Cerebrum

Dr. Arthur Janov interview on his 2011 book Life Before Birth: The hidden script that rules our lives

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Epigenetics, Limbic system, Lower brain, Neurochemicals, Primal Therapy, Stress, Telomeres , , , , , ,

Dr. Arthur Janov’s 2011 book “Life Before Birth: The hidden script that rules our lives” describes problems that start in the earliest parts of our lives, when epigenetic changes due to trauma in the womb affect our development.

“The science has changed. When I first started out 44 years ago, there was nobody who could understand it, or agree, especially the professionals. Now all, or a great deal of the current research, is backing up everything I say.

I’m saying that this therapy is really a matter of life and death now. I should probably start at the beginning and say that there’s trauma in the womb. We need to set back the clock so that we take account of trauma that occurs while our mother is carrying that has lifelong consequences for how long we live, for example. There’s a current research study that shows that as you get more traumatized in the womb, your life expectancy is much shorter.

When you get rid of the childhood pain that happened way back when – and there are ways to do it – you will live much longer. So truly, a proper therapy now is a matter of life and death. Not only because your life expectancy is shorter when you have trauma, but you get sick earlier, you have diabetes, Alzheimer’s, all kinds of diseases on your way to your death, which makes life very uncomfortable.

But that’s just part of what we do. The idea is that we found a way to take the pain out of the system, going all the way back. And what we’re finding is that pain starts way, way earlier than we thought.

I used to think that the greatest point was the birth trauma. Well that’s no longer true. Way before the birth trauma there are traumas from the smoking mothers, the anxious mothers, the depressed mothers, that have lifelong effects on the baby, the offspring.”

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbUhjZhpEyct”

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Research on brain areas involved when we imagine people, places, and pleasantness

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Beliefs, Brain hemispheres, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Thalamus ,

This highly jargoned 2014 Harvard study was on how people imagine that they’ll feel in the future.

One of the researchers was an author of:

I was surprised that this study also didn’t ignore the limbic system to the point to where the researchers wouldn’t even bother to measure important areas.

Limbic system areas that process people were different than those that process places. For example, the data in Table S4 showed that the subjects’ left amygdala and hippocampus were more activated when simulating future familiar people, whereas their right hippocampus was more activated when simulating future familiar places.

The researchers may have improved the study’s findings if they were informed by studies such as the Hippocampus replays memories and preplays to extend memories into future scenarios, which found that “place” cells in the CA1 segment of the hippocampus preplay events that imagine future scenarios of:

“Novel spatial experiences of similar distinctiveness and complexity.”

Such information may have helped to disambiguate one of the study’s findings in Table S5, that both sides of the subjects’ hippocampus were more activated than other brain regions when simulating both familiar people and places.

The researchers got a little carried away in broadly attributing most of the study’s findings to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. For example, the data in Table S6 showed that the thalamus was more activated when the subjects anticipated positive pleasantness, but not when negative effects were anticipated.

We know from Thalamus gating and control of the limbic system and cerebrum is a form of memory that this is normally how the thalamus part of the limbic system actively controls and gates information to and from the cerebrum. Their data showed thalamic gating in operation:

  • Active when passing along pleasantness to cerebral areas, and
  • Passive when blocking unpleasantness from cerebral areas.

Also, I didn’t see how the researchers differentiated some of their findings from a placebo effect. For example, Using expectations of oxytocin to induce positive placebo effects of touching is a cerebral exercise found:

“Pain reduction dampened sensory processing in the brain, whereas increased touch pleasantness increased sensory processing.”

This was very similar to the above finding involving the thalamus.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/46/16550.full “Ventromedial prefrontal cortex supports affective future simulation by integrating distributed knowledge”

Dr. Arthur Janov Book Expo America 2008 Interview

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Primal Therapy , ,

“Our therapy is centered on needs.

As we grow up we have different kinds of needs.

The need right after birth is be touched.

The need at birth is to have a good birth with oxygen, etc.

Then it’s to be held, to be listened to, and so on.

For each of the needs that are not fulfilled, there’s pain.

And it’s registered on different levels of the brain.

What we have found a way to do is to go back down into the brain and take those pains out of the system.

So you don’t have to take pills to stuff it back.

What we do is, little by little, take the pain out of the system that is based on not-fulfilled needs.

So that’s basically what Primal Therapy is about.”

Our cerebrums use ideas and beliefs to repress pain and make us more comfortable

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Primal Therapy

One hypothesis of Primal Therapy is that a major function our cerebrums have evolutionarily adapted is to use ideas and beliefs to repress pain and make us more comfortable.

Is it any wonder why this 2014 study found:

“Beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/47/16784.full “The ecology of religious beliefs”

What is Primal Therapy by Dr. Arthur Janov

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brainstem, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Primal Therapy , , , ,

“We have needs that we are all born with.

When those basic needs are not met, we hurt.

And when that hurt is big enough, it is imprinted into the system.

It changes the system, our whole physiologic system.

What our therapy does, it goes back to those early brains, those hurt brains, and relive the pain, and get it out of the system.

Because meanwhile, that pain is being held in storage, and just waiting for its exit, so to speak.

So Primal Therapy is a way of accessing our feeling brain, and down below even the feeling brain, to the brainstem, to get to all of the hurts that started very early in our lives.

And bring them up to consciousness for connection and integration.

It is a very systematic therapy, by the patient.

The patient decides when he comes and when he leaves and how long he stays.

There’s no 50-minute hour anymore.

It’s the feelings of the patient that determine when he stops.”

If a study didn’t measure feelings, then its findings may not pertain to genuine empathy

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

This 2014 UK study tried to show that empathetic actions were very context-dependent. It mainly studied causing overt pain to another person.

The lead researcher stated:

“We were interested in quantifying how much people care about others, relative to themselves. A lack of concern for others’ suffering lies at the heart of many psychiatric disorders such as psychopathy, so developing precise laboratory measures of empathy and altruism will be important for probing the brain processes that underlie antisocial behavior.”

The researchers didn’t provide direct evidence of genuine empathy – the subjects’ emotions of sensing and sharing the emotions of another person.

The study was designed to cause sensations of pain and draw conclusions about empathetic feelings. The subjects’ limbic system and lower brains were never measured, however.

Why did the researchers decide to only infer these feelings and sensations from actions and reports? Why wasn’t this inferred evidence confirmed with direct measurements of the brain areas that primarily process feelings and sensations?

  1. At no time during the experiment did the subjects see or hear or touch the person whom they caused pain. Wouldn’t it be difficult for the subjects to feel authentic empathy for a disembodied presence?
  2. We’re informed by the Task performance and beliefs about task responses are solely cerebral exercises study that it’s inaccurate to characterize subjects’ task responses as feelings.
  3. We know from the Problematic research: If you don’t feel empathy for a patient, is the solution to fake it? study that people’s cerebrums are easily capable of generating a proxy for empathy.

This study’s findings concerning empathy involved inauthentic empathy – the non-feeling, cerebral exercise, faking-it kind.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17320.full “Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making”

More from the researchers that found people had the same personalities at age 26 that they had at age 3

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain development, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain ,

This 2014 research came from the Dunedin Study in New Zealand that has studied a group of over 1,000 people for 40+ years now. They first came to worldwide fame by finding that the study’s participants at age 26 largely had the same personality that each did at age 3.

The current study linked the participants’ childhood cognitive abilities and self-control to their current cardiac age.

Would a US doctor have the knowledge and foresight to understand that significant factors in a middle-aged patient’s cardiac health came from their early childhood, infancy, or womb life experiences?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17087.full “Credit scores, cardiovascular disease risk, and human capital”

An example of how we are unaware of some of the unconscious bases of our decisions

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain , ,

This 2014 human study provided details of how we are unaware of some of the unconscious bases of our decisions:

“We show that unconscious information can be accumulated over time and integrated with conscious elements presented either before or after to boost or diminish decision accuracy.

The unconscious information could only be used when some conscious decision-relevant information was also present.

Surprisingly, the unconscious boost in accuracy was not accompanied by corresponding increases in confidence, suggesting that we have poor metacognition for unconscious decisional evidence.”

I wouldn’t agree that these findings apply as broadly as the researchers said they did during interviews.

The first reason is that the researchers restricted the study to the subjects’ cerebrums’ visual processing. In everyday life, though, our limbic systems and lower brains are also very much involved with visual processing.

As an example, have you ever taken a nature walk where you instinctually jumped back from a vague initial impression only to find that the object was a stick? I’ve done that many times, and our shared human instincts operating with the limbic system and lower brain saved me once in childhood from stepping on a copperhead snake.

Secondly, the researchers limited the term “unconscious” to mean below visual perception of the subjects’ cerebrums.

What if, for example, the study’s visual cues included emotional content that involved the subjects’ limbic systems? The researchers may have able to develop a basis for findings that applied to common operations such as making decisions that are influenced by unconscious emotional content.

The third reason to not apply the findings as broadly as the researchers may have desired is that the researchers limited the term “metacognition” to operations of the the subjects’ cerebrums. We know that Task performance and beliefs about task responses are solely cerebral exercises, which accurately describes the metacognition experiment.

As an example of how people’s metacognitions are much broader than just their cerebrums, I take a crowded train to and from work everyday. It’s fairly straightforward to understand people’s actions, body postures, and facial expressions in terms of the combined metacognition operations of their entire brains.

Also, the metacognition finding sample size may have been too small by involving only five subjects.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16214.full “Unconscious information changes decision accuracy but not confidence”

Fear extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Amygdala, Cerebrum, Epigenetics, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory

This 2014 rodent study showed that fear extinction doesn’t depend on memory retrieval:

“These results show that extinction and retrieval are separate processes and strongly suggest that extinction is triggered or gated by the conditioned stimulus even in the absence of retrieval.”

Key to my understanding this finding came from a definition in another summary study by the authors, The learning of fear extinction, where they stated:

“Extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses.”

These two studies and Hippocampal mechanisms involved in the enhancement of fear extinction caused by exposure to novelty should inform researchers of studies such as If rodent training has beneficial epigenetic effects, how can the next step be human gene therapy? of desirable alternative treatments, rather than proceeding from rodent training directly to human gene therapy.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/E230.full “Extinction learning, which consists of the inhibition of retrieval, can be learned without retrieval”

We are attuned to perceive what our brains predict will be rewarding

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Beliefs, Brain development, Cerebrum

What I got from this 2014 human study is that from the beginnings of our lives, we are attuned to perceive what our brains predict will be rewarding.

The subjects’ whole brains were monitored, but only areas of the cerebrum participated in the findings to a significant degree.

“Sounds associated with high rewards increase the sensitivity of vision.

The same neurons that process sensory information are modulated by reward..and thereby influence perception from the earliest stages of cortical processing.

Reward associations modulated responses in regions associated with multisensory processing in which the strength of modulation was a better predictor of the magnitude of the behavioral effect than the modulation in classical reward regions.”

Sounds a little bit like we all might have a mild case of synesthesia.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15244.full “Cross-modal effects of value on perceptual acuity and stimulus encoding”

What is the purpose of music? A review of evolutionary and pleasurable research findings

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cerebrum, Dopamine, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Lower brain, Neurochemicals

Ever wonder what happens in your brain and body when you get chills from a musical performance?

This 2013 summary review of 126 studies provided details of brain areas that contribute to our enjoyment of music.

Much of the review addressed Darwin’s observation that music had no readily apparent functional consequence and no clear-cut adaptive function. The researchers noted that:

“There is scant evidence that other species possess the mental machinery to decode music in the way humans do, or to derive enjoyment from it.”

The reasons why different types of music affect us differently are similar to the findings of the Reciprocity behaviors differ as to whether we seek cerebral vs. limbic system rewards study.

Here are the “We seek limbic system rewards” similarities:

“The nucleus accumbens played an important role with both familiar and novel music. In the case of familiar music, hemodynamic activity in the nucleus accumbens was associated with increasing pleasure, and maximally expressed during the experience of chills, which represent the peak emotional response; these were the same regions that showed dopamine release. The nucleus accumbens is tightly connected with subcortical limbic areas of the brain, implicated in processing, detecting, and expressing emotions, including the amygdala and hippocampus. It is also connected to the hypothalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, all of which are implicated in controlling the autonomic nervous system, and may be responsible for the psychophysiological phenomena associated with listening to music and emotional arousal.”

Here is the “We seek cerebral rewards” part.

“Finally, the nucleus accumbens is tightly integrated with cortical areas implicated in “high-level” processing of emotions that integrate information from various sources, including the orbital and ventromedial frontal lobe. These areas are largely implicated in assigning and maintaining reward value to stimuli and may be critical in evaluating the significance of abstract stimuli that we consider pleasurable.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/Supplement_2/10430.full “From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates”

Using expectations of oxytocin to induce positive placebo effects of touching

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Beliefs, Brain hemispheres, Limbic system, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin, Thalamus

This 2013 Scandinavian study detailed which brain structures were involved when fooling oneself about actual sensations in favor of expected sensations.

It was hilarious how the researchers used studies of oxytocin to create expectations in the subjects:

“To induce expectation of intranasal oxytocin’s beneficial effects on painful and pleasant touch experience, participants viewed a 6-min locally developed video documentary about oxytocin’s putative prosocial effects such as involvement in bonding, love, grooming, affective touch, and healing. As all of the material was based on published research, there was no deception. The video concluded that a nasal spray of oxytocin might enhance the pleasantness of:

  • (i) stroking and
  • (ii) warm touch, and
  • (iii) reduce the unpleasantness of pain.”

Other items:

  • Only the placebo effects for the warm and pain-reducing touches were statistically significant, not the stroking touch;
  • The a priori brain areas monitored in the “sensory circuitry” included the thalamus and were all in the right brain hemisphere;
  • The a priori brain areas monitored in the “emotional appraisal circuitry” included the amygdala.

One way the researchers summarized the study was:

“Pain reduction dampened sensory processing in the brain, whereas increased touch pleasantness increased sensory processing.”

This finding demonstrated how the thalamus part of the limbic system actively controls and gates information to and from the cerebrum, similar to the Thalamus gating and control of the limbic system and cerebrum is a form of memory study.

There was a terminology problem in the study, evidenced by statements such as:

“We induced placebo improvement of both negative and positive feelings (painful and pleasant touch).”

Touch is a sensation, not a feeling or emotion. This placebo study created expectations of sensations in the subjects’ cerebrums, not expectations of emotions.

Also, including parts of the limbic system such as the amygdala in the “emotional appraisal circuitry” didn’t mean that the researchers studied feelings or emotions. We know from research summarized in the Conscious mental states should not be the first-choice explanation of behavior study that:

“Neither amygdala activity nor amygdala-controlled responses are telltale signatures of fearful feelings.“

The current study cast additional light on the dubious Problematic research on human happiness study. Those researchers were fooled by a positive placebo effect!

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/44/17993.full “Placebo improves pleasure and pain through opposite modulation of sensory processing”

What happens next after a detox program predictably fails?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Beliefs, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Primal Therapy , ,

This 2014 study was a misguided example of looking solely at the presenting parts of a person’s condition rather than the whole historical person.

What did this study’s researchers decide after finding:

“Alcohol-dependent subjects..remained with high scores of depression, anxiety, and alcohol craving after a short-term detoxification program.”

Was it that the detox program didn’t work because it dealt with suppressing symptoms rather than addressing causes?

NO!

The researchers decided:

“Gut microbiota seems to be a previously unidentified target in the management of alcohol dependence.”

The researchers proceeded on some trendy, in-vogue aspect of their patients with which to tinker.

The researchers ignored that the correlation of the new treatment course didn’t show causation. They also ignored underlying causes for the ineffectiveness of the preceding treatments of symptoms.

Hard to see how the reviewer believed that this study would advance science.

Meanwhile, the researchers continued to ignore the elephants in the room: the relationships of the patients’ histories and their pain.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/E4485.full “Intestinal permeability, gut-bacterial dysbiosis, and behavioral markers of alcohol-dependence severity”

Problematic research on oxytocin: If the study design excludes women, its findings cannot include women

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin , ,

This 2014 study’s findings that “the hormone oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty” can’t apply generally to humans because its subjects were ALL men.

Regarding oxytocin, the researchers certainly knew or should have known previous studies’ findings about sex differences, as did Is oxytocin why more women than men like horror movies? which cited:

“Oxytocin modulates brain activity differently in male and female subjects.”

Regarding differing reciprocal behaviors, the researchers also knew or should have been better informed about associated brain areas through studies such as Reciprocity behaviors differ as to whether we seek cerebral vs. limbic system rewards and its references.

And how could the study produce reliable, replicable evidence of:

“Dishonesty to be plastic and rooted in evolved neurobiological circuitries”

when the researchers performed NO measurements of “neurobiological circuitries” that supported that finding?

What was the agenda in play here? What did the female Princeton reviewer see in this study that advanced science?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/5503.full “Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty”

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Who benefits when research with no practical application becomes a politically correct meme?

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Anterior cingulate cortex, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

Do you take a risk, as this 2013 University of Texas/Yale study concluded, because you don’t foresee how you can avoid the risk?

By making this finding, the study essentially assigned the bases of a person’s risky decisions to their cerebrum.

I wasn’t persuaded. The conclusion was reached because the study’s design only engaged the subjects’ cerebrums with a video game task involving popping balloons. See Task performance and beliefs about task responses are solely cerebral exercises for a similar point.

If the researchers had instead designed a study that also engaged the subjects’ limbic system and lower brains, the findings may have been different.

Only one of the news articles covered this story with some accuracy, io9.com:

“Helfinstein (the lead researcher) doesn’t see any direct, practical applications of the research. After all, people don’t spend their lives in fMRI scanners, so it’s not as if we can tell when people are going to make a risky decision in their day-to-day activities.”

Compare that with the majority of the news coverage that hijacked the study’s findings to try to develop a politically correct meme:

“Many health-relevant risky decisions share this same structure, such as when deciding how many alcoholic beverages to drink before driving home or how much one can experiment with drugs or cigarettes before developing an addiction.”

The study found that “risk taking may be due, in part, to a failure of the control systems necessary to initiate a safe choice.” The brain areas were “primarily located in regions more active when preparing to avoid a risk than when preparing to engage in one.” These areas included the “bilateral parietal and motor regions, anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral insula, and bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex.”

Notice that just one of the studied brain areas (the anterior cingulate cortex) is part of the limbic system or lower brains, although the bilateral insula connects to the limbic system. Yet the limbic system and lower parts of the brain are most often the brain areas that drive real-world risky behaviors such as smoking, drug use, sexual risk taking, and unsafe driving.

A video game task of popping balloons that engaged the cerebrum was NOT informative to the cause-and-effect of the emotions and instincts and impulses from limbic system and lower brains that predominantly drive risky behavior.

Who may benefit from the misinterpretations and misdirections of the study’s findings? We can take clues from the five applicable NIH grants (UL1-DE019580, RL1MH083268, RL1MH083269, RL1DA024853, PL1MH083271) and the researchers’ statement:

“We were able to predict choice category successfully in 71.8% of cases.”

Anybody ever read Philip K. Dick?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/7/2470.full “Predicting risky choices from brain activity patterns”