Attenzione bilanciata

A human given: the need to give and receive balanced attention
Without nutrient of (any kind) we die, and the human need for attention is no different.
This is shown by a horrific experiment in the Middle Ages by the German Emperor, Frederick II, who had newborn babies removed from their parents and cared for by nurses who fed and cleaned them but were under strict instructions not to touch, talk or give them any attention whatsoever in an attempt to satisfy the emperor’s curiosity as to what language the children would speak if they didn’t hear a native tongue. The experiment was never resolved, as all the babies died from lack of attention before reaching talking age.
Getting too much attention won’t kill you, but it will have bad effects because it makes you inefficient so you need to make sure your attention needs are met in a healthy balance.
The phenomenon of attention needs has always been well understood in Eastern psychology but has only recently been equally as valued by the West. A 1927 study into productivity performed by the Western Electric Company plant in Hawthorne near Chicago found that difference in the ways they treated employees was the amount of attention they were giving them, not taking 5 minute rest breaks or going home at 4pm. This became known as the Hawthorne effect. (Mayo, E 1933 The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Macmillan)
We all know that people draw attention to themselves in myriad ways - by being the most stylish, fashionable or expensively dressed, or the noisiest and most noticed at social gatherings. Some exhibit eccentric behaviours, wear garish clothes, sport deliberately odd hairstyles, boast about their achievements etc. But the lure of attention seeking can be far more subtle than that. People are attracted, far more often than they realise, to situations that provide opportunities for getting attention.
Many social and commercial transactions are in fact disguised attention situations, and if individuals are unaware that what is driving them in certain circumstances is the demanding, exchanging, extending or exchange of attention, believing they are engaged in something else - such as learning, informing, helping, buying or selling - they are likely to be less efficient in achieving their ends (both those they think they are serving and their attention needs) and will be less able to act and react in ways that are appropriate to a situation, whatever that is.
In becoming aware of how your attention needs are being met it’s important to realise:
1) That this attention-factor is operating in virtually all transactions;
2) That the apparent motivation of transactions may be other than it really is. And that is often generated by the need or desire for attention-activity (giving, receiving exchanging);
3) That attention-activity, like any other demand for food, warmth etc, when placed under volitional control, must result in increased scope for the human being who would then not be at the mercy of random sources of attention - or even more confused than usual if things should not pan out as expected.
This is a profoundly more subtle understanding of the importance of attention than found in Western psychology until now.
Read another popular post on this blog “The Art of Being Cool and Attractive” for hints as to how to use this information on balancing attention to be ‘cool’!

Human Givens

Women have more nightmares than men
February 2nd, 2009 ·
A brilliant five year study has made a significant contribution to scientific dream research.
The research with 193 volunteers has found that women have more nightmares than men.
Jennifer Parker, who lead the study at the University of the West of England, said, “To discover more about women’s dreams I asked participants in my project to fill out a structured dream diary. The evidence was collected in a very different way to that used in previous dream analysis projects that largely depended on recall after the dream has happened. The participants in my study were all primed to record their dreams before the dreams happened. I took a sample of 100 women and 93 men. They were aged between 18 and 25 and were predominantly Year 1 Psychology students at UWE.”
“..it appears that men and women differ in the frequency of nightmares - women have more - and women perceive those nightmares to be more emotionally intense..”
“I believe these results show that women carry over their waking concerns into their dream life more so than men do, and they appear to have more difficulty with ’switching off’ their concerns.”
The University of the West of England is the only UK university to hold verified data for British student’s dream content.
We are excited about the research because the findings support the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming. The expectation fulfilment theory, proposed by Irish psychologist Joe Griffin in 1993, predicts the finding that women suffer more nightmares than men, since women suffer twice as much depression than men.
The theory states that worries (expectations in the autonomic nervous system) are de-aroused during dreaming, which is nature’s stress reducing mechanism for unacted out expectations. If women ruminate more about their feelings during the day, it would make sense that they experience more dreams to dearouse these stresses and that many of these would be anxiety dreams or nightmares. Too much dreaming in the REM state exhausts the motivation circuit in the brain and can induce depression when people wake up feeling exhausted and more tired than when they went to bed.
To find out more about depression and dreaming please visit the lift-depression.com website, and read the section on sleep and depression.
To find out more about the expectation fulfilment theory you can go to the why we dream website or watch some youtube clips of Joe Griffin explaining the biology of the dream theory, and how the theory fits existing data about dreaming more other competing theories.
The theory is published in a book Dreaming Reality, how dreaming can keep us sane or drive us mad.carried out the study over three years.