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PubMedDate not supplied

Using beliefs and magical thinking to fight cancer distress-a case study.

This case relates to the way in which a young patient developed serious difficulties in coping with her life in the years following a successful bone-marrow transplant. By means of an illustrative metaphor, she revealed her existential position and the way in which she attempted to deal with her anxiety. Being diseased implied that life's order was replaced by disorder and a loss of basic trust. She tried to re-establish order by establishing beliefs that attributed specific regularities to life, and to influence the risk of recurrence by living according to these beliefs. Unfortunately, this meant that she had to tread a very thin line over a course mined with anxiety and eventually, she became a prisoner of her own creation. The author claims that we can learn from this case, as it clearly illustrates psychological dimensions commonly seen in cancer patients: the way anxiety is related to disorder and the way patients try to regain control of their lives through constructing belief-systems. The case also features a discussion of how we, as clinicians, may be able to help these patients.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1992

Subitizing: magical numbers or mere superstition?

It is widely believed that humans are endowed with a specialized numerical process, called subitizing, which enables them to apprehend rapidly and accurately the numerosity of small sets of objects. A major part of the evidence for this process is a purported discontinuity in the mean response time (RT) versus numerosity curves at about 4 elements, when subjects enumerate up to 7 or more elements in a visual display. In this article, RT data collected in a speeded enumeration experiment are subjected to a variety of statistical analyses, including several tests on the RT distributions. None of these tests reveals a significant discontinuity as numerosity increases. The data do suggest a strong stochastic dominance in RT by display numerosity, indicating that the mental effort required to enumerate does increase with each additional element in the display, both within and beyond the putative subitizing range.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Psychophysical magic: rendering the visible 'invisible'.

What are the neural correlates of conscious visual awareness? Tackling this question requires contrasting neural correlates of stimulus processing culminating in visual awareness with neural correlates of stimulus processing unaccompanied by awareness. To produce these two neural states, one must be able to erase an otherwise visible stimulus from awareness. This article describes and assesses visual phenomena involving dissociation of physical stimulation and conscious awareness: degraded stimulation, visual masking, visual crowding, bistable figures, binocular rivalry, motion-induced blindness, inattentional blindness, change blindness and attentional blink. No single approach stands above the others, but those producing changing visual awareness despite invariant physical stimulation are clearly preferable. Such phenomena can help lead us ultimately to a comprehensive account of the neural correlates of conscious awareness.

Attention↗
PubMed2002

Early administration of intravenous magnesium to high-risk patients with acute myocardial infarction in the Magnesium in Coronaries (MAGIC) Trial: a randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: The benefits of supplemental administration of intravenous magnesium in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) are controversial. Despite promising results from work in animals and the ready availability of this simple, inexpensive treatment, conflicting results have been reported in clinical trials. Our aim was to compare short-term mortality in patients with STEMI who received either intravenous magnesium sulphate or placebo. METHODS: We did a randomised, double-blind trial in 6213 patients with acute STEMI who were assigned a 2 g intravenous bolus of magnesium sulphate administered over 15 min, followed by a 17 g infusion of magnesium sulphate over 24 h (n=3113), or matching placebo (n=3100). Our primary endpoint was 30-day all-cause mortality. At randomisation, patients were stratified by their eligibility for reperfusion therapy. The first stratum included patients who were aged 65 years or older and eligible for reperfusion therapy, and the second stratum included patients of any age who were not eligible for reperfusion therapy. Analysis was by intention-to-treat. FINDINGS: At 30 days, 475 (15.3%) patients in the magnesium group and 472 (15.2%) in the placebo group had died (odds ratio 1.0, 95% CI 0.9-1.2, p=0.96). No benefit or harm of magnesium was observed in eight prespecified subgroup analyses of patients and in 15 additional exploratory subgroup analyses. After adjustment for factors shown to effect mortality risk in a multivariate regression model, no benefit of magnesium was observed (1.0, 0.8-1.1, p=0.53). INTERPRETATION: Early administration of magnesium in high-risk patients with STEMI has no effect on 30-day mortality. In view of the totality of the available evidence, in current coronary care practice there is no indication for the routine administration of intravenous magnesium in patients with STEMI.

Aged↗