8 ms·

From my reading of the article (which is hard to parse not being an expert) it seems there is a German YouTuber with Tourette's who also on his YouTube shows di

From my reading of the article (which is hard to parse not being an expert) it seems there is a German YouTuber with Tourette's who also on his YouTube shows displays non-tourette's tics. And these tics are being copied by other young people watching his shows, and being presented as Tourette's until they arrive at the clinic where these experts go "hang on this kid does not have Tourette's but does have tics similar to the German youtuber above" So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them. Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?

indigochill 4y ago
There may be a relation to military conditioning. I spent just a single week at a military academy introductory program in high school and when I returned home I was "uncontrollably" (if I thought about it I could avoid doing it, but if I was on autopilot it happened by itself) squaring my corners and calling my family "sir" and "ma'am". The thing was, those patterns were my entire life for that week, and they were very deliberately drilled into me. Eventually they faded because they weren't reinforced outside of the academy (if anything, they were "deinforced"), but there may be a connection here. If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
- kuhewa 4y ago
  The article says that one thing differentiating these kids from acutal Tourette symptoms is that instead of symptoms waxing and waning, they only deteriorate. So that definitely squares
- albert_e 4y ago
  I read about "mirror neurons" where humans watching others do physical activity also have some of the same neural pathways fire. (V. S. RAMACHANDRAN) The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously) What you are describing sounds very similar.
  - boole1854 4y ago
    When I was raising my first child, I discovered a strange, apparently innate instinct which presumably is related to the mirror neurons: At some point the child gets old enough that you start to feed them 'baby food' on a spoon. The child isn't used to eating off of a spoon so for many weeks the process is messy. The initial challenge is getting them to open their mouth wide enough for the spoon to enter. And telling them 'open your mouth' is not particularly useful since they don't understand English at that age. Instead, the following instinct kicks in: as you approach their mouth with the spoon, your own mouth opens. They see your mouth open and then open theirs. The crazy part is that your own mouth opening happens involuntarily at the moment you want their mouth to open. It is physically difficult to suppress it, even if you try. I've also noticed the reverse. When the child gets a little older, they at some point want you to open your mouth, because they want to feed you something or they are curious about the inside of your mouth (this is a phase they go through). They seem to also involuntarily open their mouth wide when they want you to open yours.
- adolph 4y ago
  After your first sentence I thought the next would be “uncontrollably dropping two f-bombs for every noun and one for every verb” but the classic hallway “at ease, make way” is good fun too. It was hilarious how it could travel in waves up a hall ahead of the drill like a preceding shadow. My floor was enthusiastically and maliciously conformant and loud about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
- hrnnnnnn 4y ago
  I love "deinforce" as an antonym to "reinforce". The standard way to say it would maybe be "deemphasised", but it lacks the symmetry of "deinforced".
  - elliottkember 4y ago
    In behavioural psychology the antonym is "punish". There are positive/negative axes (whether a stimulus is added or removed) and reinforcement/punishment axes (whether the consequence is desired). Negative reinforcement is what boot camp uses. If you square your corners, you won't get shouted at. The "negative" aspect relates to the lack of shouting, and the reinforcement relates to the fact that the shouting is unpleasant. At home, positive punishment would be making fun of the tendencies, and negative punishment would have meant receiving no validation for the behaviour.
    - labster 4y ago
      I think GP meant deinforce to be a complimentary antonym, where you gave the gradable antonym.
      - CognitiveLens 4y ago
        @elliottkember is giving the correct complimentary antonym to "reinforce" in behavioral psych - "punishment" reduces the frequency of a behavior, "reinforcement" increases the frequency. There's a spectrum, but the terms only refer to the opposing effects on behavior rates. In the GP's comment, "deinforcement" appears to also mean "actively reducing the frequency of the behavior".
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent. Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation. Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures. With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    > Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent. As someone who moved to the US in his mid-teens (from a non-english-speaking country), that's quite literally me with British movies. After watching a few over a weekend, Mondays are usually rough, as I end up saying random words in British accent and immediately correcting myself.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I feel that might be overstating things. Otherwise we would all be speaking in a transatlantic accent.
rubidium 4y ago
All behavior is total behavior, so it doesn’t really matter. Article makes the point that this is attention seeking behavior and often used as an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks. Whether the teens are aware they are choosing the tic, eventually it becomes habitual and they “can’t stop”. Except they can after meeting with a trained phycologist. Get to the root of the behavior and usually the behavior goes away.
- amelius 4y ago
  Many OCD sufferers will not agree.
  - elil17 4y ago
    I think they were referring to behaviors associated with mass psychogenic illness, which is probably a lot more curable than many OCD cases.
  - nverno 4y ago
    In this case, however, the problem going away after diagnosis was one of the indicators of the psychosis. > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
kuhewa 4y ago
> First, all patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen. > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
somedude895 4y ago
It's the mere suggestion that they might have those tics, but the article says: > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
lisper 4y ago
It's plausible [1] [2]. I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought
- throw__away7391 4y ago
  Is this not totally normal and very common though? This exact thing happens to me all the time, with some specific memories linked to seemingly random acts like shaving the left side of my neck.
  - lisper 4y ago
    I have no idea if it's common or not. It might be. It's not the sort of thing people generally discuss. This is the first time I've ever talked about it.
    - tgv 4y ago
      A (long) time ago, I noticed something not dissimilar in my behavior. I've never noticed it in others, so it quite likely that your behavior goes unnoticed too. But what I did was tell myself to not react like that again next time. Of course, that didn't work, but it made me notice it better. And after repeating that for some time, I had timely control over the reaction (not over the stimulus that provoked it). If your tic is light and annoys you, you could try that. Your subconscious is capable of picking up more than you think, and it is (somewhat) malleable.
  - twic 4y ago
    Yes, loads of people get this. A couple of random reddit threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hzgm1n/how_to_stop_thinking_about_awkwardembarrassing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hzgm1n/how_to... https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/2nnff4/how_to_stop_cringing_at_past_events/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/2nnff4/how_to... I do it. When i'm alone, and one of those thoughts hits, me, i often vocalise a bit. If i'm in company i just wince (if i made a noise in front of other people when i thought of something embarrassing, that would be embarrassing, so that would lead to a sort of embarrassment Kessler syndrome).
ridgeguy 4y ago
Faceworms instead of earworms?
akira2501 4y ago
> Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain? The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work. We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
It sounds like these people simply learned the symptoms of a psychiatric condition and used that knowledge for personal gain. > patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms > resulting in release from obligations at school and home > symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities This is a textbook example of secondary gain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain > So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them. In some cases they did get rid of them after the ruse was discovered and no longer served any purpose. > in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome

indigochill 4y ago

There may be a relation to military conditioning. I spent just a single week at a military academy introductory program in high school and when I returned home I was "uncontrollably" (if I thought about it I could avoid doing it, but if I was on autopilot it happened by itself) squaring my corners and calling my family "sir" and "ma'am". The thing was, those patterns were my entire life for that week, and they were very deliberately drilled into me. Eventually they faded because they weren't reinforced outside of the academy (if anything, they were "deinforced"), but there may be a connection here. If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).

kuhewa 4y ago
The article says that one thing differentiating these kids from acutal Tourette symptoms is that instead of symptoms waxing and waning, they only deteriorate. So that definitely squares
albert_e 4y ago
I read about "mirror neurons" where humans watching others do physical activity also have some of the same neural pathways fire. (V. S. RAMACHANDRAN) The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously) What you are describing sounds very similar.
- boole1854 4y ago
  When I was raising my first child, I discovered a strange, apparently innate instinct which presumably is related to the mirror neurons: At some point the child gets old enough that you start to feed them 'baby food' on a spoon. The child isn't used to eating off of a spoon so for many weeks the process is messy. The initial challenge is getting them to open their mouth wide enough for the spoon to enter. And telling them 'open your mouth' is not particularly useful since they don't understand English at that age. Instead, the following instinct kicks in: as you approach their mouth with the spoon, your own mouth opens. They see your mouth open and then open theirs. The crazy part is that your own mouth opening happens involuntarily at the moment you want their mouth to open. It is physically difficult to suppress it, even if you try. I've also noticed the reverse. When the child gets a little older, they at some point want you to open your mouth, because they want to feed you something or they are curious about the inside of your mouth (this is a phase they go through). They seem to also involuntarily open their mouth wide when they want you to open yours.
adolph 4y ago
After your first sentence I thought the next would be “uncontrollably dropping two f-bombs for every noun and one for every verb” but the classic hallway “at ease, make way” is good fun too. It was hilarious how it could travel in waves up a hall ahead of the drill like a preceding shadow. My floor was enthusiastically and maliciously conformant and loud about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
hrnnnnnn 4y ago
I love "deinforce" as an antonym to "reinforce". The standard way to say it would maybe be "deemphasised", but it lacks the symmetry of "deinforced".
- elliottkember 4y ago
  In behavioural psychology the antonym is "punish". There are positive/negative axes (whether a stimulus is added or removed) and reinforcement/punishment axes (whether the consequence is desired). Negative reinforcement is what boot camp uses. If you square your corners, you won't get shouted at. The "negative" aspect relates to the lack of shouting, and the reinforcement relates to the fact that the shouting is unpleasant. At home, positive punishment would be making fun of the tendencies, and negative punishment would have meant receiving no validation for the behaviour.
  - labster 4y ago
    I think GP meant deinforce to be a complimentary antonym, where you gave the gradable antonym.
    - CognitiveLens 4y ago
      @elliottkember is giving the correct complimentary antonym to "reinforce" in behavioral psych - "punishment" reduces the frequency of a behavior, "reinforcement" increases the frequency. There's a spectrum, but the terms only refer to the opposing effects on behavior rates. In the GP's comment, "deinforcement" appears to also mean "actively reducing the frequency of the behavior".
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent. Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation. Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures. With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > Reminds me of how Americans spend a couple of months in the UK and return with an affected British accent. As someone who moved to the US in his mid-teens (from a non-english-speaking country), that's quite literally me with British movies. After watching a few over a weekend, Mondays are usually rough, as I end up saying random words in British accent and immediately correcting myself.
- bawolff 4y ago
  I feel that might be overstating things. Otherwise we would all be speaking in a transatlantic accent.

rubidium 4y ago

All behavior is total behavior, so it doesn’t really matter. Article makes the point that this is attention seeking behavior and often used as an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks. Whether the teens are aware they are choosing the tic, eventually it becomes habitual and they “can’t stop”. Except they can after meeting with a trained phycologist. Get to the root of the behavior and usually the behavior goes away.

amelius 4y ago
Many OCD sufferers will not agree.
- elil17 4y ago
  I think they were referring to behaviors associated with mass psychogenic illness, which is probably a lot more curable than many OCD cases.
- nverno 4y ago
  In this case, however, the problem going away after diagnosis was one of the indicators of the psychosis. > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.

kuhewa 4y ago

> First, all patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen. > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.

somedude895 4y ago

It's the mere suggestion that they might have those tics, but the article says: > Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things

lisper 4y ago

It's plausible [1] [2]. I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought

throw__away7391 4y ago
Is this not totally normal and very common though? This exact thing happens to me all the time, with some specific memories linked to seemingly random acts like shaving the left side of my neck.
- lisper 4y ago
  I have no idea if it's common or not. It might be. It's not the sort of thing people generally discuss. This is the first time I've ever talked about it.
  - tgv 4y ago
    A (long) time ago, I noticed something not dissimilar in my behavior. I've never noticed it in others, so it quite likely that your behavior goes unnoticed too. But what I did was tell myself to not react like that again next time. Of course, that didn't work, but it made me notice it better. And after repeating that for some time, I had timely control over the reaction (not over the stimulus that provoked it). If your tic is light and annoys you, you could try that. Your subconscious is capable of picking up more than you think, and it is (somewhat) malleable.
- twic 4y ago
  Yes, loads of people get this. A couple of random reddit threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hzgm1n/how_to_stop_thinking_about_awkwardembarrassing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hzgm1n/how_to... https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/2nnff4/how_to_stop_cringing_at_past_events/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/2nnff4/how_to... I do it. When i'm alone, and one of those thoughts hits, me, i often vocalise a bit. If i'm in company i just wince (if i made a noise in front of other people when i thought of something embarrassing, that would be embarrassing, so that would lead to a sort of embarrassment Kessler syndrome).

ridgeguy 4y ago

Faceworms instead of earworms?

akira2501 4y ago

> Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain? The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work. We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

It sounds like these people simply learned the symptoms of a psychiatric condition and used that knowledge for personal gain. > patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms > resulting in release from obligations at school and home > symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities This is a textbook example of secondary gain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain > So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them. In some cases they did get rid of them after the ruse was discovered and no longer served any purpose. > in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome