Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "Re: Intrusive Music, OCD, and more!"

"Lachryma" <elclouserNOSPAM@gibralter.net> wrote in message

news:0h9W6.217379$NK4.13903995@news2.aus1.giganews.com...

> That was an interesting article. I have had intrusive music for as
long
> as I can remember...Sometimes it only takes a word, a phrase, a noise and
it sets off a song
> in my head. I just figured I was weird (well, maybe that too ...) - I've
> never heard it connected to OCD before - big lightbulb going off.

I, too, had always had "intrusive" music, sayings etc. Marketers are well
aware of this phenomena and exploit it to the hilt. Lately the volume has
been pretty loud because of stress, yet controllable. Currently "Not To
Touch The Earth" by the Doors, "I Still Got the Blues" by I don't know who
and "Bei Mir Bisr DuShon" by I don't know who (one of the swing era songs
that keeps popping up ever since I saw the movie "Swing Kids", or something
like that). I could stop it but it doesn't seem to be harmful. It has, in
the past, been overwhelming as were a lot of OCD things. IME, these things
don't go away. They are there for a reason and when you learn to control
them, they are not a real problem. They tell me that my life is getting out
of control and it is time to slow down and get control or take a different
perspective.
In one book I read, this experience is related to the "jingle channel", a
subconscious part of our brain that surfaces. This subconsciousness is
always going on and for some reason, we get tuned into it and have trouble
changing the channel. The authors are the only reference, other than the web
link you referred to, I have seen that draws a link between this "jingle
channel" and ocd. Below is the chapter on obsessions.

whatatrip

Excerpts from:
What You Can Change.And What You Can't*

*Learning to accept who you are. By Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph. D.

Obsessions

What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the ship that will cross the sea. . . .
What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the houses for you and me.'
This song is running through my mind now and has been for about two hours.
It began when I was singing this jingle from my childhood to my
two-year-old, Lara, as we were picking tomatoes. It won't go away.

The jingle channel. Everyone has a jingle channel. For some people there are
ditties on it, but not everyone has music. Others have phrases repeated over
and over. The words often rhyme, they sometimes have a beat, and they are
always simple: "Step on a crack and break your mother's back." For others
who are less verbally inclined, there is no audio, only video; the same
images recur repeatedly: the Little Mermaid swimming toward Prince Eric, or
Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. Some people have a mixture of
words, songs, and images. Left alone, the content shifts slowly, but with an
external prompt, like your roommate humming a tune, it can jump.

Your jingle channel is slightly below consciousness, but once you know about
it, it is easy to tune in and listen. Some people have a louder channel than
others. You can sometimes tell how this hour's contents started: a radio ad,
a phrase from your boss, a new rock song on MTV. Once you tune in, you will
discover that the jingle channel has a life of its own. It is very hard to
change voluntarily. When it intrudes and you can't turn it off, it becomes
quite a vexation. Mark Twain discovered this, over a century ago, when he
heard this ditty for streetcar conductors and could not rid himself of it
for days.

A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare.
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare.
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
Punch, brothers! punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.'

Civilization has often taken advantage of the channel. Before the modern
media bombardment, poetry (epic poetry, no less), catechisms, and the Bible
were probably featured. I like to think that human mental furniture was
classier then. Astonishingly, psychological researchers have shown no
interest in this channel. It is broadcast by an unknown and uninvestigated
part of the brain.

The nightmare channel. Much of emotional life is carried on the jingle
channel. For many, the jingle channel is not a pleasant and elevating
experience. Sometimes the lyrics are about loss and hopelessness. "She's
gone, she's gone, she's gone, and she's never coming back" or "l'm a born
loser" are the sort of phrases that intrude when we are in a low mood. When
these kinds of jingles are dominant and recurrent, we call the listeners
depressed, and their thoughts have been named ruminations or automatic
thoughts. For others, the jingle channel is a nightmare channel, a
production of Stephen King that may feature ferocious animals or poisonous
insects, or scenes of humiliation. These people are called object phobics or
social phobics, respectively. For others, the channel features thoughts of a
heart attack or of going crazy or of losing control: These people's problem
is called panic disorder.

For still others, when they tune into their jingle channel, what they hear
is alien, repugnant, fearful, and depressing. Worse, they have a loud
channel that frequently intrudes unbidden on them during work and play.
Their most common themes are dirt and contamination, checking for danger,
and doubt. These people have a problem called obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD), which is named for the two elements that make it up. Their obsession
is a thought or image that recurs, and their compulsion is the ritual act
performed to neutralize the thought. When thoughts of dirt dominate the
jingle channel, the person will wash his hands for an hour, or scrub her
baby's room from floor to ceiling three times a day, or open doors only with
her feet to avoid having her hands contaminated by the germs on the
doorknob.

Howard Hughes was a brilliant tycoon. Toward the end of his life he had such
severe obsessions about germs that he became a recluse. He wrote a continual
stream of memos to his staff worrying about contami nation and instructing
them in how to prevent "back transmission" of germs to him. Hughes was
wealthy and powerful enough to have an entire staff to carry out his
cleaning compulsions: In one three page memo he instructed his staff in how
to open a can of fruit to prevent germ "fallout":
"The man in charge then turns the valve in the bathtub on, using his bare
hands to do so. He also adjusts the water temperature so that it is not too
hot nor too cold. He then takes one of the brushes, and, using one of the
bars of soap, creates a good lather, and then scrubs the can from a point
two inches below the top of the can. He should first soak and remove the
label, and then brush the cylindrical part of the can over and over until
all particles of dust, pieces of paper label, and, in general, all sources
of contamination have been removed.'"

Washing and cleaning rituals can take up large swaths of the day when,
unlike Hughes, you have to do them yourself. One fourteen-year-old had to
wake up at four-thirty every morning in order to clean herself thoroughly
and make the bed so that it was exactly right before she left for school at
eight. She was plagued with the severe skin rashes and abrasions that result
when you wash your hands for an hour or more at a time.

"Checkers" find themselves waking many times each night to make sure that
the gas in the kitchen is off, or that all the doors and windows are locked.
One man drove to a crossroads near his house ten times a day for months to
make certain that there was no corpse lying there that he had run over and
failed to notice on the last trip. Another woman always peered down into the
toilet bowl to make sure that there was no baby in danger of being flushed
away. Toilets, incidentally, are often featured on the OCD jingle channel:
One otherwise successful and healthy dentist always had to flush in
multiples of three-9, 27, 81, or 243 times-before carrying on. He wasn't
much fun to go drinking with.

Do you or someone you love have obsessive-compulsive tendencies? How can you
tell if what you hear on your jingle channel is in the normal range or if it
is in need of changing? Self-diagnosis is always hazardous, 'and this book
is not a diagnostic manual. Rather, my intention is to alert you to a
variety of problems, and if they seem to apply to you, I want
to point you in the right direction for help. Some problems don't require a
lot of sophistication for you to be aware of what they are: Panic attacks
and phobias are two examples. Other problems, like obsessions, require an
experienced professional to diagnose. There are three problems that should
alert you to a need for help:
. Are the thoughts unwelcome and repugnant, and do they intrude?
. Do they arise from within, with no external stimulus?
. Do you find it very hard to distract yourself or dismiss the thoughts?

There are two viable approaches to OCD: the biological and the behavioral.
Each has a theory and each has evidence in its favor. Each has also
generated a therapy that helps the majority of people with OCD. Neither is
wholly satisfactory.

The Biological Viewpoint

Biological psychiatrists claim that OCD is a brain disease. Their first line
of evidence is that OCD, once in a great while, develops right after a brain
trauma. Jacob, eight years old, was playing football in the backyard. He
collapsed and went into a coma with a brain hemorrhage. When he came out of
brain surgery, which went very well, he was plagued by numbers. He had to
touch everything in sevens. He swallowed in sevens and asked seven times for
everything.

Sometimes OCD begins with epilepsy, and after the great sleeping sickness (a
viral brain infection) epidemic of 1916-18 in Europe, there was an apparent
rise in the number of OCD patients. There is also some marginal evidence for
a genetic factor in OCD. It runs in families: 30 percent of all adolescents
with OCD have a parent or sibling with OCD.

The second line of biological evidence comes from brain-scan studies of
patients with OCD. Two areas of the brain show higher activity in OCD
patients: These two areas are related to filtering out irrelevant
information and perseveration of behavior. When patients improve with drugs
or behavior therapy, activity in these areas diminishes.

The third line of evidence concerns the specific content of the OCD jingle
channel. What goes off there is not arbitrary. Like the content of phobias,
which is mostly objects that were once dangerous to the human species, the
content of obsessions and of the compulsive rituals is also narrow and
selective. The vast majority of OCD patients are obsessed with germs or with
violent accidents, and they wash or they check in response. Why such
specific and peculiar themes? Why not obsessions about particular shapes,
like triangles, or about socializing only with people of the same height?
Why no compulsions about push-ups, or about handclapping, or about crossword
puzzles? Why germs and violence; why washing and checking?

During the course of evolution, washing and checking have been very
important and adaptive. The grooming and physical security of one's self and
one's children are constant primate concerns. Perhaps the brain areas that
kept our ancestors grooming and checking are the areas gone awry in OCD.
Perhaps the recurrent thoughts and the rituals in OCD are deep vestiges of
primate habits, run amok. This would mean, as it does for phobias, that it
would not be easy to get rid of OCD, that we would not be able to talk
people out of their obsessions and compulsions. This is true: Neither
psychoanalysis nor cognitive therapy appears to work on OCD.

Effective therapy is, indeed, the final line of evidence for the biological
theory. Anafranil (clomipramine) is a drug that has been used successfully
with thousands of OCD sufferers, in more than a dozen controlled studies.
Anafranil is a potent antidepressant drug, a serotonin-reuptake inhibitor.
When OCD victims take Anafranil, the obsessions wane and the compulsions can
be more easily resisted.

It is not a perfect drug. A large minority of patients (almost half) taking
Anafranil do not get better, or they cannot take it because of side effects
including drowsiness, constipation, and loss of sexual interest. Those who
benefit are rarely cured: Their symptoms are dampened, but the obsessive
thoughts are usually lurking and the temptation to ritualize remains. When
those who do benefit go off the drug, many-perhaps most-of them relapse
completely. But Anafranil is decidedly better than nothing.

The Behavioral Viewpoint '
There is something magnetic about horrible thoughts and images (the
popularity of horror films testifies to this). Some of us are better than
others at dismissing these thoughts or distracting ourselves from them. When
we are depressed or anxious (as most people inclined to OCD are), such
thoughts are even more difficult to stop. Indeed, when people are shown
films of, for instance, gruesome woodworking accidents, those viewers who
are most upset are the ones who have the most trouble discarding the images.

Behavior therapists argue that people who are not very good at distracting
themselves or dismissing thoughts are most prone to OCD. Once a horrible
thought starts, if you cannot dismiss it, it makes you upset. The more upset
you get, the harder it is to dismiss the thought. You get even more anxious,
and a vicious circle is under way. If thought stopping by ordinary means
doesn't work for you, you can perform a ritual, a compulsion, that relieves
the anxiety. So if you have mounting horrible thoughts about germs, you can
wash your hands thoroughly; if you are obsessed with burglars, you can check
the locks. This relieves the anxiety temporarily, but when the thought
returns, the temptation to perform the ritual will be even stronger because
it has been reinforced by anxiety reduction. This theory fits the subjective
experience of OCD quite well.

A therapy follows directly: exposure and response prevention. If you expose
the patient to the feared situation and then prevent her from engaging in
her ritual, she should become very anxious at first. If she continues to
refrain, however, and finds out that the expected harm does not befall
her-that she does not become infected by germs, that a gas explosion does
not occur--the thoughts should wane and the ritual should extinguish.
Thousands of OCD patients have been helped by this therapy. Here is a
dramatic instance:
Jackie had obsessions about broken glass cutting her vagina. She kept her
panties in a separate, locked drawer. She searched minutely for glass around
chairs before sitting down. She could not use public toilets, and shewould
never wear flared skirts. Her most awful thought was of having to wear a
tampon.
She entered behavior therapy and agreed to a response-prevention treatment.
With her therapist's help, she sat down on unfamiliar chairs without
checking. She used public toilets. After she was able to do these things
with increasing comfort, she sat on the floor while bottles were broken
around her. Finally, with her therapist's encouragement, she was able to use
a tampon. Her obsessions and compulsions disappeared and have not returned.

Between half and two-thirds of patients improve markedly after exposure and
response prevention, and for most of those who improve, relief is lasting.
At the end of therapy, however, the patient is usually not completely
normal: The thoughts still lurk. A clear minority, it must be said, fail to
improve. OCD patients who are depressed, who have delusions, or who secretly
perform their rituals usually will not improve."
People with OCD have worry and depression as the dominant emotions on their
jingle channel. People with other emotional problems have a different
dominant emotion on their channel. People with object phobias have terror
accompanying horrific scenes of encounters with the feared object. People
with panic attacks have recurrent images of
heart attack, stroke, and death accompanied by incipient panic. People with
agoraphobia feel panic and terror as they tune in on scenes of going
outside, of getting sick and being helpless with no one coming to their aid.

That we have a jingle channel is a fact we cannot change. It is an aspect of
mental life so important that evolution wants to make sure it goes on
incessantly. It is too important to be left to any conscious decision of
whether or not to tune in. But its content may be changeable, and its volume
is surely changeable. Changing the content, or at least adjusting the
volume, can relieve some of our emotional problems. Cognitive therapy for
panic probably removes heart attacks and dying as content on the jingle
channel. Extinction therapy for any phobia and antidepressant drug therapy
for agoraphobia turn the volume from loud to soft on the feared encounters.
Both Anafranil and response prevention turn the volume from very loud to
moderate in OCD. Changing the volume of the channel, while not simple, can
now be effectively done with all these problems. My best guess, however, is
that after successful treatment for OCD-and probably for phobias, too-the
old jingles are still there-quieter and less insistent perhaps, but still
lurking.

-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----