Duchovny in Rehab. Walk it off?

David Duchovny, who plays a novelist whose libido often leads him into trouble on “Californication,” is having trouble with sex in real life. The star of the big-screen “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” has entered a rehabilitation center for sex addiction, People reported. “I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction,” he told the magazine. “I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family.” Duchovny, 48, is married to actress Tea Leoni. They live in Malibu, Calif., with their two children, daughter Madelaine, 9, and son Kyd, 6. On Showtime’s “Californication,” Duchovny plays the troubled Hank Moody, a role for which he won a Golden Globe. - ctrib

Way back in 1990, when no one outside the English departments at Princeton and Yale knew who he was, Duchovny starred in a movie called “Julia Has Two Lovers.” He played a creepy dude who called women he selected randomly from the phone book and pleasured himself during the conversations. On a related note, in the “X-Files” TV series, Fox Mulder had very little actual sex, but it is widely known that the character had a major porn addiction. In at least one episode he gets turned on watching a tape of a Bigfoot sighting. - moviesblog

Ironically, the treatment follows closely Duchovny’s 2008 Golden Globe for his role as an “over-sexed struggling writer” in the Showtime series, Californication. According to E!, the actor has been combating rumors of such an addiction since 1997, the same year he married actress Tea Leoni, who is still his wife… . Duchovny reportedly denied a sex addiction in an interview with Playgirl that year. Leoni backed up her husband’s denial in an interview with Elle a year later. However, according to the New York Daily News, on a press tour in July, Duchovny told the media about a hot sauna scene with his wife while on vacation in Vancouver. “We were just all over each other - the sauna wasn’t going to stop me, and I recovered pretty quickly,” he reportedly said. - celebcafe

Good luck to him, but I’m not seeing the problem with wanting to have sex with his wife a lot… especially Tea.

You might wonder if you have a sexual addiction when you actually have normal behavior. … Sexual addiction comes in many different forms. There is no single type of behavior or even amount of behavior that will indicate you are a sexual addict. - sexualrecovery

Sex drive varies naturally from person to person. A “twice a week” person should not marry a “twice a day” person.

“The biggest problem I encounter in sex and marital counseling is an imbalance in sexual interest — one partner wants more, one wants less,” says Richard Driscoll, PhD, a marriage therapist in Knoxville, Tenn. for 34 years, and author of Intimate Masquerades: A Survival Guide for Those Who Know Too Much. “The average American married five years has sex once or twice a week. That’s your average. It’s not a problem if you vary from that average — you only have a problem when you cannot agree,” says Driscoll.

Many couples cannot agree. Driscoll says half of all marriages experience some discrepancy in desire at some point, and it’s usually men who have a higher sex drive. About one in five women report that their husbands have turned them down for sex, Driscoll says, while half of all men say their wives have turned them down.

Sex and Happiness Are Strongly Linked

“For men, we know one thing: The absence of sex makes them unhappy. For women, it is not as problematic,” says Edward Laumann, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and lead author of The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, the most comprehensive survey of sexual practices since the Kinsey Report. - webmed

Sex drive depends on things like age, life circumstances and overall health. The key questions seem to be: Have you lost control of the behavior? Are you experiencing significant consequences due to the behavior? Are you constantly thinking about the behavior, even when you don’t want to? If the answer is “no” to these questions, congratulations, you do not have an addition!

Here is some information showing the brain link between sexual plesure seeking and depression.

.. In a 1969 study published in Science, a scientist shoots up some rats with parachlorophenylalanine, a compound that lowers serotonin levels in both blood and brain. Within minutes of its administration there’s a veritable drought of serotonin. What happens to the rats? They become sexually aroused. They mount each other compulsively. Conversely, feed rats a serotonin-laced snack, thereby raising their levels, and almost all sexual appetite disappears. ”In other words, this isn’t just about testosterone,” Kafka says. ”It used to be thought sexual deviants had just testosterone abnormalities, but they may really have serotonin abnormalities. It may be that the lower the serotonin, the higher the sex drive, or it may be something much more complex, that sexual deviance is linked to an as-yet-unidentified disregulation affecting the serotonin system.”

Other studies on male animals bear this hypothesis out: before copulation, there is an increase in dopamine and a decrease in serotonin. Post-copulation, the opposite occurs. If this proves to be the case in the human species as well, afterward, when the man is smoking his cigarette or snoring as if he had chowed down a turkey dinner, he may be experiencing a serotonin surge. In a culture in love with the idea of ”high” serotonin, it might surprise us to know that passion, and its distant cousin lewdness, may lie not in the dosed-up but in the dosed-down version of being.

Kafka calls his theory of sexual-impulse disorders ”the monoamine hypothesis” because he is looking at the central role our monoamines — dopamine, norepinephrine and, specifically, serotonin — play in mediating desire. One of the more interesting studies he cites involves castrated rats that are injected with parachlorophenylalanine, which depletes central nervous system serotonin, and are subsequently able to resume normal mounting behavior with little or no testosterone additives. In other words, at least as far as animal analogues go, serotonin deprivation and its hypothesized partner, depression, appear to be powerful aphrodisiacs.

… Drugs like Prozac and Paxil specifically target the serotonin systems, thereby avoiding the widespread side effects of the older generations of antidepressants. … Kafka claims that the drugs are capable of reducing or eradicating pathological desire while preserving or enhancing what are culturally considered ”normal” sexual urges. …

”You give a man with sexual problems Prozac,” I ask, ”and his deviance disappears while his affiliative sexuality emerges?”

”I’ve seen it happen, over and over again,” he says.

But this part is debatable. S.S.R.I.’s like Prozac cause sexual dysfunction and Prozac may be approved some day for chemical castration. As one addict seeing Dr. Kafka put it, “sex is dead”.  And sex affiliative sex with his wife? “I’m good for maybe a minute, if at all.” So, Dr. Kafka is likely mistaken. Still, it is hopeful that there is indeed a cure that works, as a starting point.

What about the abuse theory?

… Common wisdom has it that the sexually compulsive or the sexually deviant were often themselves victims of abuse. ”The fact is,” Kafka says, ”only one-quarter to one-third of my patient population suffered physical or sexual abuse, and many of them had unremarkable childhoods, as far as I can see.” Which is why Kafka, who acknowledges the need for a multimodal approach and does refer men for psychotherapy, treats his patients with medication. In Morrill’s case, the pill was Celexa, a newer version of Prozac. 

In one case Celexa removes a cross dresser’s behaviors which had continued for 28 years and also restores normal sex with his wife.

The difference between Vince and Bill Morrill is that Vince enjoys what sounds like a very ”normal” sex life with his wife. ”Three times a week,” he says. ”I have no trouble. My orgasms are actually better on the Celexa than they were off. It’s because on the Celexa I can really concentrate on my wife’s body and not on the fantasies and fetishes. My wife is gorgeous. She’s petite, five-three, 110 pounds. We take our time.”

He goes on to describe his recovery in still more detail. ”The fetishisms were like all this static,” he says. ”Now the static’s cleared away, and what’s left is my real desire. My head feels like a whole new thing.

… “it is interesting to speculate that normal male sexual arousal resides in one area of the brain, deviant sexual arousal in another, and that the S.S.R.I.’s work by targeting one arousal system while sparing another,” he says. ”That’s an interesting, plausible hypothesis, and one that wouldn’t surprise me.”

Another possibility is this: the higher the intensity of any drive, the more polymorphous its manifestations. The S.S.R.I.’s may work in paraphilias and sexual addiction not by deleting but by pruning, so that the person’s core sexuality is finally free to emerge. This hypothesis lies close to the idea some psychiatrists hold that the paraphilias are simply another form of obsessive compulsive disorder (O.C.D.) and that the S.S.R.I.’s work not because they target sexual arousal but because they reduce ruminative thoughts and repetitive behaviors in all kinds of conditions. ”I hate that idea,” Kafka says. ”The paraphilias and P.R.D.’s are not a form of O.C.D. People who have O.C.D. do not have an appetite-disregulation disorder. O.C.D. is not about appetite. Sexual-impulse disorders are all about appetite.”

… However, reductive or not, Kafka is doing something right. He appears to have ”cured,” or restored to better balance, hundreds of men, many of whom are dangerous, all of whom are, by their own standards at least, terribly twisted. Kafka’s patients love him. ”He is the guy,” Jim says. ”He saved my life,” Bob says. - nytimes

Great article, Lauren Slater. Many depressed people self medicating with sex may be just one Celexa prescription away from a more healthy happy life.

Citalopram is an antidepressant drug used to treat major depression associated with mood disorders. It is also used on occasion in the treatment of body dysmorphic disorder and anxiety. Citalopram belongs to a class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). It is sold under the brand-names Celexa… Citalopram is generally considered safe and well-tolerated in the therapeutic dose range of 20 to 60 mg/day.

Side effects of citalopram include weight gain and possible increased suicidal thoughts in people under 24 years old, plus a few others:

… Citalopram can have a number of adverse effects. In clinical trials, over 10% of patients reported one or more of the following side effects: fatigue, drowsiness, dry mouth, increased sweating (hyperhidrosis), trembling, headache, dizziness, sleep disturbances, insomnia, cardiac arrhythmia, hallucinations, blood pressure changes, nausea and/or vomiting, diarrhea, heightened anorgasmia in females, impotence and ejaculatory problems in males. In rare cases (around over 1% of cases), some allergic reactions, convulsions, mood swings, anxiety and confusion have been reported. Also sedation may be present during treatment of citalopram. If this occurs it is advisable to take the dose at bedtime instead of in the morning.

If you know someone with this problem, the risks may be worth it. Or perhaps certain foods, natural supplements or behaviors such as exercise can have the same benefits without the side effects?

There is actually quite a lot of recent research regarding the effects of antidepressants compared to the effect of walking for 30 minutes every day. Walking has the same if not better results after a few weeks, but in the long run and studying relapses of depression, walking seems to be a better treatment. The problem is that doctors find it hard to prescribe walking, as the patients doesn’t take this seriously and may also feel as if they haven’t been heard. Walking has next to no bad side effects, antidepressants do - they mess up our whole system. - yahoo

If you have a sexual compulsion, depression or anxiety, start simple: Form a new habit: 30 to 45 minutes of exercise per day. Try this for a week, and note any improvements. If you still have symptoms, try natural anti-depressants.

5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan) is a third natural antidepressant shown by clinical research to treat depression effectively. 5-HTP, an amino acid, allows your body to increase levels of serotonin, a mood-related neurotransmitter, in the brain. Low serotonin levels have been linked to depression, and many prescription antidepressants work by increasing serotonin activity. For most people, taking 50-300mg of 5-HTP per day helps improve mood in just a few weeks without causing side effects. Some websites discuss concerns over the safety of 5-HTP, but these misconceptions are unfounded. In fact, 5-HTP has an excellent safety record, and extensive research has shown it to be one of the safest natural antidepressants available. 5-HTP is a good choice for a natural antidepressant when used alone, but it may work best as a natural antidepressant when combined with St. John’s Wort.- amoryn

Here is the pathway from tryptophan to serotonin

Most supplement providers recommend 50 mg or 100 mg 5-HTP, one to three times per day. Most clinical studies have tested doses of 200-300 mg/day. - wiki

Horror film gene that makes some scream while others laugh

Scientists say different versions of a single gene linked to feelings of anxiety can explain the way in which some people simply cannot abide such movies, while others enjoy the suspense and the gore.

The findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.

While many screamed and some even fainted in cinemas at scenes of spinning heads and shaking beds, others simply laughed.

A particular variant of the ‘COMT’ gene affects a chemical in the brain that is linked to anxiety, they have found.

People who have two copies of one version of the gene are more easily disturbed when viewing unpleasant pictures, the scientists discovered.

That version of the gene weakens the effect of a signalling chemical in the brain that helps control certain emotions.

The scientists found that those carrying two copies of it were significantly more startled by frightening images than others.

By contrast, those who had one copy of the gene and one copy of another version were able to keep their emotions in check far more readily.

The study, published today in the scientific journal Behavioural Neuroscience, also found that those with two copies of the latter gene were also able to keep a lid on their anxiety more easily. - telegraph

Our grip on reality is slim, says UCL scientist

The neurological basis for poor witness statements and hallucinations has been found by scientists at UCL (University College London). In over a fifth of cases, people wrongly remembered whether they actually witnessed an event or just imagined it, according to a paper published in NeuroImage this week.

Dr Jon Simons and Dr Paul Burgess led the study at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr Burgess said: “In our tests volunteers either thought they had imagined words which they had actually been shown or said they had seen words which in fact they had just imagined - in over 20 per cent of cases. That is quite a lot of mistakes to be making, and shows how fallible our memory is - or perhaps, how slim our grip on reality is!

“Our work has implications for the validity of witness statements and agrees with other studies that show that our mind sometimes fills in memory gaps for us, and we confuse what we imagined occurred in a situation - which is related to what we expect to happen or what usually happens - with what actually happened.

“Most of us, though, have a critical reality monitoring function so that we are able to distinguish well enough between what is real and what is imagined and our imagination does not have too great an impact on our lives - unless the reality check system breaks down such as after stroke or in cases of schizophrenia.” … - ucla

Free will is an illusion

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said. - nytimes

We each do what we must do. There is a degree of chaos everywhere, outside of us and in. So, we are not predictable… but we are pre-programmed.  Your conscious self does not decide what to do. It only observes and claims ownership of your decisions after the fact.

Whereas the delay between decision and awareness detected by Libet lasted 500 milliseconds, the new research seems to show that decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before the deciders are aware of having made up their minds. - cons

So, in other words, relax and enjoy the ride.

Magicians Know More Than Scientists

Magicians are way ahead of psychologists when it comes to understanding and exploiting the human mind and our perceptual quirks.

A new study, detailed in the current online issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, reveals how elements of human cognition, such as awareness and perception, could be explained by the success of some techniques commonly used by magicians.

For instance, vanishing tricks rely on the idea that we are only aware of a small part of what’s in our visual field.

“Although a few attempts have been made in the past to draw links between magic and human cognition, the knowledge obtained by magicians has been largely ignored by modern psychology,” said researcher Ronald Rensink, who specializes in vision and cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Seeing is believing?

Rensink, UBC colleague Alym Amlani and Gustav Kuhn of Durham University in England recently lifted the lid on some key techniques in the classic magician’s toolbox.

One of their revealing experiments highlighted the disconnect between what participants saw with their eyes and what they were focused on with their minds.

The researchers showed 46 participants a video clip of a magical performance while measuring each subject’s eye movements. In the performance, a cigarette and lighter once in the magician’s hands disappear (he drops each into his lap). About 50 percent of the participants claimed to see the objects being dropped while the others didn’t.

“What people actually saw was not related to where they were looking,” Kuhn told LiveScience. “Several participants who were looking at the object being dropped failed to see how it was done.”

Even though their eyes were focused on the objects, their attention was elsewhere, he said.

Magicians have used so-called misdirection tricks for centuries to make scarves or animals appear out of thin air or cause other objects to vanish. But it’s only been in the last two decades that vision scientists have found that only a small part of the information that enters your eyes, essentially the part that has grabbed your attention, enters your conscious awareness. … -continued on  yahoo

Mechanism Behind Mind-body Connection Discovered

Immune cells (stained blue) end in protective caps called telomeres (stained yellow) that are shorter in the elderly — and in persons suffering chronic stress. A new UCLA study suggests cortisol is the culprit behind premature aging of the immune system in stressed-out people.

Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies show that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.

UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells’ ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.

The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes. - read the full article on scidaily

Could hypnotism replace anaesthetics in surgery?

I’d like this to be true… have any of you had dental work done with a drill where you only used hypnosis?

… he forced himself to believe that his knee was only bruised. He refused to believe in pain. It was a myth, he kept telling himself.  And inch-by-inch the agony receded before, finally, becoming isolated and distant. The hypnosis had worked.  … Teeth removed without an anaesthetic? The mere idea makes any sane person squirm. And yet dentists, and even surgeons, are increasingly turning to hypnosis to replace a general anaesthetic. They claim that hypnosis has no negative side effects, is cheaper, and the patient recovers faster too.

Dr Mike Gow, a dentist based in Glasgow routinely uses hypnosis to carry out oral surgery. Amanda Maxwell, one of his patients, recently had a tooth removed and replaced with a crown using hypnosis. Four titanium screws were driven into her jawbone as part of the operation. As you can imagine, such an operation would normally be excruciatingly painful and would certainly need a general anaesthetic, but she described the process as entirely painless.

“I’m quite a wimp when it comes to pain,” says Amanda. “But during the operation my mind was elsewhere so it didn’t hurt at all.  As far as I was concerned, I was walking along a beautiful beach looking at the sea. I could hear the machine drilling into my jaw but it didn’t bother me at all.”

Dr Gow uses a standard ‘light trance’ form of hypnosis, which is about as far as it’s possible to get from the drama of a stage hypnotist. Dr Gow asks his patients to breath slowly and deeply before imagining themselves in a beautiful, peaceful place. This could be their favourite childhood bedroom or a sandy beach on a summer’s day. They are then asked to imagine pain as a dial running from one to ten. They control the level of pain by simply turning down the dial.

“Dr Gow told me that if the pain rose above six or eight then I should ask for an anaesthetic,” says Amanda. “It never rose above two or three during the entire operation. It didn’t hurt at all.”

Doctors are also carrying out major operations using hypnosis. One team in Belgium has operated on over 6,000 patients using hypnosis combined with a light local anaesthetic. The local anaesthetic is used only to deaden the surface of the skin whilst a scalpel slices through it. It has no effect inside the body.

“The patient is conscious throughout the whole operation,” says Professor Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville, head of the Pain Clinic at Liege University Hospital in Belgium. “This helps the doctor and patient work together. The patient may have to move during an operation and it’s very simple to get them to do that if they remain conscious.

“We’ve performed over 1,000 thorax operations and many breast augmentation procedures. We’ve done a hysterectomy too. All were done without a general anaesthetic.”

“I don’t think it would work for organ transplants though.” … - newsmonster

World’s first brain prosthesis revealed

The world’s first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.

The prosthesis will first be tested on tissue from rats’ brains, and then on live animals. If all goes well, it will then be tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease.

Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and consciousness - parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

The researchers developing the brain prosthesis see it as a test case. “If you can’t do it with the hippocampus you can’t do it with anything,” says team leader Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The hippocampus is the most ordered and structured part of the brain, and one of the most studied. Importantly, it is also relatively easy to test its function.

The job of the hippocampus appears to be to “encode” experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. “If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,” says Berger. That offers a relatively simple and safe way to test the device: if someone with the prosthesis regains the ability to store new memories, then it’s safe to assume it works. - continued on Newsci

Once something is ours, we fear losing it.

When people were asked to choose between an iPod and, say, $100, they were more likely to choose the money. But when they were given an iPod and then immediately asked if they would like to trade it for $100, they were more likely to leave the Ben Franklin on the table.

This is called the endowment effect, which researcher Brian Knutson of Stanford University calls “the poster child of strange (economic) behavior.” Chimps exhibit the effect, too.

Watching the subjects’ brains with an fMRI (neuroimaging) machine, Knutson and his colleagues found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, which signals how much we like an object, did not increase when the new iPod belonged to the subject. But the right insular, which warns us about possible loss, became more active when the iPod became my iPod.

The results are detailed in the current issue of the journal Neuron. - yahoo

Overcoming Defensiveness

A person I met tonight got me interested in a book by the Dali Lama called The Art of Happiness at Work.

For the Dalai Lama, basic human values such as kindness, tolerance, compassion, honesty, and forgiveness are the source of human happiness. Throughout the book, he illustrates with clear examples how bringing those qualities to bear on work-related challenges can help us tolerate or overcome the most thorny situations. Recognizing that not all problems can be solved, the Dalai Lama provides very sound advice. The authors urge balance and self-awareness and wisely state, “No matter how satisfying our work is, it is a mistake to rely on work as our only source of satisfaction.”

Zeroing in a bit more, a problem in myself or others at work I’d like to address is defensiveness. This is from businessknowhow.

Do you treat simple questions as accusations? Do you feel all that matters is being right? And, even when others say they’re sorry, do you find it hard to let go and forgive?

You may be spending too much time in the “Red Zone”–a defensive state of mind that suggests you don’t always work and play well with others.

Everyone gets defensive–it’s human nature. But when defensiveness reaches the boiling point in frequency and intensity, it can destroy relationships and damage personal and career success.

Where defensiveness comes from
Defensiveness is your body’s way of keeping you comfortable. It blocks bad feelings–though it doesn’t make them go away. In fact, the only way to make those feelings and defenses go away is to let them wash over you. Don’t respond right away; just feel. Then move on–before you say something sarcastic, point a finger, or whine “poor me.”

Defense mechanisms are part of your personal history. From childhood on, they emerge as you learn to cope–for better or for worse–with stress. And when the going gets really tough, they take on a life of their own–becoming a suit of armor to “protect” you. …

Recognizing your knee-jerk defenses can help you red-flag them before damage is done. Check out the list below for a dozen of the most common defense mechanisms. If you can’t identify with any of them, “denial” may be your personal number-one.

• Sarcasm
• Rigidity
• Blaming
• Shaming
• Teaching
• Preaching
• Catastrophizing
• Trivializing
• Endless explaining
• Withdrawing into silence
• Loss of humor
• All-or-nothing thinking

Turning red into green

When you feel yourself getting defensive, choose to turn your Red Zone attitudes into “Green Zone” actions:

• Slow down. Pause. Take a breath or–even better–take a walk. Deliberately slowing down your physical and emotional reactions is a sure-fire way to defuse defensiveness.
• Detach. You know what pushes your hot buttons, so cut off your usual response at the pass. Instead of shooting a sarcastic comeback, ask a question. Instead of “brain dumping,” shut up and listen. And, instead of freezing up, open up and tell others how you feel.
• Stop dissing yourself. Pessimistic thoughts–“I can’t do this” or “I look like an idiot”–only make matters worse. Catch yourself when the self-talk turns negative and consciously make it positive: “I can deal with this” or “I can take care of myself.” Positive thoughts really do lead to positive actions.
• Start over. When your personal early warning system flashes “Danger: Red Zone Ahead,” minimize the damage and begin again. Give yourself a “do-over”–a second chance to ditch the defensiveness and move forward into a friendlier future.