Lower brain

Perpetuating the meme that rodent PTSD experiments necessarily apply to humans

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Neurochemicals, Stress

This 2015 Texas A&M rodent study found:

“Propranolol administration dampened the stress-induced impairment in extinction observed when extinction training is delivered shortly after fear conditioning.”

The researchers were way off base in extrapolating this study to humans:

“Propranolol may be a helpful adjunct to behavioral therapy for PTSD, particularly in patients who have recently experienced trauma.”

Would National Institutes of Health Grant R01MH065961 money have been available without perpetuating the meme that rodent PTSD experiments necessarily apply to humans? Or are a priori findings necessary in order to get research funded?

In rodent studies such as this one, the origins of both the disease and the “cure” are all exerted externally. But humans aren’t lab rats. We can perform effective therapy that doesn’t involve some outside action being done to us.

Studies such as Fear extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses make clear that extinction is equivalent to suppression. “Behavioral therapy for PTSD” that suppresses symptoms can’t be a “cure” for humans since the original causes for the symptoms aren’t treated.

Even if this study’s recommendation to administer a drug applied to humans, neither drugs nor “behavioral therapy for PTSD” address the underlying causes.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/E3729.full “Noradrenergic blockade stabilizes prefrontal activity and enables fear extinction under stress”

Unconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on our brain function and behavior

gettingwell4 5+ stars Premium, Brain development, Cerebrum, Epigenetics, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Primal Therapy , , , , ,

This 2015 Swedish human study, performed at the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, found:

“Pain responses can be shaped by learning that takes place outside conscious awareness.”

Images of neutral male faces were used as conditioning stimuli which the subjects were trained to associate with levels of pain.

The concluding sentence of the study:

“Our results demonstrate that conscious awareness of conditioned stimuli is not required during either acquisition or activation of conditioned analgesic and hyperalgesic responses, and that low levels of the brain’s hierarchical organization are susceptible for learning that affects higher-order cognitive processes.”

From the study’s abstract:

“Our results support the notion that nonconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on human brain function and behavior and may affect learning of complex cognitive processes such as psychologically mediated analgesic and hyperalgesic responses.”

Principles of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy related to this study’s findings are:

  • Experiences associated with pain can be remembered below our conscious awareness.
  • Unconscious memories associated with pain, when activated, have varying forms of expression as they pass up through our levels of consciousness.
  • These memories, when activated, have effects on our feelings, thinking, health, brain functioning, and behavior that are usually below our conscious awareness.

I’ll use one of Dr. Janov’s 2011 blog posts, On Being Alone, to show an example of how the study’s findings of:

  • “Conscious awareness of conditioned stimuli is not required during either acquisition or activation of conditioned..responses” and
  • “Nonconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on human brain function and behavior”

are seen through the lens of Primal Therapy:

Unconscious memories associated with the pain of being left alone may be stored, especially in the developing brain, in our lower brain areas below conscious awareness: “Pain of being left alone a lot in childhood and infancy, added to the ultimate aloneness right after birth when no one was there for the newborn. That imprints a primal terror where a naïve, innocent and vulnerable baby has no one to lean on, to be held by, to snuggle up to, to be comforted. To be loved.”
As we develop, the cumulative memories associated with the pain of being left alone, when activated, may affect our feelings, thoughts, and behavior: “And that also has multiple meanings: no one wants me; there is no one there for me: no one wants to be with me; I have no love and no one who cares. One races to phone others so as not to feel alone. One runs from the feeling and struggles mightily not to be alone. Or, depending on earlier events one stays alone out of that same feeling. These are by and large the depressives.”
Although memories associated with the pain of being left alone may be formed in our early lives, they remain decades later, and can be activated below our conscious awareness: “When something in the present occurs which is similar to an old feeling “I am all alone and no one wants me,” the old feelings are triggered off..and the whole feeling rises toward conscious/awareness where it must be combated. Either the person wallows in the feeling and is overwhelmed by it even when she doesn’t even know what “it” is. Or the compounded feeling drives the act-out, forcing the person into some kind of social contact.”

A PNAS commentary on the study stated:

“Pain, analgesia, and hyperalgesia represent higher-order cognitive functions.”

and attempted to draw conclusions from this reasoning.

The commentator was incorrect regarding pain. I didn’t see where this study showed or even postulated that pain was always a higher-order cognitive function. In fact, the researchers cited a sea slug study and stated:

“It would not be surprising if vestiges of simpler nonconscious processes would also be operative under some conditions.”

Maybe it would have provided clarifications if the researchers specifically defined “low” and “higher” used throughout the study in statements such as the closing sentence:

“Low levels of the brain’s hierarchical organization are susceptible for learning that affects higher-order cognitive processes.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/25/7863.full “Classical conditioning of analgesic and hyperalgesic pain responses without conscious awareness”

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An inhibitory gene that affects alcohol binge behavior

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Dopamine, Limbic system, Lower brain, Neurochemicals, Thalamus , , ,

This 2015 La Jolla rodent study found that an inhibitory gene affected alcohol binging behavior:

“Our study reveals the behavioral impact of this cellular effect, whereby the level of GIRK3 [the gene] expression in the VTA [ventral tegmental area] tunes ethanol intake under binge-type conditions: the more GIRK3, the less ethanol drinking.”

GIRK3-silenced mice still binged, though, and got alcohol’s rewarding effects through dopamine’s other neural pathways.

High concentrations of the gene were found in the thalamus part of the limbic system of wild-type mice, the control group. Per the study’s title, this gene presumably contributes to the thalamus’ overall function of gating information from limbic system and lower brain areas to reach the cerebrum and vice versa.

And the potential causes for reduced GIRK3 expression are..?? Hopefully – someday – researchers will be focused on finding causes for abnormal gene expression rather than being content to just study effects of abnormal gene expression. Until then, the usual practice of considering only the effects led these researchers to:

“Believe that a compound selectively targeting GIRK3-containing channels may hold promise for reducing alcohol consumption in heavy binge drinkers.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/22/7091.full “GIRK3 gates activation of the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway by ethanol”

Running a marathon, cortisol, depression, causes, effects, and agendas

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Neurochemicals, Stress , ,

Let’s imagine that you decide you want to run a marathon. You haven’t run in six months, and you know you’ll have to train.

On the first day of training, as you run your first mile a friend pops out of nowhere and says, “You’re sweating! That means you’re going up to Mile 14 today! Good job, you’re on your way!”

You may appreciate the encouragement, but would a friend’s assessment have anything to do with your physical reality? Before you’ve run one mile, can an observer of your sweat say with certainty that you’ll run 14 miles on your first day of training?

Yeah. That’s how I felt when reading this 2014 UK study that found:

“Adolescent boys who have high levels of stress hormone ‘cortisol’ along with some symptoms of depression are at a 14 times higher risk of the condition than their peers.”

The researchers latched onto teenagers (12-16 years old, mean 13.7) to assess a psychiatric condition. They stated that a physical effect as common as visible sweat was a biomarker that predicted where some of the teenagers were going with their lives.

The study’s only physical measurements were cortisol from saliva samples at 8:00 a.m. on four consecutive days, then repeated a year later. For comparison, a standard lab test is to measure cortisol from saliva taken four times in one day at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m.

Cortisol is an effect of multiple potential causes, including stress, which itself is often an effect of multiple potential causes. One common cause of stress and its cortisol byproduct is diet, for example, when a person consumes caffeine.

“Mean time between waking and morning-cortisol collection was 50 min.”

I found it hard to believe that teenagers who:

  • woke up at 7:10 a.m.,
  • gulped down who knows what for breakfast,
  • got ready for, and then
  • went to school for an 8:00 a.m. cortisol test

wouldn’t have relatively “elevated morning cortisol” from the resultant stress.

Subjects self-reported depressive symptoms via a 33-item questionnaire initially and again every four months. They were interviewed for psychiatric diagnoses.

The largest separator used for stratification within subjects was an autobiographic memory test. Without this test, the study wouldn’t have made its main finding, so let’s look at the test’s details:

“Anxious and depressed adolescent patients report significantly elevated levels of over-general categoric memories compared with well controls. Six positive and six negative words are presented on flashcards in pseudorandom order, and participants are instructed to recall a particular memory of an event in their life after each word. Sixty seconds were allowed for each response.

Responses were categorized as specific if they referred to an event with a specific time and place, lasting no longer than 1 d[ay]. Responses were considered overgeneral if they formed a general class of repeated events.”

We can see that the autobiographical memory test only considered the subjects’ verbal expressions – within a short time period – of their recalls of emotionally triggered memories. As informed by the principles described in Agenda-driven research on emotional memories, the recall of an emotional memory is a product of the cerebrum responding to input from limbic system and lower brain areas. When someone describes their recall of an emotionally triggered memory, it’s yet another level further removed from the brain areas that store emotional memories.

We can also see that test scores of the subjects’ verbal expressions aren’t capable of providing any etiologic evidence for an effect of high cortisol. A correlation is the best that could ever be shown by an autobiographic memory test. Again, the study’s main finding hinged on this third-order observational method of trying to figure out what’s going on inside subjects’ brains.

The researchers developed a control group, and made only a token attempt to trace the control group teenagers’ histories:

“The primary caregiver was interviewed about the quality of the family environment in three epochs (0–5, 6–11, and 12–14 y of age).

Four classes were found: optimal class, aberrant parenting, discordant, and hazardous.”

Were we supposed to believe that any primary caregiver would tell the truth about anything in a teenager’s history that indicated they had damaged their child? Good luck with that.

Anyway, the researchers didn’t act as though teenagers’ histories had any significant relationships with any present or future conditions. Their ahistoric biases showed by subsequently processing the entire history of each of the control group teenagers into a 1 or a 0 for the model.

The researchers then modeled this binary assessment to be relevant to the study’s main subjects!

The researchers’ agenda led to predetermined findings. Was the reviewer onboard with this agenda?

  • By disregarding the main subjects’ histories, it couldn’t provide etiologic evidence for any present or future effects.
  • By measuring only early morning cortisol, are we surprised that model numbers could be processed into some correlation?
  • Comparing this sole measurement to 325 measurements taken of subjects in Assessing a mountain climber’s condition without noticing their empty backpack made me wonder about the study designers’ real intentions.

News coverage of the study jumped on its flimsy finding to demand that something must be done. What did researchers offer teenagers who needed help?

  • After citing research that:

    “Showed null effects for two active treatments [cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and attentional training, respectively]”

    they recommended some unspecific:

    “New models of public mental health education and intervention in the youth population.”

  • After citing research that found:

    “Current diagnostic classifications [e.g., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)] have proved to have low diagnostic validity for investigations on the etiology, prevention, or treatment of MD [major depression]“

    the study relied on these diagnoses anyway, and then disclaimed:

    “It may also be the case that current classifications, as used in this study, such as DSM and ICD are simply not optimally specified.”

They didn’t make their case that “elevated morning cortisol” effect was an adequate biomarker for teenagers who needed help. They did a disservice to their subjects by neither investigating nor providing any etiologic evidence for observed effects.

Who really benefited from this underlying agenda? I didn’t see that it was teenagers who may have actually needed assistance.

Did the study’s funders know that these efforts had enormous lacks? And what did:

“New models of public mental health education and intervention in the youth population”

really mean?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3638.full “Elevated morning cortisol is a stratified population-level biomarker for major depression in boys only with high depressive symptoms”

The thalamus part of the limbic system has a critical period for connections

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Anterior cingulate cortex, Brain development, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Primal Therapy, Thalamus , , ,

This highly-jargoned 2015 UK study found that connections made by the thalamus of the developing human fetus had a critical period of the last trimester of womb-life. Babies born before the 33rd week of gestation experienced thalamic disconnections compared with normal-term babies and adults. The disconnections increased with a shorter womb-life.

The thalamus of premature babies also developed stronger connections with areas of the face, lips, tongue, jaw, and throat. They presumably needed these connections for survival actions such as breathing and feeding that aren’t a part of the last trimester of womb-life.

The study confirmed that the structures of thalamic connections of normal-term babies were very similar to those of adults. The study added to the research that shows that human limbic systems and lower brains closely approximate their lifelong functionalities at the normal time of birth.

It was difficult to measure the thalamus at this stage of life with current technology, and the researchers had to discard over two-thirds of their results. The researchers recommended monitoring these premature babies for difficulties in later childhood that may be caused by their early-life experiences.

Why would this monitoring recommendation apply to just the study’s subjects? We know from other studies that a main purpose of thalamic connections is to actively control and gate information to and from the cerebrum.

Would it make sense for a medical professional to disregard any patient’s birth history if they had problems in their brain’s gating functions or connectivity?

One researcher said:

“The ability of modern science to image the connections in the brain would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but we are now able to observe brain development in babies as they grow, and this is likely to produce remarkable benefits for medicine.”

This study’s results provided evidence for a principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy: the bases for disconnection from aspects of oneself are often set down during gestation. The “remarkable benefits for medicine” are more likely to be along the lines of what I describe in my Scientific evidence page.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6485.full “Specialization and integration of functional thalamocortical connectivity in the human infant”

Agenda-driven research on emotional memories

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Primal Therapy , , ,

I curated this 2013 study because one of the authors has made a career out of denying that people accurately remember and re-experience emotional memories. I’ll show how this viewpoint created problems with the study.

For background, one relevant hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that there are differences in the levels of consciousness of: (1) an emotional memory; (2) the recall of an emotional memory; and (3) a verbal description of the recall of an emotional memory.

  1. The retrieval and re-experiencing of an emotional memory can engage our lower-level brain areas without our higher-level brain areas’ participation.
  2. The recall of 1 above is a product of our cerebrum in response to input from limbic system and lower brain areas.
  3. The verbal description of 2 above is a product of our brain’s language areas in response to input from the cerebral areas that recalled the emotional memory.

Clinical principles of Primal Therapy that follow are:

  • A patient won’t re-experience an emotional memory when they only just recall it.
  • It’s another level of consciousness even further removed from an emotional memory when someone describes their recall of the memory.

The researchers asserted that they studied emotional memories in one part of this study. Their method was to ask the subjects to recall and verbally describe the emotions they felt the week after 9/11/2001.

The researchers introduced factors to try to confuse the subjects about their recall of their emotions, and their verbal descriptions of their recall. The researchers were very sure that confusing the subjects’ cerebral recalls and descriptions produced evidence that the subjects’ emotional memories were changed and falsified.

Can you see how far removed the researchers were from studying emotional memories? They didn’t demonstrate that they understood how emotional memories were stored because they didn’t attempt to engage the subjects’ limbic system and lower brain areas.

Let’s illustrate the study’s inappropriate characterizations with an example. I burned my left index fingertip last week while toasting bread on an infrared oven grill. The pain is still stored with my emotional memory, and is probably why my memory is very clear.

I can recall the visual details of the grill, how my fingertip looked, the pain I initially felt, and the relief I felt when I held my finger under running cold water. I can retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory in a calm environment such as lying in bed with no aural or visual distractions.

Let’s imagine that the researchers analogously studied my burned fingertip accident. They would deny that I can accurately retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory of the accident if they could create problems with my verbal descriptions of my recall. For example, if I initially said that I pushed the kitchen faucet handle all the way in the cold direction, then after repeated questioning, I said that I wasn’t sure that the handle was pushed all the way over to Cold.

The researchers intentionally conflated the falsifiability of emotional memories with a strawman definition of false emotional memories.

They purposely misidentified both:

  • The subjects’ recalls of post-9/11 emotions; and
  • The subjects’ descriptions of their recalls

as emotional memories.

The study was designed to be lawyering, not science. The researchers DETRACTED from science.

Maybe their purposeful error could be overlooked if it was confined to this study. But it isn’t.

Imagine the damage this viewpoint creates when mental health professionals deny the reality of their patients’ feelings, experiences, and emotional memories!

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20947.full “False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals”

Who benefits when research promotes a meme of self-sacrifice?

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

The main purpose of this 2014 Illinois human study was to make findings directed toward high school students that:

“Well-being may depend on attending to higher values related to family, culture, and morality, rather than to immediate, selfish pleasure.”

The study’s messages to young people and to those who control young people were:

  • You have to give up trying to live your own life if you want to be happy.
  • For your own “well-being” just follow the “higher values” where other people tell you what to do and think.
  • Other people know how you should live your life better than you do. Science says so.

The researchers embedded many assertions into the study, most of which weren’t supported by the study’s data. The researchers’ main assertion was:

“Optimal well-being may be achieved through eudaimonic activities.”

The researchers repeated this assertion multiple times in multiple ways, such as citing philosophy and other research. The short version of the term “eudaimonic” was defined as: “Meaning and purpose, a life well-lived.”

The study’s ONLY measurement of “eudaimonic” activities was the subjects’

“Neural activation when making a donation to the family that involves self-sacrifice.”

The study’s main finding involving this SOLE measurement was:

“Eudaimonic decisions predicted longitudinal declines in depressive symptoms.”

Depressive symptoms were determined by “a self-report measure” where the subjects, 47 adolescents aged 15-17:

  • “Completed the internalizing symptoms subscale of the Youth Self-Report form of the Child Behavior Checklist
  • Underwent a brain scan during which they completed a family donation task and a risk-taking task.”

39 of the subjects returned one year later to reanswer the checklist.

I wonder what bases the reviewer used to approve the researchers’ methods.

1. In the study’s verbiage the researchers extrapolated the significance of the sole measurement of eudaimonic activities – the initial fMRI scan – many times past what it actually measured. One-time measurements of the blood flow in the ventral striatum of a few Los Angeles teenagers can’t validly be assigned as the bases for all of what the researchers went on and on about to glorify “prosocial eudaimonic decisions.”

2. No method checked the subjects’ personal impact of the experiments’ monetary rewards and donations. The subjects didn’t scale their personal relative importance of the monetary rewards and donations.

Consider the relative importance of a dime for a kid whose parents gave them a BMW to drive to high school. Compare that with a kid who searched the sidewalk for dropped coins as they walked to high school.

Absent subjective scaling, the monetary rewards and donations data couldn’t be used as the basis to produce informative results.

3. The balloon test used in this study to measure “risky hedonic decisions” was the same as in the Who benefits when research with no practical application becomes a politically correct meme? study. The same objection applies here: a video game task of popping balloons that engages the cerebrum was NOT informative to the cause-and-effect of the emotions and instincts and impulses from limbic system and lower brain areas that predominantly drive risky behavior.

Scientific justification for memes like the self-sacrifice promoted by this study helps rush people past what really happened in their lives. A popular cultural meme is to “live in the present” and purposefully overlook how we arrived at our present lives.

I wonder how we would evaluate the “higher values related to family, culture, and morality” if we felt and honestly understood our real history.

Do you feel that young people benefit when they sacrifice their lives in the name of “family, culture, and morality?” Who benefits when people don’t pause to reflect on how their history impacts what’s going on now with their lives?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6600.full “Neural sensitivity to eudaimonic and hedonic rewards differentially predict adolescent depressive symptoms over time”

A study of visual perception that didn’t inform us about human conscious awareness

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

This 2015 Vanderbilt study with a Princeton reviewer stated that they found “compelling evidence” related to:

“How the brain begets conscious awareness.

Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human experience.”

Let’s begin with the “conscious” part of the study’s conscious awareness goal. A summary article of 105 studies entitled Evolution of consciousness: Phylogeny, ontogeny, and emergence from general anesthesia that I curated found:

“The core of human consciousness appears to be associated primarily with phylogenetically ancient structures mediating arousal and activated by primitive emotions.”

The current study ignored the evolutionary bases of human consciousness and didn’t include any limbic system and lower brain areas. The researchers’ biases were further indicated by the statement from their press release:

“Focal theories contend there are specific areas of the brain that are critical for generating consciousness, while global theories argue consciousness arises from large-scale brain changes in activity.”

The researchers were in the “global” camp of this unnecessary divide.

Let’s next examine the “awareness” part of the study’s conscious awareness goal. The subjects were 24 students in a visual perception experiment that used fMRI. The visual events that were perceived went into the “aware” bucket and the others into the “unaware” bucket.

The study’s subject selection criteria and experiment seemed a little odd for developing “compelling evidence” related to “how the brain begets conscious awareness.” By equating visual perception with awareness, the researchers excluded the contributions of other senses and methods of awareness.

Would it follow from the study’s methodology that blind people can’t be consciously aware?

The supplementary material showed that 7 of the 24 subjects’ results for one experimental condition, and 12 – half – of the subjects’ results for another condition were excluded because they apparently had problems reporting confidence in their visual perception. I wonder why the reviewer agreed that it was appropriate to discard half of the subjects’ experimental results?

Whatever else it was that the study found, the researchers didn’t reach their goal of developing “compelling evidence” related to “how the brain begets conscious awareness.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3799.full “Breakdown of the brain’s functional network modularity with awareness”

A study on online cooperation with limited findings

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

This 2015 Cambridge/Oxford study found:

“Global reputational knowledge is crucial to sustaining a high level of cooperation and welfare.”

Basically, the subjects learned how to “game” a cooperative online game, and the researchers drew up their findings.

To me, the study demonstrated part of the findings of the Reciprocity behaviors differ as to whether we seek cerebral vs. limbic system rewards study, the part where the cerebrum was active in:

“Reputation-based reciprocity, in which they help others with good reputations to gain good reputations themselves.”

The current study ignored how people’s limbic system and lower brain areas may have motivated them to cooperate.

I didn’t see how excluding people’s emotional involvement when cooperating with others improved the potential reach of this study’s findings. Doesn’t a person’s willingness to cooperate in person and in online activities usually also include their emotional motivations?

The findings can’t be applied generally to cooperative motivations and behaviors that the researchers intentionally left out of the study. The study’s findings applied just to the artificial environment of their experiment, and didn’t provide evidence for how:

“Cooperative behavior is fundamental for a society to thrive.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3647.full “The effects of reputational and social knowledge on cooperation”

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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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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.”

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”