Automatism (medicine)
Automatic behavior can also be exhibited in REM sleep, during which a higher amount of brain stimulus increases dreaming patterns.
[citation needed] Varying degrees of automatism may include simple gestures, such as finger rubbing, lip smacking, chewing, or swallowing, or more complex actions, such as sleepwalking behaviors.
In some more complex automatisms, the subject enters into the behaviors of sleepwalking while fully awake until it starts.
In these episodes, which can last for longer periods of time, the subject proceeds to engage in routine activities such as cooking, showering, driving a familiar route, or even conversation.
[9] Many people believed that uncontrollable movements such as table-turning, tilting, and screaming were signs of spirit possessions or that outside forces were taking over human bodies.
[9] Many individuals started focusing on automatic behavior, such as the psychotherapist and psychologists Pierre Janet.
[10] Pierre Janet played an important role in studying the condition of dissociation related to automatic behaviors.
[10] This approach to automatisms and the study of the conscious and unconscious part of the brain was inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud and William James; two investigators of hypnosis and hysteria.
[9] Indeed, scam artists use confidence tricks to depict fake spiritual possessions by making it seem like they weren't in control of their bodies.
[11] Dissociative symptoms, prevalent in many cases can be seen in people who have experienced blindness, deafness, anesthesia of various parts of the body, convulsions, possession, odd voices or sudden new habits, physical illness, and others.
[11] Dissociation leads people to lose control over their actions as their consciousness and unconsciousness separate.
People subject to automatism will produce involuntary actions that were not controlled by their mental causation.
[12] According to the book Brainstorm: Detective Stories From the World of Neurology by Suzanne O'Sullivan, a side effect of focal seizures are uncontrollable movements, also known as automatism.
[13] O'Sullivan observed many automatisms in her patients such as purposeless swearing, spitting, uncontrollable clicking fingers, fumbling movements, and more.
[13] According to O'Sullivan, these symptoms are "an automatic release phenomenon that occurs because brain inhibition has been lost.
"[13] The release of inhibition causes automatic behavior in other cases such as after a cingulotomy or even in the postictal phase of a seizure.
For instance, the electric stimulation of the cingulate, part of the cortex involved in behavior regulation, can create an automatic movement to the contralateral leg, lip, and face.
[14] If the patient has an effective automatism such as facial expressions that exhibit fear, the limbic motor region of the cingulate cortex is most likely impacted by the seizure.
[14] Seizures can also impact the anterior cingulate causing the patient to have an uncontrollable ictal pouting also known as an inverted smile.
[15] The ideomotor effect, also known as the "Automatism Theory", is the idea that even though a person may not know they are controlling the message indicator, they are.
[15] Most proponents of the Automatism Theory undertake the fact that it is probable to move the planchette unconsciously and declare that the Ouija board opens up a shortcut from the conscious to the subconscious mind.
[22] Scientists know this information from performing various tests on sleepwalking patients, such as EEG's and brain scans.
[weasel words] It has been shown that sleepwalking relates to the natural human behavior of sleeping, although the frontal cortex is awake and ready to go.
This can be seen in many animal species, as this form of sleep where the frontal cortex is partially awake stems from an adaptation of enhanced survival.
