VisionAndPsychosis.Net©

In Montgomery Alabama

Children  and Violence

 

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In the last half of the 20th  century there has been an increased rate of violence in the  population.

It is especially troubling when it happens in schools and involves children.

The events of Columbine, Pearl Mississippi, and Conyers Georgia stun observers.

But there has been little understanding of why these events happen.

 

 

This site is about a conflict of human physiology.

It was discovered because it caused dissociative mental breaks for Knowledge workers.

 

 

Close-spaced side-by-side seating in all class rooms copies the design problem those engineers found.

Mental events that happen with Landmark Education's seminar, The Forum, are evidence of classroom involvement.

 

The introduction of the personal computer allows additional exposure when it is used in a room with repeating detectable movement.

 

This  little known, rare, psychiatric injury was  explained in college psychology lectures under Psychophysics, Physiology of Sight, Subliminal Sight, and Peripheral Vision Reflexes.

You will find this information hard to believe.

Students hearing the explanation for the first time don't believe it either.

 

 

 

 

Children and Violence

 

 

How to use this site.

This site is a psychology project.

Some pages are anchors to explain basic observed phenomenon.

Others combine that information to show the similarity in the theory being advanced.

Start with the Demonstration page and the Everquest Connection.

Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga produce psychotic episodes and permanent altered mental states.

Similar behaviors will cause similar mental events if a threshold of exposure is reached.

 

 

 

This site argues that there is a simple problem with the physiology of sight that connects youth violence through the centuries and across racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.

If you have normal peripheral vision and can form a vision reflex you can be a victim.

 

 

Introduction

 

Over the years there have been periods when violence among youth seemed to suddenly spike. In the period after WWII violence was blamed on reading comic books about war. Violence in the media in TV and movies became the next cause. A fifteen-year study published from the University of Michigan argues to confirm that correlation. (They did not consider all the variables. Link to a copy of the study below.) Today video games with violence as a part of game play have risen to the top of the list of probable causes for youth violence. The reason is that there is a provable correlation between video game play and violence such as mass school shootings.

But sudden unexplained violence has a long history that is unknown to the average person. For centuries Amok was a sudden outburst and violent attack on people and things in Malaysia.  (Running Amok.) Articles about life in Malaysia sometimes mention that police stations had a long handled two tined tool, like a hay fork, that was used to pin the victim of Amok down without having to engage them in a hand to hand struggle. Otherwise an armed attacker might have to be killed to stop the violence. There was no media in Malaysia over these hundreds of years. In fact there was no electricity for interior lighting.

These events, such as Amok and Going Postal,  are called Culture Bound Syndromes. CBS's that involve sudden violence and attacks on people and things happen around the world. Although Going Postal is such a CBS in the United States others involve attacks.

During the fur trapping period in the United States Mountain Men would choose to live  alone for months through the winter, rather than with a partner because occasionally that cabin mate would have a sudden episode of berserk violence and attempt to kill them. It was called Cabin Fever. These episodes happened when the two men were snowed in for weeks. There were no comics, TV, movies, or other media in the early 1800's. If they had the inclination to pack one the men might have a Bible in the cabin. Now, are we to argue that reading the Bible is the same as watching violence in media? Certainly not.

There have been episodes of violence on Russian space missions, fist fights over chess games. When there was an ax murder over a chess game in a Russian polar station Russia banned chess in space. Does playing chess fall in to the same risk category as playing violent video games? I don't think so. The men involved in these incidents lived in very small arrangements like the fur trapper's over-wintering cabins. There is no media available on the earth's poles. There is little media present in space capsules orbiting the earth.

 

So what was available in all these places and at all these times?

Human physiology and a little known 'conflict in the physiology of sight.'

 

The playing field, the issue:   (incomplete page -- under construction)

On Thanksgiving Day 2001 Shawn Woolley's mother discovered he had committed suicide seated at his computer with the opening screen for Everquest on the monitor. There was and is an uproar to control or ban computer games especially violent ones. In part Woolley's suicide has been used to argue that content can have serious effects on those who use video games.

A shooting involving two teens who had been playing a video game about random violence and which had shooting episodes as part of the game play,  was used as evidence for the campaign against violent video games. (1)

Although there has been lingering suspicion that unusual college suicides are somehow connected to the parallel invention and increased use of computers no one has been able to make a connection. The flickering of the monitor in early computers was the first thing suspected.

  This site correctly states a connection to computer use and mental events.  It's the workstation, where and how the computer is used.. .

see the  (College Suicides and Missing Students pages.)

The disappearance of Ron Tammen  from Miami of Ohio in 1953 is the case to show this connection. (There were no computers in 1953. But the problem of physiology has always been present. This is explained and linked to Miami University's "Ron Tammen" site on both linked pages above.)

 

The Phenomenon

The problem, of course, is not the computer or content of games played on it. The problem is a little known conflict of physiology related to the vision startle reflex and an engineering design problem.

A conflict of physiology related to the vision startle reflex was accidentally discovered in the 1960's when it caused mental breaks for knowledge workers using newly designed movable close-spaced office workstations. The psychologists who solved the problem didn't call it a "conflict of physiology." It was probably called pseudo psychosis. Those first episodes were temporary and resolved without treatment.

As far as I can determine, today, office furniture designers view the problem as a nuisance of human physiology which they must design around. They would only recognize temporary periods of dissociation and psychotic behavior if it happened to someone in the workplace who did not use a cubicle. They would not connect a sudden mass shooting to "their design problem."

Students and Knowledge workers have similar behaviors. They each sit for hours engaging deep mental investment. To maintain that concentration to work or study, each person must ignore everything happening around them by using slight dissociation. That dissociation engages a evolutionarily developed warning system that will break your concentration if movement is detected in peripheral vision. Within seconds of first presentation we can learn to ignore the reflexes subliminally-detected movement creates. Demonstration page.

Successfully ignoring the reflex and stopping the startle does not turn the subliminal detection system off. It continues to detect movement and evaluates it as a threat. The system is warn first, evaluate second. When threat movement is detected your brain attempts to cause the warning reflex. Those attempts are called Subliminal Distraction. The Cubicle solved the early design problem. Herman Miller Inc. introduced the first movable close-spaced office workstations in 1964 but modified it by adding side-vision-blocking panels creating the first cubicle. (Subliminal Distraction in the United States usually refers to audio stimulus rather than visual. But outside the United States the name is recognized.)

Anytime a student study area or computer workstation is located in a room with repeating detectable movement, sufficient to cause a peripheral vision reflex, that workstation must have Cubicle Level Protection. ...Prevention... (bottom of this page)

 

 

What is the connection to children and violence?

Children are exposed to Subliminal Distraction; as part of normal classroom use, in incorrectly designed computer workstations, by using hand-held computer games where there is detectable movement in peripheral vision. They have the same outcomes as adults exposed in business offices.

Look at school mass shooters. In those cases where information is available they were all computer users. Many had previous mental health problems. Only the Redlake school shooter left information that shows he had an activity that would have caused exposure to Subliminal Distraction.

Jeff Weise had placed a second monitor near his computer so he could watch movies while he used the computer by slightly shifting his eye position. It means that when he played a movie with enough contrast and movement he had created the "special circumstances" to cause exposure to Subliminal Distraction. Movement in the movie monitor, two dimensional  movement, could be detected as he concentrated and dissociated to use the computer. When he accumulated enough exposure he had the same mental break those early knowledge workers had.

There has been research in which college teams were sent to the sites of school shootings to interview and gather information. But none of them has been aware of the conflict of physiology. Never the less in some of the interviews the teams accidentally included information on activities that  would engage the phenomenon.

For example, the shooters in Pearl Mississippi had a hobby of frequently playing video games with friends.

 

 

 

Exposure in Classrooms is low...

Unlike business office workers students do not spend hours in deep mental investment. Students do the same things at the same time so there is little opportunity for exposure from others walking beside a concentrating student. But exposure does happen. For students exposure is random, accidental and light.

Exposure begins to peak near puberty when body size increases. When the level of exposure and the resulting stimulation of the subconscious mind by failed reflexes is not enough to cause the full mental break it can cause other psychiatric symptoms. This is the potential cause of ADD, ADHD, and Panic Attacks.

 

 

Evidence exposure to Subliminal Distraction causes psychiatric symptoms...

So few people have been aware of the problem that there is no research on it. So we are left to look at situations where Subliminal Distraction was evident because of the situation and design of work and living spaces.

In 1898 Belgium sent an expedition to Antarctica. A sealer used in polar seas was purchased and refitted. On the Belgica space was at such a premium that each man was measured and his bunk fitted to him. In his book "Through the First Antarctic Night," Dr. Fredrick Cook, ship's doctor,  wrote about the incident. One man died of a preexisting heart problem when the situation and stress became too much for him. Another man became a deaf mute, and a third man hid in small remote places to sleep believing the others were plotting to kill him. The men began to recover when they all worked outside to chop the ship out of the polar ice in the spring. Only one man became permanently insane.

Those scientists and crew members were experienced in Artic conditions. They had no previous mental problems. The only thing that happened was that they were confined in too-small living conditions inside the ship for almost a year.

Although not made public there have been mental breaks on other expeditions and scientific stations in Artic areas. In one case at an American Antarctic station one man became so psychotically paranoid that he was sedated until he could be evacuated in the spring.

There was an incident at a Russian Antarctic station where one person killed another with a hatchet over a chess game. There have been fistfights on Russian space stations over chess games. The solution the Russian space agency used was to ban chess in space.

Astronauts & Insanity has quotes from Dr Cook's book.

Doesn't that sound like banning violent video games? An entire field of psychology has been created to deal with this problem, the psychology of isolation. None of the papers or authors seem to be aware of the 1960's accidental discovery or that Accidental Subliminal Operant Conditioning exists.

 

 

 

The supporting theory on this site:

Culture Bound Syndromes

Mental events happening around the world point to a uninvestigated cause of violence.

The first instances of sudden violence were noted during the 1830's in over-wintering cabins of mountain men, fur trappers. They preferred to risk living alone through the winter rather than risk that their cabin-mate would go berserk and attack them. It was called Cabin Fever.

The same phenomenon happens in Malaysia. It is called Amok, as in running amok. The Navajo call the behavior iich'aa. Today in the United States we call the sudden attacks Going Postal. All three of these behaviors are considered Culture Bound Syndromes. But no one knows why the same behaviors appear in different cultures with different belief systems and ethnic values.

The connection is that all the behaviors happen when members of different societies accidentally create the same circumstances to allow exposure to Subliminal Distraction.

All the victims of these syndromes live in one of two single-room situations. Either many people live in a large single-room, or family members live in small huts, hogans, or other traditional single-room housing.

Like the classroom situation these living arrangements create the "special conditions" to allow exposure from Subliminal Distraction. (As noted above classroom exposure is different from exposure where many people live and work in single-room arrangements.)

 

Accidental Subliminal Operant Conditioning...

The phenomenon explored on this site does not create violence out of thin air. The phenomenon supplies subliminal stimulus to the subconscious. The normal frequency of the subliminal stimulus is low for outdoor workers whose activities copy the hunter gather rate of exposure. But when we create the special circumstances for exposure that rate of stimulus increases until the brain becomes aware of it and attempts to understand it.

If your brain misunderstands the stimulus as reinforcement of thought and contemporaneous situations, such as disputes, the stimulus can reinforce negative evaluations of those situations.

In discussions on on the Internet people who become aware of the problem note that they have a feeling of something moving behind them. I suggest that this is the source of perceived paranoia when the stimulus happens over weeks and months. Those subliminal perceptions eventually color thought and reason.

(There is an alternate possibility. There have been experiments where electrically stimulating areas of the brain produce fear. It is possible that the neural impulses from the attempts to cause a reflex are misdirected and stimulate those areas. This is above the training and education in brain anatomy I have available.)

 

 Each person subconsciously  perceives the stimulus differently. Paranoia is a common feature as well as fear. This can be seen in notes left by mass shooters such as Mark Barton and the accounts of Dissociative Fugue victims such as Mary Shotwell Little.

If the stimulus is intense in a compact time frame a dissociative mental break can happen. This is evidenced in the mental breaks associated with Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga.

 

Sudden Violence Around the World...

Attacks on people and things are noted in the descriptions of Culture Bound Syndromes. Investigators believe that these syndromes are created by the pressures of life in exotic ethnic societies. Sudden violence is the main feature of a group of CBS's.

 

Amok, iich'aa, and Going Postal are incidents of sudden violence from Malaysia, among the Navajo, and mass shooting incidents in the United States. But of you only considered these cases it would be hard to see how they are connected.

The jumping diseases contain the information to understand the cause of Culture Bound Syndromes. Their symptoms are so strange and unique that they cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Victims exhibit hyper-startle effects and upon being startled they will match any behavior exhibited to them. When given commands they will perform any act demanded of them even it is potentially harmful to themselves or others. When startled they will also repeat the last words spoken to then or their own last words. Those two features are usually only seen in catatonic schizophrenia.

The first cases were located among French Canadian lumberjacks in Mooselake Maine in 1880. They became known as Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. The phenomenon was found in other locations in Canada. The behavior happens in Malaysia where it is called Latah. Now there are cases found around the world.

With the exception of a few separate cases found in industrial manufacturing companies the syndrome only happens where many people live in single-room arrangements or where small family groups live in too-small single-room huts, hogans, or other "traditional ethnic housing." In 1880's Maine the lumberjacks lived in bunkhouses and in Malaysia entire villages lived in longhouses.

Anytime that situation exists one person will begin an activity requiring mental investment while others walk nearby.  That exposes the concentrating person to Subliminal Distraction.

In the class room exposure situation all the students do the same things at the same time. There is little opportunity for one student to cause exposure for others if they all sit and concentrate at the same time. But sensitive children would be exposed at higher rates than the average student. ADD and ADHD can be explained as a child's response to Subliminal Distraction. Indigo Children are those whose exposure has begun to cause the hallucinations and hearing voices.

Exposure is cumulative. Peripheral Vision Reflexes are created at a level below though, reason, and consciousness. Far peripheral vision, Subliminal Peripheral Vision, uses rods to that it is black and white vision and only position and movement are detected. That means that shape and color are not present in the internal brain signals so that the moving object cannot be identified. There is no memory associated with vision reflex creation so that each threat detection incident will cause the brain to attempt another reflex.

When the victim is in a competitive situation or there is an ongoing situation of bullying/teasing the effect of paranoia functioning through Subliminal Operant Conditioning creates a situation for violence.  Repeating incidents of detected threat movement shapes thought to attach blame on those involved in negative social interactions.

If you read the suicide notes left by mass shooters they contain elements of perceived persecution which the shooter gives as the reason for the event.

Mark Barton Day Trader Shooter Atlanta 1999.

 

 

DSM disorders and violence

 

The first thing you should understand about the disorders of the DSM is that there if no knowledge of the cause of any of them. ... The problem on this site, on the other hand, is a known problem with a certain cause.

If the subject recovers within a short time the psychotic episode would be classified as  brief psychotic disorder. In many cases the perpetrator does not survive the episode or commits suicide while the psychotic episode is active. There is no determination in those cases. Experts are left to guess what "disorder" they should apply as the cause of violence.

The Virginia Tech shooter, Seng-Hui Cho, is a good example. We know he used the suite common room to study while roommates walked by ignoring him. That's Subliminal Distraction exposure. But we also know he had been exposed for months and had begun to exhibit bizarre behavior.

Had he survived is is not certain he would have recovered. That pattern of exposure seen in Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga produces a fixed altered mental state.

There is no way to know which of the "disorders" of the DSM would have applied. It would not have mattered if anyone had known about Subliminal Distraction.

 

 

 

Cases of violence associated with Subliminal Distraction Exposure.

 

2001 Landmark Education mental break. (This case is also on the est psychotic episodes page. )

Mental breaks have happened to participants of Landmark Education's Large Group Awareness Training Seminar, LGATS, since its inception in the 1970's.

Landmark does not know what causes them. Victims are sitting in the audience participating in the seminar.

The belief of the trainers and lecturers is that constant confrontation will break down resistance and allow a new beginning with new habits and goals. The fact that psychotic mental breaks happen tells us to look for Subliminal Distraction.

When participants concentrate on the lecture to the point of slight dissociation they can detect movement of other audience members in their peripheral vision. If the lecture were held in a darkened room there would be no mental breaks.

 

Jason Weed took a Landmark Education seminar training course, had a mental break as a result of that course,  and killed a postal worker named Robert Jenkins on December 21, 2001. Seventeen months later a commitment hearing was held to determine if Weed should be released under 18 U.S.C. 4243 (2000), the federal statute governing commitment of persons found not guilty by reason of insanity. Experts for both sides agreed and testified that he was psychotic at the time of the murder but his  psychotic symptoms had disappeared. The court decided that Weed failed to prove he was no longer a threat to the community in that he might still have latent mental illness. He was committed to the custody of the Attorney General of the United States. That court decision was affirmed on appeal.   (There had been two previous hearings at nine months and one year after the commitment.)

 

The appeal decision mentioned that video tape of the original interrogation showed psychotic behavior. Weed switched from laughter to anger and had many incomprehensible statements. 

 

Dr. Curtis Grundy testified that Weed's mental problem should be diagnosed as "brief psychotic disorder." He said the mental break happed because of a defect but the nature of that defect was unknown. Dr. Grundy said that Weed displayed symptoms of psychosis at  the time of the shooting, including visual and auditory hallucinations, paranoia,  delusions, and severe agitation. No additional psychotic episodes had happened since the murder.

 

Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard Med.,  testified for the government. He interviewed Weed by phone and  reviewed the records to reach a diagnosis. He discounted the participation in an est seminar and blamed a "complex partial seizure" deep in the brain. He could not cite any evidence of that having happened.

 

A report from the Bureau of Prisons, called a "Certificate of Mental Disease or Defect and Dangerousness," was introduced. It stated that mental health workers treating Weed believed that,  "Weed is currently suffering from a mental disease or defect that would cause him  to present a substantial risk of danger to others if released." A forensic evaluation  submitted by staff psychiatrist Bryon Herbel, M.D., and staff psychologist Robert E. Cochrane, Psy. D., diagnosed Weed as having "Brief Psychotic Disorder, In Remission." They noted that the symptoms shown a the time of the shooting had "remitted a few days after his arrest, following treatment with a single dose of Haldol and Ativan." 

 

Note that both psychiatrists create a mental problem or seizure in Mr. Weed without any medical evidence that such a seizure happened or that a brain defect existed. The story including sudden onset and recovery matches the description of Subliminal Distraction. The est participation probably was the cause of the incident even though the psychiatrists discounted it. Today the mental breaks associated with est are acknowledged. They claim a serious incident rate at less than 1/1000 of 1%.

 

There is a long history of this problem and it has been investigated before. The in those previous investigations psychologists could only find that the mental breaks happened in seminars where aggressive lecturers were used. 

 

A French TV program took a hidden camera into a seminar and filmed the process. All the participants were doing was sitting in the audience while watching a lecturer interrogate volunteers about their psychosocial problems.

 

When someone sits in the seminar and intently involves themselves in the action at the front of the room they eventually reach a state of light dissociation for activity around them. In that mental state they can subliminally detect the small movements of others nearby. That is Subliminal Distraction.

 

Redlake School Shooting (This information is also on the Redlake School Shooting page.)

Jeff Weise accidentally created the design problem known to cause mental breaks at home. He had been assigned home schooling because of a 'policy violation.' This allowed him to use his computer and watch movies all day. He tried to do both at the same time.

An entry on his Live Journal site has him attempting to type on the computer while watching a movie running on his TV monitor .

"As I sit here typing up my musings I listen to Cheech & Chong Up in Smoke, the movie. Occasionally shifting my eyes from screen to screen, trying to balance out typing and observing." 

The human mind can only concentrate on one task at a time. You cannot calculate math problems while carrying on a conversation. But tasks like math or using a computer engage slight dissociation so that movement in peripheral vision will be detected as threat movement to cause a vision reflex. When you learn to ignore that detected movement as not dangerous to you, the subliminal operation of the detection system prevents your learning that detection continues to happen.

Each time Weise concentrated on his computer screen he dissociated slightly. In that mental state if there was sufficient contrast in the movie scene playing in peripheral vision his brain mistook that for threat-movement. Small movements or small moving objects will not be detected.

Movement in two dimensions would be apparently toward you if the object increased in size. Large, quick, dark objects would more easily be detected.

The detected movement and the efforts of your brain to force a vision reflex are a Subliminal Distraction.

The description of him laughing while shooting classmates indicates some  disruption of his normal mental process and adds to the belief he had the mental break associated with Subliminal Distraction.

The Tribal Council did not respond to phone messages or emails to investigate this problem.  There were hits from Paul Bunyon Telephone Co-Op. on this site.

 

 

 

 

Sunday March 16, 2008 07:59:42 PM

The links section below has material that is not in the text section above. Page Links

 

 

 

Culture Bound Syndromes  (This text begins the second draft of this page.) This is a repeat of the text above. I use this method because of frequent interruptions that may last hours. This text will be removed as I finish the last edit.

 

Culture Bound Syndromes have been included in the DSM for the first time. They are defined as odd and disturbing behaviors in ethnic populations. Amok, Going Postal, and Iich'aa are the three of concern to violence and children. No, children are not included as victims of these behaviors. But the situation where many people live and work in a single room is. Only children who act out violence and create mass shootings in schools could be said to have similar behaviors to Amok, Going Postal and Iich'aa.

To explain this requires a slight diversion. Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disease, JFMD, was believed to be a neurological disorder. News of that discovery went around the world in a series of articles by a New York neurologist in the 1880's. The symptoms were hyper-startle, command behaviors, and some features usually only seen in catatonic schizophrenia. Command behaviors mean that someone could tell a victim to perform some act and the victim of Latah or JFMD would instantly do what they had been commanded to do. They would do so even if the act were dangerous and possibly harmful.  Later research determined that the command behaviors indicated that operant conditioning was the cause of the disease but they could not find the source of that operant conditioning. Additional research determined that becoming a lumberjack was the only prerequisite to becoming a victim of JFMD.

Much later he same disease was found in Malaysia where it is called Latah. There it began as a disease of men but has shifted to elderly women today.

What would you imagine could be a causative factor to create the same bizarre problem on opposite sides of the world and in vastly different cultures? How could it shift within a population from men to elderly women?

Exposure to Subliminal Distraction is that connection.

Cabin Fever was a sudden violent attack that happened to fur trappers in the 1820/30's. Mountain men preferred  to over-winter alone rather than risk a berserk attack by their cabin-mate. Amok, Going Postal and Iich'aa, Culture Bound Syndromes, are sudden attacks like Cabin Fever that happen in Malaysia, Post Offices in the US, and among the Navajo.

Why is this significant? When two or more people attempt to live and work in a too-small single room arrangements such as a primitive cabin in the mountains, they eventually create the "special circumstances" that were discovered to cause mental breaks in the 1960's. In the case of both JFMD and Latah many people lived in bunkhouses in Maine and Longhouses in Malaysia. Both designs are single room living arrangements. The same situation is created there too.

When humans begin to concentrate on any activity a normal feature of our physiology comes into play. We all have an evolutionarily developed, retained warning system that will break our concentration if movement is detected approaching from behind. We call that system Peripheral Vision Reflexes. The reflex is to slightly startle, then turn, look, and identify the movement. We also have the ability to ignore the movement if it repeats and we are aware that it is not a danger to us.

But we do not have control over the subliminal detection of that movement. We cannot 'stop seeing' anything that appears in our vision field. And we cannot tell our subconscious to stop attempting to force the reflex when movement is subliminally detected. There is no memory or reasoning associated with this system so that every time a new incident of movement is detected another reflex is created. That's what the psychologists learned in the 1960's. That discovery led to the creation of the office Cubicle in 1968. Cubicles are designed so that peripheral vision is blocked for knowledge workers using them.

The explanation given in first semester psychology classes was, " as the subject continues to ignore repeating reflexes a conflict arises in the mind, then builds to a mental break." I don't know why this is not included in those lectures today. But the basics of the physiology of sight is still part of the instruction set in psychology.

Too-close side-by-side seating in classrooms is the same design problem. School children do not sit and maintain concentration like knowledge workers in business offices. They, like those lumberjacks and fur trappers, only have exposure when they concentrate while there is detectable movement in peripheral vision. But exposure is cumulative. Any other activity that can cause exposure to Subliminal Distraction will add to total exposure. Playing video games requires a similar level of concentration. If there is movement in peripheral vision the game player is exposed to Subliminal Distraction.

The Pearl Mississippi school shooters played video games with friends and the Redlake shooter left a journal entry describing an activity that would have caused exposure for him. When he was sent home  by the school he had all day to sit at his computer with a movie monitor placed in peripheral vision. He did that so he could watch movies while using the computer by slightly shifting his gaze. That placed a source of movement in his peripheral vision when he used the computer. The Heritage school shooter  in Conyers Ga is in prison with psychiatric symptoms. That argues he had a mental event that led to the shooting.

An event aboard the Belgica during the Belgian Polar Expedition of 1898/99 demonstrates that exposure to Subliminal Distraction can cause a variety of psychiatric symptoms. In his book "Through the First Antarctic Night" Dr Cook, ship's doctor mentioned that the Belgica, a converted whaler, used a single room living space for the scientists on the expedition. When the ship was trapped in polar ice they had little to do except sit, think, write, daydream, and try to stay warm. The eighteen men began to go insane. Scientists were first but the crew succumbed when the normal activities aboard the ship were no longer necessary. Dr. Cook was credited with saving lives. He remained active treating the men and was unaffected.

 

We all have exposure to this problem every day. Most of it is harmless. The mental events happen when a threshold of exposure in a compact time frame is reached.

The next question you should ask is, "are there any mental events associated with school children and classrooms?" ADD, ADHD, and Schizophrenia.

 

   TO BE CONTINUED  ... there are several pages with this information in slightly different forms. Browse the site until I can finish this page.

 

 

 

 

L__

 

 

Links for this page  Links for the site are a "Favorites" list from Internet Explorer, here.

 

Longitudinal Relations Between Children’s Exposure to TV Violence and
Their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977–1992
L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D. Eron
University of Michigan

"The data we are analyzing in this article were collected on a sample of youth during two time periods in their lives—an original 2-year period when they were in the first and second or third and fourth grades and a 2-year follow-up period approximately 15 years later when they were in their early 20s".

 

http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/dev392201.pdf

Although I am still reading this study, it fails to account for exposure from Subliminal Distraction whether in homes or  classrooms. The authors are unaware the problem exists. Being last in birth order would mean that other siblings were available to move in peripheral vision as these middle school students watched violent TV. Family income levels would translate into smaller apartments and home situations leading to additional exposure from SD. Last, the overall income and tax base for a community is felt in overcrowding of school classrooms. Closer spacing in those overcrowded classrooms causes additional exposure.

 

 

Articles on Media and Violence

Five newspaper and magazine articles about university studies of children and violence. None of the articles mention the conflict of physiology because none of the studies included it.

http://www.fradical.com/March_2002_tv_violence_study.htm

Iowa state

Although Craig Anderson, chair of the department of psychology, cites myths about violence and children caused by media exposure, he does not mention the conflict of physiology. The text of this article is taken from the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, "The Impact of Interactive Violence on Children," March 2000. Professor Anderson says he has studied human behavior for over 25 years.

The "myths" he cites are questionable not because he has not gathered data to support his statements, but because he incorrectly thought he had considered all the variables.

 

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2000-2004/00Senate.html

 

Media Awareness Network

I have not had time to read all the material available on this site  One thing I did note is that fear is believed to be an outcome of watching media violence. Un-attributed fear is an outcome of stimulation in Subliminal Peripheral Vision.

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/effects_media_violence.cfm

The Skeptic ,,, Am article by Bruce Rolston, December 22, 2000

"Tobacco scientist comparison" is the phrase used to speak about research done on violent media and violence by children in the quotes from this article.

"One of the reasons that people think television was harmful was because this increase [in homicide] followed, by some number of years, the introduction of television....But it turns out in the United States this pattern of a very sharp increase and leveling off and then dropping sharply also occurred between 1900 and 1935. Almost exactly the same pattern. In just one century you've got this pattern repeated twice, and certainly the first pattern wasn't due to television."   Site quote spelling as copy/paste

 

http://www.avault.com/articles/getarticle.asp?name=skeptic

What did change? The pace of business. The  introduction of the engineering design office and other business offices using the Bull Pen System. In the period before computers man power was used to bulldoze out engineering problems. The conflict of physiology was not discovered until the 1960's but it had always been present in all human populations. It did not start with close-spaced workstations.

 

 

Articles on School Violence

 

Violentkids.com

An excellent read. The author is correct but again she is missing the same key piece of information to explain why:

"The truth is that teens who kill -- in school settings or elsewhere -- are already deeply disturbed individuals who are easily sent over the edge."

http://www.violentkids.com/articles/violence_article_4.html

Violent Video Games Can Increase Aggression
May be more harmful than violent television and movies because of the interactive nature of the games

A brief review  of two studies is presented but the links to full article texts are dead. These are corelational studies which cite statistical outcomes. Neither mention the existence of the phenomenon on this page. But they tell the story of the current belief about TV violence and its influence on children and violence.

http://www.fradical.com/violent_video_games_can_increase_aggression.htm

 

Culture Bound Syndromes:

Around the world there are bizarre and exotic psychiatric events. Some of them can be connected to the conflict of physiology. One grouping includes Going Postal and Amok, as in running amok. These episodes include violence against bystanders and the destruction of property. The Culture Bound Syndromes page has that discussion.

 

 

FTC report "Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children"

http://www.ftc.gov/reports/violence/vioreport.pdf

 

 

 

Inclusion of Culture Bound Syndromes in the Text Revision of  DSM -IV provides information that points to the phenomenon at work around the world. (See Amok and Going Postal on the Culture Bound Syndromes page.)  Psychiatrist writers of the DSM believe these events, syndromes, are  created by stresses unique to each culture. They are missing one key piece of information, that the conflict of physiology exists. The conflict was discovered in the 1950's/60's. That means every thing you know about psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the cause of mental illness was theorized without knowledge of the problem.

(DSM means Diagnostic and Statistical  Manual of Mental Illness of the American Psychiatric Association)

Examples

In both Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga there are serious psychiatric symptoms which happen when the exercise is done to excess in groups.

In both the exercise forms  the exercise is performed in groups possibly with an instructor. Eyes-open meditation is attempted in both cases. Each person can "subliminally see," detect, the movement of  persons moving near them. A dissociative mental event happens when frequent practice exceeds a threshold, different for each person. The life long mental disability may or may not be significant depending on the nature of the altered mental state and installed belief system.

 

Kundalini Yoga  _ Unknown to most of us this form of Yoga is known to have serious mental outcomes for some who attempt to travel the path to enlightenment. Gurus of this exercise form believe the serious negative  mental outcomes, including hearing voices, thoughts of reference and beliefs that you can communicate and read minds by mental telepathy, are caused by the failure to control the awakening of the coiled serpent that resides in the untapped source of energy at the base of human spines. Others who practice this Yoga form believe these abnormal beliefs are evidence of the enhanced mental state and prove there is a higher plane of existence.  (I do not understand how something like this got by everyone. Do you?)

QiGong Psychotic Reaction  _ For years, both in the United States and China, there have been medical cases and lawsuits claiming serious psychiatric injuries caused by this slow motion martial arts exercise form. The psychiatric injury is listed as a Culture-Bound Syndrome in the DSM, Chinese method of categorizing mental illness.

 

 How does this connect to Violence in Children?

Explained in Culture Bound Syndromes each person understands this subliminal stimulation and mental event in terms of their own experience and mental belief set. Children have limited experiences and contemporaneous beliefs  for Accidental Operant Conditioning to shape.

It is possible that the attention disorders ADD and ADHD are the effects of this subliminal stimulation. Remember no one knows what causes these disorders.

You can test this by moving effected children to a position in the classroom where is nothing that can move in that students peripheral vision.

You should be aware of any child's efforts to turn in their chair when there is a student next to them who exhibits hyper-activity. The student who turns in the seat is not aware of why they move. The over-active student is subliminally distracting to them.

The phenomenon to cause all of this  is Accidental Operant Conditioning.  Although this will sound strange to you, I am not the first person to state a connection for a neurological condition that might be caused by operant conditioning. In about 1880 a New York Neurologist visited northern Maine to investigate strange stories of problems in French Canadian lumberjacks. The problem is listed in some indexes as a Culture Bound Syndrome. Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome, Latah in Malaysia, Myriachit, Siberia all seem to be connected. All are characterized by hypersuggestibility, echolalia, echopraxis, coprolalia, disorganization, and automatic obedience. They also involve violence at the incidence of a startle event.

 

This site is the first to cite a physiological cause or method to create operant conditioning.

In addition the Chaco Canyon page states the connection between these Culture Bound Syndromes.

 

Mass School Shootings

 

When you read accounts of school shootings you find that the shooter may not say why they did it but have some of the same factors involved in the shooting. The Heritage School shooter from Conyers Ga. is still in prison with serious psychiatric symptoms. Many of them were heavy computer users. In the Columbine incident bullying was given as one cause. (Materials from Columbine have been sealed by the judge.)

Your brain functions as an organic computer. It has little connection to the world outside. The brain depends on signals from nerves to create a reality. It must correctly  identify incoming stimulus.  Elements of sight are handled in several areas, hearing in others and sensations from your skin in still other areas of your brain. Your brain is able to understand and assign meaning to each stimulus because of those associations. Synesthesia is an example of the failure of a brain to differentiate these sources.

http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/synesthesia.html

After you ignore the source of threat movement,  the subliminal signals from the attempt to force a peripheral vision reflex are still being created as long as the movement is there. But because they no longer have a connection to consciousness  there is no association consciousness can make for them. When your mind perceives subliminal stimulus as reinforcement for contemporaneous thought or activities, operant conditioning happens.

The common perception of this signal would of being watched or of something behind you. When that is eventually associated with an ongoing event or dispute the stimulation operating as operant conditioning against consciousness eventually causes that event to be raised to psychotic levels.

Paranoia is present in many psychiatric conditions but there is little understanding of what causes paranoia. This site suggests that the fact that peripheral vision reflexes can only happen when threat movement is detected coming from behind explains  the source of paranoia. The general sensation would be one of being watched. As the stimulation continues day after day the sensation gradually occupies more of the brain's evaluation process to create paranoia.

The child is unaware anything is happening. They experience this as part of their normal day to day activity. Usual disputes in school can be raised to psychotic levels as the mind subconsciously associates the sensations of warning, fear, to those events.

 

 

How do I know this?

I saw it happen in my wife's case. Near the point of the mental break she began to say that others at work were against her. She associated the sensations with mistakes she had made in preparing payroll reports. She eventually thought the University was about to have her arrested because thousands of dollars had been lost due to her mistakes. Normal events in the office were seen as sinister. When I checked with a supervisor the events actually did happen but they had no connection to my wife, Connie.

 Personal Experiences page.

Even though I had known about the problem for forty years it took several weeks to realize what had happened. This is the first time someone has observed a mental break who knew about the conflict of physiology so that a connection could eventually be made.

 

What should be done?

 

Simple changes in class rooms and computer labs in schools is a first step.

Informing students and parents that the problem exists is another step.

In the business office the Cubicle was the solution to prevent subliminal detection of threat movement. The classroom will not lend to that solution but staggering rows of seats so that no student sits close beside another should reduce the number of threat movement incidents.

Correct construction of desk top computer workstations in homes and the correct usage of notebook computers should eliminate additional exposure.

I will have a poster available for downloading in a few weeks.

 

Studies Publications:

Conclusion:

A small little known oddity, quirk, or conflict of human physiology is never used or included in studies that attempt to prove viewing violence has a direct relationship to committing violence by children.

The phenomenon is Accidental Operant Conditioning and has the power to subliminally effect thought and beliefs.

 

LINKS

 

(1)

cnn news

Lawsuit filed against Sony, Wal-Mart over game linked to shootings Thursday, October 23, 2003 Posted: 11:58 AM EDT (1558 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/10/22/videogame.lawsuit.ap/

 

 

 

 

 

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Prevention:  This  section is now repeated at the bottom of every page.

The rare occurrence of the injury establishes that is difficult to create enough exposure to cause an injury. But when it does happen the consequences are serious, possibly fatal.

 Our personal experience was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays for thirty calendar days.

If you have a tower CPU mount it under your desk. That's the way they position it in a cubicle. The hard drive busy light is about the height of your low peripheral vision if you put the tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or writing notes beside the keyboard on the side of the monitor away from the tower makes the blinking hard drive busy light appear to approach from behind when you turn to view the screen again.

If you have a computer work station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write or do other non computer work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove screen savers in this instance. The movement, animation for example, in your screensaver, two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral vision at close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.

All home, apartment, or dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace. To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'

If you use computer or CD-ROM games for many hours day after day, the game playing position should follow the same rules as the computer workstation. Battery operated games will not run long enough on a single rechargeable battery to cause a risk for SPVP.

Although a laptop does not have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same rules apply to your work position.  There should not be human traffic moving to you from behind. There should be nothing behind you, which could enter your subliminal peripheral vision field as you turn your head while working at the laptop and be mistaken for threat movement.

Only movement coming from behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause a peripheral vision reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead then enters your Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be no peripheral vision reflex.

 

Repeated for Emphasis:

A single session or rare sessions will not cause this problem.

It is the same day after day long hours of play or computer use with detectable movement in ‘Subliminal Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a risk for SPVP injury.

Exposure can be cumulative 

The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.

 

 

 

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