Blondé, P., Sperduti, M., & Piolino, P. (2023). The benefits of mind wandering on a naturalistic prospective memory task. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 11432.

Poerio, G. L., Totterdell, P., & Miles, E. (2013). Mind-wandering and negative mood: Does one thing really lead to another?. Consciousness and cognition, 22(4), 1412-1421.

McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current directions in psychological science, 22(3), 233-238.

I have been recently reading about imagery in therapy, and it is very interesting to think about the individual differences in therapists about their understanding and practices toward using imagery in therapy. 

I want to discuss specifically one article investigating imagery in CBT by Bell et al., 2015.

Imagery mostly think of as a visual concept, however it can be about olfaction, audition, taste, anything. People and therapists mostly think of it as visual imagery.

Imagery as a concept closely aligned with memories is mostly used in therapy settings to make people remember, inhibit something. Sometimes it is avoided because it creates high level of emotion in clients, and sometimes it is preferred to be used in cases where clients have trauma or anxiety. In any case, clients saw imagery has seen pivotal in therapy.

Therapists think imagery can facilitate their access to client's  emotional world, help clients to access their own thoughts. 

Interestingly, the understanding and definition of imagery changed therapist's imagery practices. Thus, it is very important to understand the own limits in imagery to observe its influence. Imagery is a skill vary between individuals, and it might be interesting to observe its changes in therapy practices because of therapist's imagery capabilities. 

In the article, Bell et al. discusses the lack of confidence on application of imagery practises stemming from lack of practise but it may be merely because of the low imagery skills of therapists and simply not understanding what imagery does! If you cannot imagine an emotional scene visually, you cannot see the emotional influence it creates, and it can cause lack of empathy!

Ide & Hidaka (2013) show that when people have a tactile vibration to their index finger (not their forearm or shoulder) their accuracy to perceive visual orientation of a stimulus decreases. This effect is most prominent when the both stimuli has given at the same time & in the same location of the body (both touch and visual task on the left or right). 

It is also important to note that the cross-sensory effect has not been observed in auditory-visual task.

Thus, there is a shared mechanism of tactile and visual modalities. 

I recently keep wondering how different modalities (senses for psych people) influence/contribute/compensate each other. 

One paper I stumbled by Olofsson et al. (2020) created a memory task that participant need to look at only two items in each step to find all pairs that are given randomly distributed in the board. The less number of steps they need to complete the matching of all pairs, the better you are. They are measured in both visual or olfactory versions of the same task (while you try to match two smells-- in olfactory/or/Chinese symbols -- visual version) and two separate groups trained on either visual or olfactory task for 40 days. Their performances on both tasks again measured at the end of the training period. What they have found is very interesting:

The ones who trained on olfactory task, performed better in both visual and olfactory task in post test. 

However, this effect has been smaller in the ones trained in visual task. 

Thus, there is an asymmetrical transfer of olfaction.

I will be reading more about the modalities and their transferability, stay tuned :P