#robert ornstein

Image: Cleric-Knight-Workman / Unknown artist / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Image description: An inhabited initial from a 13th-century French text representing the tripartite social order of the Middle Ages: the ōrātōrēs (those who pray – clerics), bellātōrēs (those who fight – knights, that is, the nobility), and labōrātōrēs (those who work – peasants and members of the lower middle class).

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Thin and Thick Barriers

“One major personality dimension that’s been described, on the basis of many years of research and supported by hundreds of studies, is “openness to experience” which is one of what are called the “big five” dimensions of personality.* Another concept is “barriers” in the mind, [a continuum] which distinguishes between people who have “thick” barriers, who compartmentalize their different experiences, from those with “thin” ones, whose experiences merge together. Many investigators use the term “boundaries,” but we think “barriers,” which can be porous, is a better descriptor.” ...

People with thin barriers tend to be open, emotional, and perhaps spiritual; those with thick barriers tend to be detached and perhaps religious, traditionalist, or conservative. Those on the autistic spectrum, and religious or scientific fundamentalists usually have very thick barriers. Most people are somewhere between the extremes.

“... Adherence to a single extreme way of understanding gives comfort to the “believers” in both extremes but is the cause of much incompatibility, and one way or the other, both miss the truth. The arguments just pass each other by; it’s like listening to a flat-earther debate with an alien-from-outer-space adherent.”

~ Robert Ornstein and Sally Ornstein, God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God”.

Note: * The big five are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are (Robert Ornstein, 1993)

“Using the three dimensions related to these systems, we will consider whether some mental disorders might not simply consist of normal tendencies on each continuum taken to an extreme. 

Does meticulousness shade into obsessiveness and then develop into obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Does creativity and what we call flakiness shade into schizophrenia?

Does ordinary sadness lead an individual into depression?

The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are (Robert Ornstein, 1993)

“In this study, groups of extroverts and introverts were exposed to increasingly intense visual and auditory stimuli while the evoked responses of their brain wave patterns were recorded.

Once the stimulus, either the light or noise, reached a high level, the introverts tended to decrease the intensity of the stimulus that brain received from the outside (this is known as reduction).

Extroverts, on the other hand, turned their stimuli up (a process called augmentation).

If you give a high- and a low-gain person the same dose of a sedative, what happens? 

Low gainers fall asleep with a low dose, and high gainers require a higher dosage for sedation than do low gainers. 

Extroverts, being low gain, are less aroused than introverts. 

Being chronically aroused, introverts are also more sensitive to stimuli at all levels.

Introverts are also more sensitive to barely detectable stimuli and have lower pain thresholds than do extroverts.

These two groups have the same reactions to the “lemon-drop test” as do shy and sociable young children.

The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are (Robert Ornstein, 1993)

“If we understand that our basic temperament is relatively fixed, we might be able to initiate a different approach to self-management. 

This is somewhat like knowing the nature of the horse you are riding. 

You can try some maneuvers with a placid horse that you wouldn’t try with a skittish one.

Similarly, we need to know ourselves in order to “ride” in the most appropriate way.

Observing the self in this way might well make it easier to make choices about how we organize our lives.

If you are the sort of person who needs lots of stimulation and you are getting it by having frequent affairs that upset your partner or by causing disruptions with people at work, you might get the same excitement by taking up a dangerous sport instead.

Go kayaking or bungee jumping, or go to horror movies.

The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are (Robert Ornstein, 1993)

“Using the three dimensions related to these systems, we will consider whether some mental disorders might not simply consist of normal tendencies on each continuum taken to an extreme.

Does meticulousness shade into obsessiveness and then develop into obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Does creativity and what we call flakiness shade into schizophrenia? (…)

Individuals who are at the other end of the deliberation-liberation continuum are highly disorganized, instead of exceedingly organized.

For the most part, they suffer from a weakened regulation of information and actions.

They hardly have the worries of someone with OCD, but they have a different deficiency: a disordered structure to perceptions and to the control of their actions. (…)

OCD can be thought of as a highly deliberated restriction of thought, and it is sometimes called overexclusive.

It limits thought to one subject, such as “Did I hit someone?”

Some forms of schizophrenia represent, in contrast, an unwanted liberation— an opening of the gates—a condition sometimes called overinclusive.

Some schizophrenics, then, have difficulty limiting the content of their consciousness, and consequently they misconstrue the information they receive. (…)

Claridge’s initial studies discovered that schizophrenics and schizotypals find irrelevant material intruding into their consciousness.