Psychic numbing

The original concept of psychic numbing argued by Robert Jay Lifton was that it manifests itself collectively. This means that a society or a culture adapts this withdrawn attention outlook and collectively applies it to current issues. Robert Jay Lifton: "Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness" Lifton's 4 Focal Points: • Hiroshima as a text for "psychic numbing" • Nuclear Illusions • What are nuclear weapons doing to us? (Nuclear fundamentalism) • Hope for the future Lifton's main area of focus was the Hiroshima bombing during World War II. He broke up his analysis of the bombing into psychological stages that spread at the societal level. Lifton's article, "Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness", addressed a concern that was new at the time: nuclear warfare. He argued now that there is a single weapon in the world that can cause so much damage, humans need to be more alert and confront the images of nuclear power and an ever increasing nuclear actuality. There is a societal understanding now that countries can create nuclear weapons; this led to Lifton's coining of the term "nuclear fundamentalism". All these are argued by Lifton to be beneficial at times, however rather inadequate for helping people feel better about the ubiquity of nuclear weapons and potential warfare. There needs to be a sense of control in order to comprehend the consequences of nuclear warfare as well as strategies to combat the psychological grip it has on individuals. Lifton's final argument regarding hope for the future is that society must take action. He uses Vietnam War veterans as a reference point. He has worked with them before and noticed partial changes, while he agrees this is good, society must adapt an awareness that aims to teach and educate as opposed to avoid and withdraw from the potential threats to survival. ==Neuroscience==

Psychic numbing has been associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they share the same attributes of withdrawal and behavioral changes when presented with a stimuli that triggers a reminder of the traumatic event or with a very intense neutral stimuli. The observable emotional response is not enough to understand the concept of psychic numbing. Therefore, neuroscience and the biological activity that occurs within the brain is employed to give people a better understanding of the thought process of individuals who engage in psychic numbing. Studies have also focused on the habituation of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). This means it may play an active role in identifying important behavioral responses necessary to comprehend the consequences of the aversive stimuli. The limbic system also includes areas that are important for memory consolidation. The relationship between all the areas in the limbic system is an area of interest for psychic numbing because it encapsulates two factors that contribute to the phenomenon: emotions and memory. Stress can also be considered a brain-body reaction due to external or internal cues, this can include the environment as well as memory. The areas of the brain that communicate with one another are the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, and the hypothalamus. Through a series of feedback processes, the release of specific neurotransmitters as well as neuromodulators occurs. This further suggests the individual differences people have in regards to psychic numbing and the deviation away from more tragic accounts of rape and PTSD. This type of desensitization is not independent of the participant's lives, instead it is a result of years of experience woven into his or her daily lives, resulting in a numbed response. Figures of areas of the control group's brains showed activation in the rACC, and the physician's brains did not, suggesting there was already habituation. ==Conceptualizations==

The original view of psychic numbing dealt with human extinction and the mass response to potentially life-threatening scenarios. Lifton argued the worry for these events was low and therefore generated an equally low probability of occurrence point of view. Slovic also points to Weber's law, which states the difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. Additionally, Weber's law focuses on the just-noticeable difference between the two stimuli. Slovic addressed Weber's law from a different context - he considered the magnitude and value of a human life. Slovic took Weber's law and incorporated prospect theory, which is decision making based on potential gains and losses, not the actual outcome. Slovic found that when prospect theory and Weber's law are analyzed in regards to human life, the value of saving human lives is greater for a smaller tragedy than for a larger one. There are three elements that attribute to psychic numbing: Susan Gill bridges the disciplines of social psychology and neuropsychology in her analysis of psychic numbing by explaining that there are notable behavioral changes, the most typical trait is being zombie-like and in a "dead-zone". • The relationship between being overwhelmed and completely shutting down. ::The state of being overwhelmed is different than complete shut-down. Overwhelmed responses follow moderate to prolonged stressful states and result in an active effort to regain control. • The neurochemical states associated with dissociative behavior are not metabolized, that is they become perpetual and frozen in time, which causes the deviation from normal behavior. ::The very anatomy of the brain can be manipulated under extreme cases of psychic numbing. The neurochemical reactions fail to metabolize and result in lack of synaptic connections and neuronal firing with no dendritic connections. There is also a loop of the same information that fails to connect with other areas of the brain, which results in the inability to get out of the "dead-zone". ==Religion==

Religion is also considered to be an internalized coping mechanism. The role of religious values in coping with life-threatening illnesses is another individualistic trait that people use to cope with the behavioral side-effects associated with the diseases. Depersonalization is a very prominent behavioral trait associated with cancer patients. Findings show that people with cancer cope no worse than non-cancer patients. As described earlier, research on psychic numbing has suggested that people who become desensitized to suffering may be more adept in dealing with an upsetting or dangerous situation. ==Nuclear denial disorder==

Many individuals fail to react effectively to the overwhelming threat of annihilation by nuclear warfare, and in 1987 Thomas C. Wear termed this nuclear denial disorder, a type of psychic numbing. It involves the over-use of a denial defense mechanism, and "an apathetic business-as-usual attitude toward the threat of nuclear annihilation". Michael D. Newcomb viewed nuclear denial as an avoidant response to quite justifiable nuclear anxiety. ==References==