Jumping Frenchmen Key to Mental Illness Cause

VisionAndPsychosis.Net©

In Montgomery Alabama

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder

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There is an article explaining Culture Bound Syndromes. You might better understand Subliminal Distraction if you also read that page, Here

Scroll Down one screen to the top of the page.

Some tasks require full mental investment and other behaviors do not.

Movement to either side of the sitting man repairing his pants would be detected to cause

Subliminal Distraction exposure when he lightly dissociates while sewing.

This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected until the 1960's.

In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.

It caused mental breaks for office workers.

You will find this material hard to believe.

This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.

For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.

The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.

The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.

This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.

The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.

If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.

Long term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong Kundalini Yoga

If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.

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Jumping Frenchmen of Maine

Key to Understanding Mental Illness

Everyone has Subliminal Distraction exposure every day, most of it is harmless.

When you create the "special circumstances" massive exposure is possible.

Seng-Hui Cho did that in the suite common room at Virginia Tech.

His paranoid psychotic rant demonstrates the power of low-level long-term exposure.

When many people are crowded into too-small single-room bunkhouse arrangements,

those "special circumstances" will be created.

Why is Jumping Frenchmen important? The features of the disorder are so strange that it cannot be mistaken for anything else.

You might argue that depression, paranoia, or psychotic beliefs have many causes because the examples in individuals are different. Not true with the jumping diseases. They are unique behaviors, the same in each individual, and independent of the usual psychobabble, psychosocial, suspect causes.

This allows Jumping Diseases to be used to track Subliminal Distraction as it causes Culture Bound Syndromes, around the world.

Since they are found in many cultures Jumping diseases must have a common cause independent of culture.

That actually eliminates the disorder as being caused by the stresses of the individual cultural groups since they are different.

Most sites that mention Jumping Frenchmen of Maine simply tell that it was discovered by a New York neurologist in the 1880's.

French Canadian lumberjacks in Moose Lake Maine were known to exhibit strange startle-matching behaviors. Upon being startled they would copy any action demonstrated to them. They would perform any action commanded of them.

They exhibited hyper-startle and hyper-suggestibility.

It was first thought to be a neurological disorder similar to Tourette disease. That association was soon discounted because of the involvement of startle in the jumping disease but not in Tourette.

Subliminal Distraction would not be discovered until the 1960's. No one had the imagination to look to the vision startle reflex as the cause of this behavior. This problem has not been solved by any of the "experts" in psychology or psychiatry. It is still considered an unsolved mystery.

I will explain to you what actually caused this bizarre behavior. There are still a few cases that happen on factory work floors in the United States. Although lumberjacks were the first victims, it wasn't the job. It was what the lumberjacks did to cause Subliminal Distraction exposure.

The subliminal detection of threat-movement stimulates the subconscious at a level below thought, reason and consciousness. It acts like operant conditioning or accidental subliminal hypnosis.

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine subjects have the post hypnotic state without the suggestions seen in stage performances of hypnosis.

Hyper startle reflexes and hyper suggestibility are the basic outcomes of this exposure.

When the subject has preexisting thoughts of persecution the constant subliminal appreciation of threat creates paranoia and fear to raise those thoughts to psychotic levels. Mass shooters such as Seng-Hui Cho or Mark Barton are examples. Barton's suicide note mentioned intense un-attributed fear. The psychiatric symptoms seen in failed Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga experiences also include paranoia and fear.

The performances of Latah's in Malaysia are a learned behavior suggested by cultural beliefs and observances of others with the behavior. When startled they exhibit the same command behaviors that Jumping Frenchmen of Maine did.

When hospital intensive care patients have this exposure, in their episode they often believe nurses and doctors are attempting to kill them. Another favorite delusional theme is that the attendants are extraterrestrial aliens. Each ICU patient's cultural beliefs shape the context of the delusional experience.

ICU Psychosis exposure is every fifteen minutes around the clock as long as the patient is awake and daydreaming when the nurse enters the cubicle. One in three ICU patients who spend more than five days in the ICU have this episode. The response is to strap the patient down. Most recover when they leave the ICU. A few have life long psychiatric injuries.

Not many people take note that the delusions of Schizophrenia are also culture specific.

Different levels and intensities of exposure produce the outcomes. The delusions and psychotic beliefs are developed from each persons preexisting mental state, situation, and cultural beliefs.

Cold weather and bunkhouse living arrangements placed the men in close proximity so that as they prepared for the next day's work, read to relax, wrote letters, or performed any other activity requiring mental investment they created the "special circumstances" for Subliminal Distraction exposure. The cold kept them inside during the long nights. Their outdoor work had to stop at sunset.

In Maine and Canada trees were cut and stacked awaiting the spring thaw and snow runoff. Trees would be floated down stream to the lumber mill. This practice was not used in more populated states in the south. The lumber was often milled on site and used for construction. There was no runoff flooding to transport lumber on rivers. Rivers that were large enough for massive tree trunk rafts were used for steam boat transportation.

There are scattered stories of problems in ranch bunkhouses in the west until those bunkhouses disappeared. Writers attribute these incidents to alcohol use or Cabin Fever.

Today there is still genetic testing and investigation ongoing to establish a connection to a neurological source for the strange symptoms present in victims of this disorder. But the solution to the cause is much simpler. True, there may be a genetic connection but it is not for disease. Rather it will be related to inherited, increased abilities to detect movement in peripheral vision. Behavioral tendencies such as a propensity to daydream also increase opportunities for exposure from visual Subliminal Distraction.

Studies at the University of Georgia in 2002 found a genetic problem in the M pathway for vision in schizophrenics and their close but disease free relatives. The inherited defect was hyperactivity. The M pathway in the brain communicates the movement and position portion of vision to higher areas of thought and reasoning from the V center.

Our brain has a subliminally functioning system that detects movement in peripheral vision to trigger a vision reflex. Far peripheral vision is black and white vision. The human vision startle reflex, triggered by threat-movement detection, deals only with movement and position.

Latah, Ainu, Bah-tschi, all startle-matching behaviors, appear where one of two conditions are met. Either many people live in single-room lodges (like bunkhouses and long houses), or small family groups live in single-room too-small huts, kivas or hogans. These arrangements are usually called traditional or ethnic housing.

Those were the similar living arrangements for the lumberjacks in Moose Lake Maine.

Jumping diseases, startle matching behaviors, appear around the world as Culture Bound Syndromes. Each ethnic group or culture experiences the same symptoms but the culture names the disorder in terms of their own experience. Each group has a belief system that explains, again in their own terms, the significance of the episode. Sometimes this involves hexing, magic, or the breaking of cultural or religious taboos.

We can postulate that the common element in each of these situations is human physiology. Every human or pre-human who ever lived had subliminal sight and peripheral vision reflexes. This system subliminally detects threat movement and will break your concentration with a startle which causes you to look and identify the source of the detected movement. To prevent constant startle and conscious reflex events we have the ability to ignore movement once we identify it as harmless. But the system is "hard wired" into our physiology. Although consciously ignoring movement will stop perceived startle events this does not stop or turn the system off. If hunter gathers and pre-humans could have turned the system off it would not have protected them from being a meal for a predator. As long as the threat movement detection incidents continue to happen your brain subliminally attempts to force the startle and vision reflex.

Being unable to stop the detection of movement in peripheral vision would be harmless for hunter gathers who act as roving bands constantly on the move. They had no behavior which caused them to sit performing some activity requiring mental investment. When man began to construct living quarters and make tools the phenomenon would begin to cause problems.

In the 1960's this problem caused mental breaks for knowledge workers using the first prototypes of moveable close-spaced workstations. The cubicle solved the problem but those psychologists who solved the problem made three basic mistakes.

They thought that they were the first to create the problem; that it could only happen in a business office; that the episode they saw was the only possible outcome. The episode was thought to be a harmless period of confusion and pseudo-psychotic behavior. It resolved without treatment once the defective workstation was replaced or the source of detected movement eliminated.

It may be difficult to see and imagine but a single primitive worker sitting near a door of a long house to weave a basket is creating the same situation as a knowledge workers using a laptop computer at an unprotected table in a business office. A college student creates the same situation when a laptop is used in a dorm room with a roommate moving in their peripheral vision.

When you look back through history you will find events where the only possible solution for the event is exposure to Subliminal Distraction. Previous psychobabble explanations rely on the belief that the frailty of the human psyche reacting to stress was the cause of these difficult to explain events.

Variations of this situation, no mater where it is created, places workers in close proximity. The Anasazi build brush arbors to shade workers and used single-room Kivas as housing. They eventually exhibited severe paranoia and stopped living in large villages. In the South Pacific some cultures build raised houses for men, which are separate from living quarters. But where Jumping Diseases appear some feature of the living arrangements create the "special circumstances" that approximate those first office workstation prototypes.

Other places the mental breaks happen:

A combination of observations points to this brain system as being the cause of mental breaks in places other than business offices.

Users of Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga have the same mental breaks. The method of performing the exercises uses eyes-open meditation which requires slight dissociation. The user begins to concentrate on performing the movements correctly and is unaware of others nearby. In that concentrating mental state each person can subliminally detect others. Thus performing in groups supplies both the mental investment and detected threat movement in peripheral vision. The mental events happen when too many sessions are done in a compact time frame. Today, in our modern world, failure to provide Cubicle Level Protection in small businesses and schools can be an alternate source of exposure so that the exercise's exposure reaches a threshold for a mental break. Your brain only detects movement and position to trigger a peripheral vision reflex so that the nature of the movement is revealed only when you turn and look. You can have exposure many places during a day. We all have minor exposure most of it is harmless.

Kundalini Yoga is performed in an effort to reach a higher plain of existence realized by a mental event called The Awakening of Kundalini. Some users have serious mental problems on the path to enlightenment. In this case too, Gurus correctly state that too many exercise sessions in a compact time frame will cause these mental problems. But they incorrectly claim that mishandling of powerful universal life energy, Prana, causes the difficulty. Just as in Qi Gong the method of performing the exercise in groups along with eyes open meditation creates the "special circumstances."

It is possible to create part of the required special circumstances so that exposure is low level. Examples are classrooms and side-by-side seating in airplane cockpits. In both cases mental investment and too-close spacing provide the opportunity but movement in peripheral vision that can be detected happens less often. This low level exposure follows the example of Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga long term exposure.

The Virginia Tech shooter had create the "special circumstances" for SD exposure. When he had the expected mental break he planned then killed 32 people.

Next...Mental Illness...

Until I have time to condense a few paragraphs on Mental Illness you can link to the Cause of Psychotic Mental Illness page on this site. If you have not done so perform the psychology Demonstration also on this site.

Links (originally these links were for peripheral vision)

I recommend this site. But you will have to browse several pages.

"Early in evolution, human ancestors had only peripheral vision. The role of this early vision system (still preserved in our eyes) was to detect motion and set off protective reflexes."

http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm

Peripheral vision Lego tester

Adobe file with tester construction and data results sample

http://www.edex.com.au/lego/support/activities/032_peripheral_vision.pdf

Nightwalking

"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."

The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.

The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.

http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125

Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation

Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.

http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm

This page has the vision material. http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four

Speed Reading (peripheral vision)

http://www.ababasoft.com/wider_eye_span/

Vision, is a set of brain level subsystems

This page explains the M & P pathways and vision processing.

http://www.wayfinding.net/visanal.htm

The Red Myth

Color in Vision

http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html

University of Missouri

The first paragraph on this page refers to psychological factors effecting pupil dilation.

"Interestingly, the pupil/iris combination also changes in response to psychological factors. One sign of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a system important in arousal, fight, and flight, is dilated pupils. For example, sexual interest results in pupil dilation. (This piece of information may come in handy some time.)"

http://web.umr.edu/~psyworld/eye.htm

University of Utah

John Moran Eye Center -- Anatomy

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/

Kimball's Biology Pages

A simple explanation of the eye and sight.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html

Understanding Human Vision

This site deals with color vision.

http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html

Vision and the Brain

Block diagrams of vision paths through the brain explain the M and P channels.

http://www.thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_02/i_02_cr/i_02_cr_vis/i_02_cr_vis.html#2

Study Notes Vision

http://www.utmed.com/studynotes/neuro/VisualProcessing.pdf

++ Use your [Home] key to return to the top of the page and site navigation.

Prevention: This section is now repeated at the bottom of most pages.

The rare occurrence of the injury establishes that is difficult to create enough exposure to cause an injury. But when it does happen the consequences are serious, possibly fatal.

Our personal experience was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays for thirty calendar days.

If you have a tower CPU mount it under your desk. That's the way they position it in a cubicle. The hard drive busy light is about the height of your low peripheral vision if you put the tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or writing notes beside the keyboard on the side of the monitor away from the tower makes the blinking hard drive busy light appear to approach from behind when you turn to view the screen again.

If you have a computer work station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write or do other non computer work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove screen savers in this instance. The movement, animation for example, in your screensaver, two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral vision at close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.

All home, apartment, or dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace. To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'

If you use computer or CD-ROM games for many hours day after day, the game playing position should follow the same rules as the computer workstation. Battery operated games will not run long enough on a single rechargeable battery to cause a risk for SPVP.

Although a laptop does not have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same rules apply to your work position. There should not be human traffic moving to you from behind. There should be nothing behind you, which could enter your subliminal peripheral vision field as you turn your head while working at the laptop and be mistaken for threat movement.

Only movement coming from behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause a peripheral vision reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead then enters your Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be no peripheral vision reflex.

Repeated for Emphasis:

A single session or rare sessions will not cause this problem.

It is the same day after day long hours of play or computer use with detectable movement in ‘Subliminal Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a risk for SPVP injury.

Exposure can be cumulative

The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.

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