Reimagining Psychology

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Reimagining Psychology

Tom Whitehead

28 episodes

3 months ago

Welcome! For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have to hand it to them. They did a pretty good job explaining things in the time they had to work with...

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Social Sciences

Society & Culture,

All content for Reimagining Psychology is the property of Tom Whitehead and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Welcome! For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have to hand it to them. They did a pretty good job explaining things in the time they had to work with...

Show more...

Social Sciences

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/28)

Reimagining Psychology

Addiction as Parasitic Behavior

Welcome! For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have to hand it to them. They did a pretty good job explaining things in the time they had to work with...

6 months ago

18 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Why Did the Chicken?

One of the confusing things about addiction is that the addict seems to be voluntarily choosing things that are really hurtful - not just for the addict, but for the people they care most about. The same confusion comes up when we see the executives of addiction-based companies voluntarily making choices that harm their customers. Why? We ask ourselves. How could they act that way? When we speak to the addict, or to the executive, they seem like ordinary people, not monsters.&nbs...

10 months ago

17 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Habits and the Environment

The behaviorist movement in psychology in the early 1900s provided a number of benefits. The behaviorists’ precise measurement of stimulus and response lent psychology a scientific cachet. And precise measurement led to the development of the technology of behavior control that has been quite valuable in a practical sense. At the same time, the decision to ignore the subjective experience of animals introduced unnecessary confusion about our behavior. The behaviorists mistakenly believed that...

11 months ago

13 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

The Behaviorist Hangover

The word “psychology” literally means the scientific study of the mind, or psyche. A little over a century ago, psychologists were in fact avidly studying the mind, mental life, and the subjective experience of self. The most brilliant psychologists of the era – most prominently William James and Robert Woodworth – were assembling knowledge of a broad range of phenomena, pulling together concepts that cast light upon the relationship between subjective experience and overt behavior. Some – fo...

11 months ago

12 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Awareness of Child Sexual Abuse

Freud's Electra theory and the later False Memory Syndrome (FMS) idea both served to discredit women’s memories of having been sexually abused as children. Freud’s theory held that women who remembered abuse were actually reporting their own childhood fantasies of sexual interaction with their fathers. Many decades later, as Freud's theory was losing its popularity, the FMS idea posited that therapists were implanting false memories of abuse into the minds of their clients, whether deli...

11 months ago

11 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

When Habits Turn Screechy

Parasitic patterns in behavior are self-reproducing and detrimental to both individuals and society. We can think of these rogue patterns as "behavioral screeches" They're like the feedback loop of a microphone and loudspeaker, where control is lost, and the screech becomes self-sustaining. These screechy habits are not just theoretical but are observable in animals placed in restrictive environments, leading to repetitive and purposeless behaviors. They manifest in humans, just as they do i...

11 months ago

12 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

The Craziness of Social Media Bubbles

To spend time on social media is to be bombarded with craziness. The informational silos of social media seem to amp up weirdness, bad logic, conspiracy theories, crackpot ideas, extremism and hatred. But why? The information age was supposed to bring enlightenment, not psychosis. What happened? What happened is a business model. The craziness within informational silos generates heavy cash flow. That's because extremism makes consumer engagement compelling. Engagement translates directly in...

11 months ago

20 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Comparing Addictions to Cancer

Addicted individuals – alcoholics, for example – behave in ways that are counterproductive both for themselves and those they care most about. Trying to explain these rogue habits in terms of their benefit doesn’t seem to work. We need a new insight. Oddly, comparing rogue habits to cancer may help. The way self-destructive patterns pop up in our behavior is reminiscent of the development of self-destructive cells within our bodies. Cancer provides a useful analogy for understand...

11 months ago

17 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

The True Roots of Addiction

Conventional wisdom tells us that exposure to chemical substances causes addictions. With repeated use of substances, we develop a dependence that becomes difficult to manage. But there are problems with this simple explanation. There are far more addictions that involve no substances – so-called “process addictions” – than those that are substance related. And the process addictions look almost exactly like those that involve substances. There’s evidence from the study of animal...

12 months ago

20 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Alcoholism: A Parasitic Habit?

Most of us have fallen into problematic habits. They seem benign at first, but soon begin to wiggle out of our control, taking on a life of their own. They turn into parasites, sucking the life out of us, twisting our lives out of shape. Alcoholism is the poster child of this kind of wayward habit. As the old Japanese saying goes, “First the man takes a drink; then the drink takes a drink; then the drink takes the man.” In the later stages of alcoholism, it’s clear that the habit is running t...

12 months ago

15 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Bringing Immunity to AI, Part Three

Do Chatbots Need Love? Is there anything in the architecture of AI systems that would justify and support the development of loving relationships with humans? “Bringing Immunity to Artificial Intelligence,” Part Three is the conclusion of a series about ducking a strange form of illness that affects not only humans, but potentially AI entities as well. I'm Tom Whitehead, A practicing psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. In this podcast, my bril...

1 year ago

30 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Bringing Immunity to AI, Part Two

I'm Tom Whitehead, A Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. This episode is Part Two of a series, “Bringing Immunity to AI. The series is about a strange form of behavioral illness that not only affects humans, but potentially AIs as well. Here I continue a discussion with my brilliant AI assistant Alex about the ill effects that can arise when parasitic forms reproduce themselves within logic and behavior. Humans, like all other comple...

1 year ago

18 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Bringing Immunity to AI, Part One

Tom Whitehead, a Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence, speaks with brilliant AI assistant Alex about an unusual problem – parasitic forms that reproduce themselves within the behavior of both humans and AIs. Parasitic patterns regularly crop up in human behavior, perception, and logic. Humans, for example, are vulnerable to shopping or gambling addictions. These are repetitive habits that have seemingly escaped their control, and have begun...

1 year ago

23 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part K - The Self and its Defense

The previous episode of the Healing Psychology series laid out one of the most important reasons addictions persist - they disable our attention. Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. Disabling our attention gives the green light to bad habits because our attention works like biological immunity. But … what is immunity, exactly? It is an evolved Protector of the Self. In this episod...

2 years ago

49 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part J - Runaway Habits, Second Half

The previous episode, “Runaway Habits, First Half,” highlighted something important about human addiction: this KIND of problem is shared by all higher animals. If you put an animal into a cage, you make it more likely that the animal will fall into some unproductive, repetitive, stereotypic, habit – a behavior that looks a lot like an addiction. In this episode, “Runaway Habits, Second Half,” we’ll look at something else that provokes addiction-like behavior in animals: disabled attention. T...

2 years ago

25 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part I - Runaway Habits.

Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Through most of the last century psychology looked for a way to explain learning in a scientific way. Researchers found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Oddly, the truth was right in front of them. But they didn't see because they had decided in advance to ignore it. They were looking with their eyes shut. Frustrated, they finally abandoned thei...

2 years ago

49 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part H - A Crippling Misstep.

Previous episodes of Healing Psychology highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or spirit. That was a strange decision, and a mystery, because the word psychology literally means “...

3 years ago

55 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part G - The Drive/Habit System

Previous episodes of this series pointed to psychology’s difficulty explaining addictions and other disease-like quirks of human behavior. The weakness of today’s psychology’s can be traced its disconnect from its mother science—biology. For it is in biology that we find the concepts that explain the normal learning of habits. And understanding normal habit development allows us to understand the abnormal habits we call addictions. As a bonus, understanding habit development casts light on th...

3 years ago

49 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part F - Viral Origins.

In the last episode of this series, we described self-repeating, malignant behaviors – habits such as alcoholism and anorexia nervosa – as true diseases. In fact, these patterns of behavior have many of the features of viruses. Like viruses, they are simple patterns – so simple that they can get themselves repeated only by exploiting the capabilities of their hosts. They begin as normal habits, but they escape our control. They end up acting like parasites, with us as their hosts. Today...

3 years ago

42 minutes

Reimagining Psychology

Healing Psychology, Part E - Viruses

In previous episodes of this series, we interpreted destructive behaviors like alcoholism and anorexia nervosa as habits that have escaped our normal means of control. Weirdly, these habits have somehow taken on a life of their own, reproducing themselves at our expense. And now they’re relating to us as parasites, using us as their hosts. The idea of parasitic habits doesn’t fit anywhere in today’s psychology. But in biology, psychology’s mother science, parasitism is the rule—not the ...

3 years ago

1 hour 6 minutes