Psychology

Word clouds are supposed to be great for visualizing unstructured text data and getting insights on trends and patterns.  When I see wavelength, stroboscopic, hypnosis, trance and entrainment grouped together, it makes me think about psychology.  Psychology is the mental process involved with thinking about thoughts, manipulating information, forming concepts, engaging in problem solving, reasoning things out so we can make decisions, and this act of thinking ends up producing more thoughts.  The frequency of a wave is inversely proportional to its wavelength, so waves with a high frequency have a short wavelength.  The human eye is only able to detect light wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers, and this is what we refer to as visible light.  We are not able to see things with shorter or longer wavelengths, so we can’t see radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, or gamma-rays, which are all around us.  A man must know his limitations, but just because we can’t actually visually see these wavelengths, that doesn’t mean that we are not able to detect them.

A stroboscopic device can be used for studying the motion of a body, especially if that body is moving rapidly or vibrating quickly, as this will make the motion appear to slow down or stop.  This creates an illusion of slow motion through a series of intermittent light flashes.  The stroboscopic effect in psychology is a phenomenon of human vision, where a moving object is perceived as standing still or even moving in the opposite direction that it is actually moving.

Hypnosis is a procedure for treating someone, that creates a highly relaxed state of inner concentration and focused attention so that a patient can experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts or behavior.  It is often used to help people cope with anxiety or pain.  People that undergo hypnosis may feel like they are “zoned in” or in a trance-like state, becoming so focused that they are able to block out any distractions from their surroundings.  Entrainment in the biomusicological (music mixed with psychology) sense, refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external perceived rhythm such as human music and dance.  Brainwave entrainment has been used for treating ADD and ADHD by entering a desired specific brainwave frequency and state of mind.  Entrainment often happens unconsciously, like when you are dancing while you are trying to move to the beat, you don’t realize that your breathing rate has sped up, as most breathing is involuntary.

Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge 272, where today she gave us a word cloud.