In Wetumpka, AL

The Wayback Machine will show this site is an investigation of Subliminal Distraction begun in 2002.

If you wish to help in this project, send the Home page URL to your email list and encourage everyone to do the same.

Preventing Subliminal Distraction episodes, mistaken for mental illness, is simple and free.

Copyright 2003 Edit Thursday April 12, 2018

ICU or Hospital Psychosis

Skip to explanations below introduction.

Why ICU mental breaks happen.

How ICU Psychosis can be stopped.

Theory: Why failed attempts to startle cause psychosis.

Question: Where does the problem happen, unrecognized, to cause symptoms.

One in three people who spend five days in a hospital ICU has a mental break. If you phone any hospital you will be told the mental break is caused by too much stimulation from lights and buzzers in the ICU. But there have been cases that happen in hospital rooms, not ICU's, where there were no lights and buzzers.

There are jobs such as floor trader on the stock market that have much more stimulation from lights and movement than an ICU. No mental breaks are noted there.

Stock traders are reacting with others not spending long hours concentrating to a level that they become unware of events around them which is a necessary component for visual subliminal distraction.

Google ICU Psychosis and there are many sites that try to explain the psychotic-like episode as delirium. But ICU Psychosis happens to patients who are not delirious. Although the patients are recovering from serious surgery, or other devastating conditions, they were awake and if without restrictive treatment modalities, speaking.     If properly researched those who have ICU Psychosis have reached a level of recovery so that their eyes are open, and they can engage activities to pass time.

Fifty years ago design engineers hired to modernize the business office by researching how offices function then designing new efficient workstations their employers could sell accidentally discovered a simple problem when workers using their first protypes of close-spaced workstations began to have mental breaks, panicked episodes of psychotic-like confusion.

Although today a multi-bilion dollar industry exists to provide peripheral vision blocking protection with cubicles and Systems Furniture, to this day those aware of this problem fail to realize there is no magic so that the presence of desks, office chairs, and filing cabinets promote mental breaks.

Visual subliminal distraction, explained in first semester psychology, is a feature of everyone's physiology of sight.

The mental event will happen anywhere and anytime ALL the "special circumstances" for it exist and exposure lasts long enough.

Those circumstances are created in hospital ICU's.

Simple free precautions to block peripheral vision for recovering patients will stop the mental event there.

In the first nine years searching I found only one doctor, a psychiatrist at Tufts University,who said he had seen the episodes from offices when he was in residency. Dismissive he refused to answer questions. (Name available on request. Contact )

Why

Why do the episodes of psychotic-like confusion happen?  (Longer explanatio begins with page Subliminal Distraction.)

When an ICU patient learns to ignore movement in peripheral vision from the approach of visitors, nurses, staff, and doctors, they still subliminally see, detect, the movement, and their brain reacts to that detected threat-movement with a subliminal, undetectable,  attempt to startle. 

Initially, when the movement first detected is safe, of no danger, without effort or knowledge of the action your brain will assign a zero level of attention to that non-risk threat movement. The full startle is blocked, suppressed. Knowledge of the movement is blocked from your conscious mind. (First semester psychology, the physiology of human sight.)

Because the trigger for the vision startle reflex is movement and position information, without color or shape, your brain cannot identify different sources of movement once the startle is blocked and you stop turning your head to use full conscious sight to look at the movement.   Thus when you block one source of movement by suppressing the reflex, you block knowledge of all threat-movement in peripheral vision.  That magnifies the effect of Subliminal Distraction in a busy location.

But you do not stop seeing the threat movement subliminally.  You cannot stop seeing anything in your field of view. (Same reference first semester psychology.)

While sensor adaptability exists for hearing, constant loud noise depletes the chemistry of sensor cells of the ear reducing the perceptiom of the level of noise, micro movement of your eyes refresh the chemistry for the sensor cells on rods & cones of your retina.  Thus neural impulses on the optic nerve are always at full strength.

If that were not so staring at objects would cause the perception of them to dim.

When movement in peripheral vision is detected from reflected light striking the cells of your retina, resulting neural impulses travel along their normal path to your brain no matter what you are doing and whether you have sucessfully consciously ignored them or not.

If the movement is vigorous enough your brain will attempt but fail to execute the consciously-forced-blocked vision startle reflex.

The stimulation of the amgydala, as a part of that failed attempt will, with enough exposure, begin to color thought and reason with the subliminal appreciation of threat.

If you have not done so perform the demonstration of habituation in peripheral vision. Here

Five short connected text pages explain visual subliminal distraction beginning with this Link.

That process of failed attempts to visually startle is a visual subliminal distraction, explained, and defined,  in first semester psychology under the physiology of sight, subliminal sight, and peripheral vision reflexes. 

Lectures on peripheral vision reflexes vary in quality so the mental breaks may not be mentioned. If they are mentioned the phenomenon is treated as something that happened once, long ago, not a normal feature of physiology still happening today. My instructor said, "Subliminal sight caused a problem in the early days of modern office design."

It is a problem of everyone's physiology of sight, not just a nuisance in the correct design of offices.   Only the fully blind, or bind from birth, are immune.

Anytime, and anywhere some one creates all the "special circumstances" those engineers found, long hours of full mental investment while there is repeating detectable movement nearby in peripheral vision, Subliminal Distraction must happen.  It cannot be prevented unless the same measures those engineers devised are used, peripheral vision blocking protection. (This is known as Cubicle Level Protection in the design field.)

HOW

HOW CAN ICU PSYCHOSIS BE STOPPED?

A problem for a hospital patent in bed is that their peripheral vision while lying down, sweeps the room.   Unlike an office situation where the worker is sitting up, measures to stop ICU Psychosis must block an area of peripheral vision which is much larger.

While researching ICU Psychosis I discovered anecdotal stories of patients whose symptoms stopped when their eyeglasses were returned to them.   Wide temple arms of eyeglasses block peripheral vision when the arms are wide enough to cover the pupil diameter.

That is the first approach.  Particle blocking safety glasses have wide temple arms.  But the available products have transparent temple arms.  They would have to be modified with paint or black tape.

If the ICU patient is manic they might not accept glasses with modifications.  

A second choice is to arrange the hospital room bed so the room door is behind the head board.  Alternately a screen could be placed between the patient's eyes and the room door.   Visitors to the bedside would have to call out to the patient and have them look directly at the corner of the screen where the nurse or doctor will appear from behind the screen.  You cannot subliminally detect something in your conscious sight.

Everything the patient's brain can mistake for threat movement, such as blinking lights, should be out of sight behind the patient.

When a blinking light is swept through peripheral vision with a head turn the neural impuses thus created will be mistaken for movement in peripheral vision.  At the level in the brain below thought, reason, and consciousness where the reflex is created there are only neural impulses electro-chemical exchanges across synapses. There is no differance between the apparent movement  from pulses of a blinking light and neural impulses from reflected light of a moving object. There is no thought, reason or images at that level.

Visitors in the room, talking, and reacting with the patient will not be a source of Subliminal Distraction.    Exposure happens when someone is using full mental investment, unaware of anything happening around them.

You would think that a medical school would be interested in preventing a psychiatric problem that decrements responses to treatment.  But over twelve years only Vanderbilt replied to a message about ICU Psychosis.  As far as I can determine nothing was done at Vanderbilt to investigate blocking peripheral vision for ICU patients to test the solution.

Typical answers given to me in person during  hospital stays in 2007, and 2012, were that the facility was not a research hospital. When ICU Psychosis strikes, the staff tie the patient down until they are removed after the ICU recovery. The episode spontaneously remits just after leaving an ICU.

If you perform exhaustive Google searches there are stories posted on line that not all the victims completely recover.

The solution to stop and prevent ICU mental breaks is to use a modality which blocks peripheral vision in the same way engineers devised in 1968 with the office cubicle, while not making the solution burdensome on the ICU staff.

THE

THEORY: Why do repeating failed attemps to startle cause a temporary episode of psychosis.

The triggering signal for the vision startle reflex,  neural impulses on the optic nerve from detected threat movement nearby in peripheral vision is so quck it is usually ignored.

But when the situation is created so that the signal is repeated a massive number of times in a compact time frame the brain finds it and attempts to understand and use it as visual input.

That is an impossible task.  Sight consists of four defining elements color, shape,  movement, and position.  As the brain attempts to learn and use the input, movement and position only, half of that needed for conscous sight, it creates new connections  between neurons as a part of normal brain function. 

This can be understood as maladaptive brain reconstruction.

When Subliminal Distraction stops, appropriate rest from exposure allows the new connection to disolve as the brain forgets the new behaviors.

When new connections bridge barriers allowing dreaming while awake hearing voices and visual hallucions can be created from that experience.

QUE

QUESTION for you.

Given that this ICU problem has remained unsolved for about fifty years, how many other places create ALL the "special circumstanes" for visual subliminal distraction thus create the same episodes seen in hospital ICUs?

I had known of the "mental break causing design mistake" engineers found and solved since I was a 22 year old engineering student in 1966.  But I had never seen it happen before.  When my wife's office was changed eliminating Cubicle Level Protection she heard voices and hallucinated guilt for impossible crimes.   Connie Tucker

I was astounded to learn the entire mental health establishment around the world is unaware this problem exists.

If the same situation which causes ICU Psychosis is created other places but exposure spaced so that one episode spontaneousy remits before the next begins, the experience can be mistaken for Bipolar Disorder.

There is a 2,400/3,000 year history for QiGong and Kundalini Yoga respectivly causing mental events when too many exercise sessions are done in a compact time frame.

In both exercises full mental investment is used to correctly perform slow motion martial arts moves or moving Yoga poses in small groups.

Movement from adjacent participants will be detected in periperal vision to cause Subliminal Distraction.

The outcomes of those mental events are well doccumented to be fear, panic, paranoia anxiety, depression and in severe exposure situations, thoughts of suicide.

A mild outcome for both exercises is called the 'Awakening of Kudalini' or 'Opening the Third Eye' in QiGong. It is viewed as enlightenment.

Would you believe no one has wondered why waving your arms and legs in unison with a small group causes psychiatric symptoms? 

QiGong and Kundalini Yoga  mental events are known to happen when too many sessions are done in a compact time frame. The episode will spontaneously remit without treatment or after effects, __ just like ICU Psychosis, __ when the exercise is stopped.

Explanations from acolytes say mishandling supernatural forces that created the world by incorrectly performing the kata cause the mental breaks.

No one is screening for a Subliminal Distraction episode before diagnosing mental illness.