from the department of silver linings

I'm back in assigned reading hell, albeit assigned reading 3rd or 4th circle of hell as opposed to assigned reading 7th or 8th, where I was last week. (Does hell have circles? I think I read that somewhere. And if so, how many?)

So I was tracking down cited articles on OCD and cognitive deficits (the cognitive deficits of OCD being working memory & attentional deficits, it appears) when I found this:

Possible protective value of severe psychopathology against lethal effects of an unfavourable milieu

Reading this I get a Jeez, I don't even want to know kind of feeling.


speaking of attentional deficits

How happy am I that automated calling ($) has swept the town of Irvington at the exact moment I'm trying to plough through Stereotypic Animal Behaviour?

The mayoral election is coming up; plus the school has now got automated calling, a fact I discovered on the same day I read "Schools Discover Automated Calling And Go Wild" in the WSJ. Synchronicity alert!

Do you get the feeling that the WSJ is written by people who have kids in the public schools? I do.

Every time I think I almost have a handle on the difference between recurrent perseveration and continual perseveration, and stereotypies versus ARBs ("abnormal repetitive behaviors"), and CSS versus SAS (don't ask), the phone rings, the answering machine picks up, and it's a recorded message from the folks running for office, the same recorded message I tried not to listen to a couple of hours ago. The candidates all sound like very nice people.

I am becoming terminally distracted.


At least I'm not dithering.*

* ...stuck-in-set perseveration is the failure of the SS to shift cognitive attentional set; distractibility is it failure to maintain the activation of a response in the face of competing stimuli, while dithering is its failure to select between two equally cued responses (Frith and Grasby, 1995).

source:
Perseveration and Stereotypy -- Systems-level Insights from Clinical Psychology
J. Garner
Stereotypic Animal Behaviour