Indigo Children

Copyright 2003 -  Edit Sunday March 16, 2008 08:55:19 PM -0600

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This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected  until the 1960's.

In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.

It caused mental breaks for office workers.

You will find this material hard to believe.

This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.

For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.

The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.

The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.

This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.

The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.

If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read  ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.

Long  term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong  Kundalini Yoga

If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.

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Indigo Children Explained as Benign Schizophrenia

The fact that so called "Indigo Children" are often gifted is a hint to the cause of their bizarre tales of seeing ghosts and their strange belief systems. Those with higher intelligence or creative gifts often spend more time in private thought or performing activities that qualify as knowledge work.

During those frequent incidents of mental concentration they are susceptible to exposure from Subliminal Distraction if the concentration is done in a location that has detectable repeating movement in peripheral vision. Where is that exposure possible? Too-close side-by-side seating in classrooms copies a design problem that was accidentally discovered in the 1960's.

In business offices engineers, accountants, designers, editors, copywriters, and a long list of other at-risk occupations must have Cubicle Level Protection.

Designers and engineers accidentally discovered a conflict of physiology when knowledge workers using the first production examples of moveable-close-spaced office workstations began to have mental breaks. The problem was solved. Subliminal Sight and Peripheral Vision Reflexes had operated in the special circumstances the new workstations created to cause the mental breaks.  The Cubicle became the industry standard to prevent the repeating subliminal detection of threat movement.

See the Modern Cubicle VPN site page for Cubicle information.

Children in classrooms do not maintain long periods of concentration as knowledge workers in business offices do. That limits the opportunities for exposure in classrooms to periods of writing, reading, performing math, or daydreaming. Movement of someone in the next row of seats is difficult to detect if that movement is limited to writing in notebooks. But when puberty increases body size movement of larger bodies is easier to detect. Exposure to Subliminal Distraction spikes after puberty. That's why schizophrenia usually onsets in adolescence.

Hearing voices is mentioned as a sign of a child being an Indigo. They often insist on doing things their way no matter what the result. Psychic skills are often claimed. Those include knowing in advance what will happen, precognition,  and they may claim to be able to communicate with the dead or spirits. One TV interview, done on a beach with a seventeen year-old surfer, demonstrated that she believes her deceased grandmother visits and speaks to her often.  During the CNN segment the Indigo child pointed to angels just behind the interviewer. While the girl may have been putting the interviewer on seeing angels is listed as common for Indigos.

Those same qualities, behaviors, and beliefs are present in Schizophrenia. This argues that the behavioral elements seen in Indigos are part of a path to severe mental handicaps. Just as in 'theory for dissociation' the 'altered mental states' may exist in a continuum of varied levels of psychosis. 

What is Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a diagnosis, nothing more.

One of the diagnostic elements used in the DSM is the degree of impairment of functioning.  The DSM does not recognize a definitive cause for psychosis. So the degree of impairment becomes a determining factor in deciding that behaviors and beliefs are a serious problem. Bizarre beliefs are not considered problematic if the culture accepts them as normal. Around the world the ability to speak to spirits and the dead is seen as evidence of supernatural gifts. But a failure to correctly perceive a normal reality is psychotic. Beliefs that you can or have levitated, have the ability to become invisible, can walk unharmed through solid objects, and can hear and direct the thoughts of others through mental telepathy are  encountered in those on a path to enlightenment through Qi Gong or Kundalini Yoga. (Those two exercises create the "special circumstances" for exposure to  visual Subliminal Distraction.)

The concept of Indigo Children has been created or adopted by new age gurus. This gives an acceptable explanation for the hallucinations and hearing voices. The children's delusions are guided by this acceptance. Seeing and speaking to ghosts, angels, dead relatives is accepted as a gift of increased awareness. In Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga there is a similar, but organized belief system.  The strange thinking and bizarre beliefs are often called "psychotic-like" and unrecognized as mental illness. The desired outcome in Kundalini Yoga is a higher plane of existence. Those with symptoms resembling the psychotic delusions of schizophrenia are revered as enlightened.

Like Indigo Children the affected gurus function normally within their cultural and ethnic groups of common belief set.

Subliminal Distraction

Subliminal Distraction is the name for a problem with human physiology. The term refers to the fact that you can ignore but cannot stop stimulus from sight or hearing. In the United States the term usually refers to distracting sounds subliminally perceived while in a mental state of concentration or mental investment.

I have searched for three years without finding reference to the fact that visual Subliminal Distraction exists also. I encountered the problem as an engineering student forty years ago. In the 1990's it was included and explained in beginning psychology lectures. The explanation given was, "as the subject continues to ignore the vision reflexes a conflict arises in the mind, then builds to a mental break." Today there is no mention of this problem. Emails and letters reveal the phenomenon is unknown in the mental health field.

Humans can ignore vision reflexes once we determine that the threat movement is not a danger to us. But we can't "stop seeing" anything in our vision field. Ignoring things in our vision field is sometimes called, "attaching a zero level of attention."

We all have normal exposure to Subliminal Distraction every day. The problem arises when the stimulus reaches a threshold in a compact time frame.

We don't have to perform experiments to determine what the psychiatric effects of exceeding your personal threshold are. Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga have produced those effects for 3000 to 5000 years.

Although both exercises actually achieve their benefits from Subliminal Distraction exposure, you can exceed the safe level of exposure if you have other activities that also cause exposure. Classrooms, working in a small business office without Cubicle Level Protection, video game play in a risk location are all other sources of exposure.

Therefore  you can see that exposure from Subliminal Distraction can be changed as the situation that causes that exposure increases or decreases periods of exposure in number or length.  Fewer instances of exposure would halt or slow the progression of that descent into madness. Total accumulated exposure in a compact time frame is the determining factor for the full mental break. Low but persistent exposure produces the fixed altered mental states evidenced in Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga.

This explains sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms as well as spontaneous remissions of those symptoms.

Qi Gong Psychotic Reaction is recognized as a Culture Bound Syndrome. It has been included in the DSM as a CBS of China. Users of Qi Gong believe if they stand in groups and perform slow motion martial arts katas in unison they gain the ability to alter their reality. Qi Gong Masters acknowledge that when too many sessions are performed in a short time frame a mental break happens. But they blame that mental event on mishandling powerful life energy forces. Specifically they say the victims didn't perform the exercise correctly.

Kundalini Yoga produces the same mental events. Advanced Yogis also say that these mental breaks happen when users perform too many sessions too quickly. They blame the mental breaks on a  failure to control the Awakening of Kundalini. The DSM recognizes the Qi Gong mental breaks but not those associated with Kundalini Yoga.

Long term users begin to believe they can levitate, dematerialize, become invisible, walk through solid objects, or that they can read and direct your thoughts and actions through mental telepathy. This is not recognized or considered psychotic in the DSM because in the cultural society where these beliefs exist, they are considered part of a religious belief system.

Gurus, Yogis, and Qi Gong masters espousing these beliefs are considered enlightened.

When you examine how each exercise is performed the eyes-open meditation copies the mental investment to perform knowledge work in business offices. The movement of others exercising beside the  victim copies the movement of office staff walking beside an unprotected worker in the business office example.

It is reasonable to conclude that both exercise forms produce the same dissociative or psychotic mental break discovered to happen to knowledge workers before the introduction of the Cubicle.

What causes the psychiatric effect?

First I must admit that I don't know.

My working theory is that the stimulus to cause a peripheral vision reflex has that single use. The fact that the portion of your vision field that detects movement to effect the startle and warn you functions subliminally prevents the normal brain function of assigning meaning to the stimulus, understanding it.

The vision startle reflex is generated at such a primitive level in the brain that there is no thinking associated with it. If there were the ability to evaluate and understand the signals the system wouldn't work. The sole function of this vision reflex is to break your concentration, startle you, and cause you to react to detected threat movement.

Your brain must grow connections between neurons to create memory. As it attempts to learn and understand the unusual repeating stimulus the brain makes incorrect associations and connections. When enough of these incorrect connections exist the brain shuts down and a dissociative mental break happens.

If the exposure was intense in a compact time frame the incorrect connections will disappear due to disuse when the stimulus stops. Evidence of this is Culture Bound Syndromes. These strange behaviors happen around the world. Some of the syndromes contain enough information in their descriptions to associate them with Subliminal Distraction.

Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga demonstrate what happens if the stimulus is low level but persistent over long periods. Those incorrect connections in the brain are reinforced over those weeks and months. The stimulus is never enough to cause the full mental break. Victims begin to believe that they can levitate, dematerialize at will, become invisible, walk through solid objects or that they have other super human or super natural powers.

If you take away the substance of the beliefs and examine only the form of the condition it is similar to Schizophrenia.

Why is this not in the DSM?

The DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, American Psychiatric Association, is a collection of observations of disturbing behaviors. These behavior are sorted into groups under titles that attempt to define the behaviors as mood or psychotic disorders. The original intention was to prevent patients with similar problems being diagnosed differently by practitioners with their own beliefs about the cause of mental illness. 

One mistake made is to believe that the disorders actually exist. The disorders are labels that have been defined over time. There are different systems in other countries. But none of the categorizing systems recognizes a provable cause of mental illness.

Papers and presentations have noted the co-occurrence of disorders, co-morbidity, but until this site published the cause there was little understanding of why several "disorders" appear at the same time in a single subject.

An example of this is PTSD. That diagnosis began as an answer to episodes by Vietnam veterans. The experts believed that the substance of those flashbacks pointed to their cause, trauma. There is no evidence that this is so.

Violence by those veterans was associated with the subject of the flashbacks instead of the correct association of sudden violence with Amok, Iich'aa, and Going Postal. (Culture Bound Syndromes)

Susto is a Culture Bound Syndrome. In primitive locations sickness such as fever and vomiting is believed to be caused by exposure to trauma. That trauma can be seeing a snake, being startled, or any number of events associated with local  taboos. Dr Simon's book "Boo Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex," has an excellent chapter on this.  Dr Simons relates stories from different cultures where the parent experiencing trauma is believed to cause sickness in their children.

If you believe that is strange look at the diagnostic criterion for PTSD. It can be diagnosed even if the trauma happened months or years in the past. The recognized differential between PTSD and other similar disorders is that single fact, trauma.

Again, there is no physical evidence that this theory of the cause of PTSD behaviors is true.

For instance: PTSD has replaced "Combat Fatigue," as the name of a dissociative or psychotic break associated with combat. Subliminal Distraction was unknown in the 1940's during WWII. But it existed then because it is created by normal features of all human physiology, Subliminal Sight, and Peripheral Vision Reflexes. I have been unable to find data that would associate the duty station in WWII aircraft with cases of Combat Fatigue. Pilots and waist gunners in bombers fought in positions where there was another person moving in peripheral vision. Many people living in a single-room situation, barracks,  would cause exposure to Subliminal Distraction. Additional exposure during missions and the stress of the combat situation would increase the effect of Subliminal Distraction.

See PTSD and Culture Bound Syndromes for additional discussion and information,

Indigo Children are the creation of  new age gurus. They are said to have an indigo aura when "special photos" are taken.

If you have cable TV or access to the National Geographic Channel I suggest you watch the "Is It Real" program series, "Superhuman Powers" episode. There is a program segment on auras.  The subject of Qi (chee) is included as well as levitation, yogic flying.

Unfinished .....Sunday March 16, 2008 08:55:19 PM -0600

 Page LINKS    

Links for the entire site are on the Separate Page. Those links are a "Favorites" list accumulated during research.

ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES  Examining Indigo Children Aired November 14, 2005 - 22:00 ET
"...But from her bedroom on the Jersey Shore, Sandy says she is wired into another universe, sort of supernatural super highway.
 

It may sound like science fiction, but a growing network of believers say these types of visions are fact. Teens like Sandy claim they're part of a special generation born after 1978 known as "indigo children" for the deep blue auras that psychics say they see around them. Indigo children have high IQs and tend to be rebellious and oversensitive, they're often also said to share specials gifts, heightened intuition and psychic abilities. "
 

http://uk.geocities.com/veryscarymary/indigo-cnn.html

Full show transcript  Sunday March 16, 2008    http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/14/acd.01.html

Houston Press .Com

Alien-ated Youth
They're the next step in human evolution. But they're just like everybody else.
By Dylan Otto

"The term Indigo Child was coined 17 years ago by Nancy Ann Tappe, a parapsychologist who developed a system for classifying people's personalities according to the hue of their auras, described in her 1982 book, Understanding Your Life Through Colors. According to her, auras have been entering and exiting Earth throughout history. For example, aura colors such as fuchsia and magenta disappeared from the gene pool 100 years ago..."

http://www.houstonpress.com/Issues/2002-12-19/news/feature_print.html

Belief Net

"Named for the deep-blue aura they’re said to radiate, Indigo Children make up more than 80 percent of the generation that began "appearing on Earth," in Virtue's phrase, in the 1970s. Virtue believes this special breed of young healers and teachers comes from a variety of "realms"--some are reincarnated priests and wizards, some come from far-off solar systems, while others are simply highly evolved humans. They represent a new form of consciousness that will bring about a leap in human evolution, taking us from thinking in three dimensions to four. Among other things, they can see spirits, levitate, bilocate, communicate telepathically, bend time, and "instantly manifest" any spiritual or material need."

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/122/story_12252.html

Conflict of Physiology

The conflict of our physiology explored  on this site is that although you can ignore  peripheral vision reflexes, you cannot stop seeing the movement that causes them. You cannot tell your brain to stop subliminally detecting that movement and attempting to force  the reflex.

Peripheral Vision Reflexes

Peripheral vision reflexes are an evolutionarily developed, retained, warning system. For early man or pre-humans to survive they needed a system to warn  them of predators approaching from behind. To function it must work all the time no matter what  you are doing. If you had the ability to turn the brain system off at will, it could not warn you in critical situations.

The act of concentrating on something at arm's length, in your hand for instance, causes physiological changes in the eye.

When you focus on a close object your eye accommodates by changing the shape of the lens.  This shape-change expands the area covered by Subliminal Peripheral Vision.

Plitz's reflex, or Attention Reflex, changes the size of  your pupil. This floods the retina with ambient light desensitizing the rods so that only a large movement close by will trigger a reflex.

M and P Pathways

Although all signals from the retina travel on the optic nerve there are actually two pathways. They route the signals from conscious sight and peripheral vision to different parts of  the brain. This allows humans to have two vision systems running at the same time. The pathway from peripheral vision is subliminally observed.

http://www.vestibular.org/computer.html

Links

Nightwalking

"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."

The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.

The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.

http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125

Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation

Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.

http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm

This page has the vision material.    http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four

Vision, is a set of brain level subsystems

This page explains the M & P pathways and vision processing.

http://www.wayfinding.net/visanal.htm

The Red Myth

Color in Vision

http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html

University of Missouri

The first paragraph on this page refers to psychological factors effecting pupil dilation.

"Interestingly, the pupil/iris combination also changes in response to psychological factors. One sign of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a system important in arousal, fight, and flight, is dilated pupils. For example, sexual interest results in pupil dilation. (This piece of information may come in handy some time.)"

http://web.umr.edu/~psyworld/eye.htm

 University of Utah

John Moran Eye Center --  Anatomy

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/

Kimball's Biology Pages 

A simple explanation of the eye and sight.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html

Understanding Human Vision

This site deals with color.

http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html

Vision and the Brain

Block diagrams of vision paths through the brain explain the M and P channels.

 http://www.thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_02/i_02_cr/i_02_cr_vis/i_02_cr_vis.html#2

Study Notes Vision

http://www.utmed.com/studynotes/neuro/VisualProcessing.pdf

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