Out of Pod Experience

What I think, beside it being only a stupid joke, those muppets were very characteristic and in fact teaching young people tolerate their small differentiations, and differentiations in others. What is sad, its that adult people don't watch sesame street, they are used to listening to idiots who want to sell a bag of chemicals to everyone, childrens too.

I have to respectfully disagree m8. In RL, you can't get away with what you can get away with in EVE. EVE lulz society is not even close to real world society. It's just a through a mirror darkly resemblance of real society. That's good, ne?

In my own opinion (and opinions are like butts-- everybody's got one, and most of them stink)... Some of us have a predisposition toward depression. Which is scientifically known to be a matter of fine shadings of neurochemicals, the subtleties of the brain's preferred routing's of information withing itself, the enzymic transfer of microelectrical impulses from one synapse to another.... In other words, a somewhat lot of scientific quantitative data. But no unified theory proposed. In other words, no one has dared to say they understand.

Except for some intense individuals such as Nietszsche and Hermann Hesse. Another one is the people who wrote for http://www.amazon.com/Aquamarine-Blue-Personal-Stories-Students/dp/0804010544 , which is about college students with autism. Actually the list goes back forever, probably about back to the guy who held a burning stick up and painted the caves of Altamira.

The other side of depression is being a Sensitive. If one is a Sensitive, that's their tough luck. And also their really great luck...

hold on aren't those the people that are supposed to be great at hearing ghosts and getting possessed and whatnot

oh, i see. it was just a confusion in terms, since i was going off the first things i got when i googled "sensitive" and was pretty surprised that i'd run into a person implying a link between ghosts and brain problems on the space game forums. i'm not really well-versed enough in either brain or ghost lore to assert that there is definitely no link, but i feel pretty confident in saying that it generally isn't the sort of thing that is accepted as fact

anyway, people with lots of automatic affective empathy are a pretty interesting bunch. (tbh, as someone with an interest in becoming a therapist or teacher i've always been a little envious of people who are really good at picking up people's emotions, but i guess you guys have all sorts of stress that comes from that :/) if you don't mind me asking, what is it that you usually tend to get information on people's feelings from; body language, vocal tone, word choice, etc

i'm so glad that i don't actually have to get into an argument about whether or not ghosts cause depression with you

"The other side" is used to describe the feature accompanying, not opposite. Like in "The other side of the same cube".

I tend to catch and process micro-expressions, body language, tone of voice, wording, breath sounds, posture, blinking, conversational timing, ticks, gestures... but all in gestalt. If I try to do it consciously, I fail.

The things I most tend to review later are facial expressions and tone of voice.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/28/5-gifts-of-being-highly-sensitive/

i'm guessing it's generally more of a thing for you when communicating irl then, right? i know a person who comes across as kind of blunt and oblivious to emotional cues when talking face-to-face, but catches on to tone and subtext really easily over text because it's easier for her to just analyze the word choice. your cues seem more physically based, i guess


... gosh. that seems like a clear cut case of "the simplest answer is usually the right one", but some people seem dead-set on believing in less likely things. maybe they're the people that take everything freud said about psychosomatic symptoms super seriously without taking account that his procedure was not in the least scientific? i mean, freud was a brilliant man and i do put a fair amount of stock into his work, but he did some things pretty incorrectly. anyway, i hope you won that one; arguing with psychs is usually a pretty dismal exercise

Sorry mate, bad wording obviously. I'd think that empathy, an artistic or poetic temperament, or a philosophical/seeking mentality-- all of those tend to be closely linked to what we in modern terms call clinical depression. In ancient Egypt, Sumeria or India, or modern Tibet, the priests might acknowledge that kid and come take him/her into the priesthood.

Same with Native American tradition, which has managed to somehow preserve itself intact and more than healthy, into our time. It's a link to the way original human societies would have thought. In the Lakota language, a person who is empathetic, or somehow deeper or more sensitive, is probably more on the wakan ('Spirit') side. That kid might choose to devote himself/herself to learning as much as possible about the wakan side, and incidentally passing the insights on to the community. That would be what we call being a shaman. It's a universal tradition of all cultures, but the traditions and ways of doing things are different, depending on the local culture.

Contrast that with Western reductionist philosophy, which has its roots in Renee Descartes. Not a bad guy, but egad, that was about 300 years ago, and he was bringing things forward from 400 years ago. (Before there was a steam engine, no less). the approach of Western science (including medical/psychological science) is that everything can be reduced into discrete components. "After a careful 5 minute evaluation, and based on your responses to my rote questions-- I hereby diagnose you as clinical depressive. Nice to meet you, good-bye, please give this piece of paper to the receptionist/billing clerk, who will phone in your prescription or something. It was very nice to meet you [on the next person waiting in a room, and what might his/her problem be, while I'm walking down the hall?]."

Maybe the best thing is realize one has what's called depression, recognize it, and think about it in the terms that our ancestors would have. You may have a harder row to hoe than most, but you may also have more insights to share than most. Somehow, that's the path you chose.