Unconscious memories

What can cause memories that are accessible only when returning to the original brain state?

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This 2015 French rodent study found:

“Memories can be established and maintained without de novo protein synthesis and that experimental amnesia may not result from a disruption of memory consolidation/reconsolidation.

Posttraining/postreactivation treatments induce an internal state, which becomes encoded with the memory, and should be present at the time of testing to ensure a successful retrieval.

This integration concept includes most of the previous explanations of memory recovery after retrograde amnesia and critically challenges the traditional memory consolidation/reconsolidation hypothesis, providing a more dynamic and flexible view of memory.”

From Neuroskeptic’s analysis of the study:

“A different drug, lithium chloride, produces the same pattern of effects – it blocks ‘reconsolidation’, but this can be reversed by a second dose at the time of recall. However, lithium chloride is not an amnestic [a drug that blocks memory formation] – it doesn’t block protein synthesis. Rather, it causes nausea.

The implication of the lithium experiment is that any drug that causes an ‘internal state change’, even if it’s just nausea, can trigger state-dependent memory and behave just like an ‘amnestic’.”

As this study may apply to humans, a drug wouldn’t necessarily be required to “induce an internal state.” If the findings of studies such as Are 50 Shades of Grey behaviors learned in infancy? extend to humans, an emotional or physical experience may be sufficient to produce a state-dependent memory. For example, A study that provided evidence for basic principles of Primal Therapy found, albeit with rodents and use of a drug:

“Fear-inducing memories can be state dependent, meaning that they can best be retrieved if the brain states at encoding and retrieval are similar.”

Memories triggered while in a brain state reentered through an emotion or a physical reaction are experienced by Primal Therapy patients and observed by therapists every day. However, as mentioned in What scientific evidence can be offered for Primal Therapy’s capability to benefit people’s lives? there’s a difficulty in developing human evidence for such state-dependent emotional memories.

Standard procedures would use human subjects and control groups in a way that retrieved memories according to the researchers’ schedule and experimental parameters. In order for the retrieval of an emotional memory to be therapeutic, though, the methods of an experiential therapy such as Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy leave the timing of entering a triggering brain state up to the patient.

When a brain state protects a human emotional memory from being accessed, it probably wouldn’t be therapeutic to:

  • Force a return to that brain state, and thereby
  • Remove the memory’s protection, then
  • Retrieve and re-experience the memory

just for the sake of research.

The evidence for retrieving and re-experiencing a state-dependent memory lies mainly within the individual’s experiences.

A challenge is to find innovative ways to document human evidence for state-dependent emotional memories while ensuring a therapeutic process.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/33/11623 “Integration of New Information with Active Memory Accounts for Retrograde Amnesia: A Challenge to the Consolidation/Reconsolidation Hypothesis?”

A study that provided evidence for basic principles of Primal Therapy

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This 2015 Northwestern University rodent study found:

“Fear-inducing memories can be state dependent, meaning that they can best be retrieved if the brain states at encoding and retrieval are similar.

Memories formed in a particular mood, arousal or drug-induced state can best be retrieved when the brain is back in that state.

‘It’s difficult for therapists to help these patients,’ Radulovic said, ‘because the patients themselves can’t remember their traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms.’

The best way to access the memories in this system is to return the brain to the same state of consciousness as when the memory was encoded.”

The study demonstrated one method of activating neurobiological pathways with a drug to remove a hippocampal memory’s protection, which played a part in enabling subjects to relive their remembered experiences. This rodent study’s methods weren’t designed to therapeutically access similarly protected memories with humans.

From the Northwestern press release:

“There are two kinds of GABA [gamma-Aminobutyric acid] receptors. One kind, synaptic GABA receptors, works in tandem with glutamate receptors to balance the excitation of the brain in response to external events such as stress.

The other population, extra-synaptic GABA receptors, are independent agents.

If a traumatic event occurs when these extra-synaptic GABA receptors are activated, the memory of this event cannot be accessed unless these receptors are activated once again.

‘It’s an entirely different system even at the genetic and molecular level than the one that encodes normal memories,’ said lead study author Vladimir Jovasevic, who worked on the study when he was a postdoctoral fellow in Radulovic’s lab.

This different system is regulated by a small microRNA, miR-33, and may be the brain’s protective mechanism when an experience is overwhelmingly stressful.

The findings imply that in response to traumatic stress, some individuals, instead of activating the glutamate system to store memories, activate the extra-synaptic GABA system and form inaccessible traumatic memories.”

I’d point out that “can’t remember” and “inaccessible traumatic memories” phrases used above were in reference to what’s usually called “memory” i.e., a recall initiated by the cerebrum.

The study’s findings should inform memory-study researchers if they care to understand how emotional memories can be formed and re-experienced.

The study provided evidence for fundamentals of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, such as:

  • Experiences associated with pain can be remembered below our conscious awareness.
  • The retrieval and re-experiencing of emotional memories can engage our lower-level brain areas without our higher-level brain areas’ participation.

The obvious nature of this study’s straightforward experimental methods made me wonder why other researchers hadn’t used the same methods decades ago.

Use of this study’s methodology could have resulted in dozens of informative follow-on study variations by now, and subsequently found whether subjects’ physiological, behavioral, and epigenetic measurements differed from control group subjects, as in:

“miR-33 is downregulated in response to gaboxadol [the drug used to change subjects’ brain state] and modulates its effects on state-dependent fear.”

See Resiliency in stress responses for abstracts of three follow-on papers by these researchers.

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n9/full/nn.4084.html “GABAergic mechanisms regulated by miR-33 encode state-dependent fear”

MP3 with lead researcher Dr. Jelena Radulovic: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/specials/show/20150825/

Leaky gates, anxiety, and grocery store trips without buying list items

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An interview with Jeff Link, the editor of Dr. Arthur Janov’s 2011 book “Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” with Ken Rose:

“Even further confirmation for some of the views of Janov, that maybe weren’t widely accepted for a time, it’s new research now being done into memory and what a lot of scientist are seeing, a lot of different studies is that memory reactivates the same neuroimpulses that were initially firing off when the event happened.

So a traumatic event when you remember it, the act of remembering it is actually creating a neuromirror of what went on initially.

In a lot of ways that is what Primal Therapy is attempting to do; is to go back to that place and reconnect, or as it’s sometimes referred to, reconsolidate the brain state so that real healing can take place.”

Transcript (part 4 of 6): http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2015/09/ken-rose-on-life-before-birth-part-46.html

MP3: http://www.pantedmonkey.org/podcastgen/download.php?filename=2011-12-15_1300_what_now_jeff_link.mp3

A missed opportunity to study image-evoked emotional memories

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This 2015 Ohio human study found that the:

“Hippocampus integrates distinct experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories.”

The researchers ignored the hippocampus’ role in emotional memories, although studies such as Emotional memories and out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia have shown emotional involvement to be desirable in order to properly study the hippocampus with human subjects.

The researchers missed quite a few good opportunities to advance science. Consider these opportunities:

  • All subjects were instructed during fMRI scans (here’s a video of one subject) to:

    “Try to remember the event depicted in each picture and relive the experience in their mind while viewing the photo for eight seconds.”

    The photos were taken during each subject’s day-to-day life by a smartphone hung around their neck. Following these instructions created an ideal situation for engaging the subjects’ emotions when they successfully remembered and relived. Although the experiment probably engaged the subjects’ emotions;

  • None of the subjects were asked anything that would lead the researchers to discover WHY the subjects remembered! The researchers had a perfect setup to make even a bare-bones inquiry, or to ask the subjects to immediately rate the emotional impact of each remembered event/relived experience, or to have them identify what emotions were evoked. But the researchers didn’t use any emotional measures to help understand how and why events were remembered or not.
  • Wouldn’t it also have potentially helped the subjects to become somewhat aware of how they processed memories, of how they felt with each remembered event/relived experience? They probably wouldn’t have remembered personally unimportant events, or forgotten personally significant ones.

  • “One subject recalled all of the items presented” and another had “very few unrecalled items.”

    Why? Weren’t the researcher interested in what was potentially the same between these two and different from the other subjects?

The researchers instead focused on rodent studies with statements such as:

“Validating the relevance of decades of rodent studies for human memory.”

They lost track of the reason rodent studies exist: to help humans.

In order for the research to help humans, move forward on the evolutionary scale, not backward! A rat or mouse can’t define and describe the emotional impact of an image of their life that evokes a memory.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/35/11078.full “Human hippocampus represents space and time during retrieval of real-world memories”

Reflections on my four-year anniversary of spine surgery

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At age 55, I found out that I’d suffered for maybe 45 to 50 years from a childhood injury, and I didn’t know anything about it. It still seems unbelievable to me that I was physically ill for decades before I received a diagnosis.

As explained to me by two surgeons, the cause of my spondylolisthesis between L5 and S1 was a sudden injury sometime between ages 5 and 10. Here’s a further explanation:

“In children, spondylolisthesis usually occurs between the fifth bone in the lower back (lumbar vertebra) and the first bone in the sacrum (pelvis) area. It is often due to a birth defect in that area of the spine or sudden injury (acute trauma).

Other causes of spondylolisthesis include bone diseases, traumatic fractures, and stress fractures (commonly seen in gymnasts). Certain sport activities, such as gymnastics, weight lifting, and football, put a great deal of stress on the bones in the lower back. They also require that the athlete constantly overstretch (hyperextend) the spine.”

I played a lot of baseball when I was a kid growing up in Miami. I didn’t suffer from a birth defect or bone disease, play football before I was a teenager, do gymnastics, or lift weights.

I don’t remember a specific “sudden injury (acute trauma)” per the above explanation. Maybe I incurred the acute trauma that started my spondylolisthesis sliding into bases playing baseball. Maybe I incurred it playing in the other rough-and-tumble activities that I did as a boy.

Please stop at the first hint of any pain that you feel while reading the rest of this post. I don’t want to cause you pain.

I re-experienced while in Primal Therapy a day when I was seven or eight years old. A most exhilarating day, one that filled me with light and joy.

What brought on my elevated mood? It was the day I finally ran faster than my father did, and he couldn’t catch me to give me a beating as I ran out of the house.

My father never beat me on the sidewalk, the street, or the front yard anyway. That would make the abuse public.

My father’s job was assistant principal/dean of boys at West Miami Junior High School. He whipped boys with a thick belt or paddled them daily as part of his job requirements.

My father kept a wooden paddle with holes in it at home. For me.

I don’t remember that my three siblings ever received a paddling or belting, although they were spanked. I’ve remembered while in Primal Therapy that my younger sister and brother were spanked for crying.

I re-experienced the dread of waiting (in an exact place with visual details), waiting for my father to come home to administer a spanking or belting or paddling to me for some “transgression” my mother observed. She had dozens of rules of conduct for her children.

I re-experienced my early childhood feelings that my father’s punishments depended more on my mother’s mood than on what I did.

I re-experienced my early childhood feelings that I didn’t deserve the beatings. I didn’t deserve any beatings, not one!

My father continued, though, until I was around age 11 or so. I’m sure that the beatings were a factor in how I felt at age 12:

Suicidal. Needing to escape from my life.

When I was a child, I needed my parents’ love.

I re-experienced many times while in Primal Therapy the overwhelming hopelessness, helplessness, worthlessness, and betrayal when the people I needed to love me were cruel to me instead.

My parents knew what they did was wrong. Neither one of them ever told me that, though.

My father never apologized for beating me so much before he died 19 years ago. Even before he retired, 17 years before he died, the Miami-Dade County public school system stopped him and the rest of their employees from spanking, whipping, beating, and paddling children.

What could he even tell me to take away those experiences?

  • That he beat me as a child because he himself was beaten as a child?
  • That he couldn’t help it?
  • That how he and my mother frequently went out of their way to help me along in life after my childhood somehow made up for the beatings?

I’m certain that my father was beaten as a child. I bring this up not as a defense for what he did, but as part of my history, too.

It wasn’t enough for my father’s mother to beat me while she was babysitting my siblings and me at our parents’ house. I re-experienced crying as a five-year old when I was required to go cut off palm fronds from the tree in front of our house for her to use as a switch, and bring them to her.

It was a mark of my grandmother’s cruelty that she threatened to beat me with a broom handle when I tried to not participate in my own torment. I re-experienced exact places of my legs where she switched me with the palm fronds, giving me even more when I cried during the punishment.

These wounds left scars that haven’t gone away.

Run your hand down your spine until you reach the top of your sacrum. That’s the area on which I had surgery four years ago, where I now have a titanium cage, replacement disc, and two rods to keep the area stable.

I received a lot of beatings pretty close to that area. Maybe my boyhood activities didn’t cause the “sudden injury (acute trauma).”

I write frankly about my parents because that’s my history: the realities of who they were.

And the realities of who I needed them to be.

I express it because getting well has to address reality.

From Dr. Arthur Janov’s book, Primal Healing, page 133:

“Another cognitive technique is to help the patient understand and forgive his parents. ‘After all, your parents did the best they could. They had a pretty tough childhood too.’ ‘Oh yes, I understand. They did have it tough and I do forgive’ comes forth from the left side. Still, of course, the right side is crying out its needs and its pain, and will go on with its silent scream for the rest of our lives.

There is no way around need.

‘Forgiveness’ is an idea that has no place in therapy.

We are not here to pardon parents; we are here to address the needs of patients, and what the lack of fulfillment did to them.

I regret to say that much of current therapy and particularly cognitive therapy is about a moral position; well hidden, couched in psychological jargon, but, at bottom, moralizing. The therapist becomes the arbiter of correct behavior.

After all, the therapist is trying to change the patient’s behavior toward some preconceived goal. That goal has a sequestered moral position.”

Words are neither the problem nor the solution

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“Words are neither the problem nor the solution. They are the last evolutionary step in processing the feeling or sensation. They are the companions of feelings.

We cannot make progress on the third-line cognitive level alone. We can become aware of why we act the way we do but nothing changes biologically; it is like being aware of a virus and expecting the awareness alone to kill it. Our biology has been left out of the therapeutic equation.”

Janov’s Reflections on the Human Condition: On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 6/9).

One way our bodies remember our histories

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This 2015 California rodent study found:

“Potentially pathogenic memory cells in lymph nodes and redistribution throughout normal and inflamed skin may help explain the generalized worsening of psoriasis reported in patients undergoing localized skin treatment with imiquimod.”

The opening sentence was:

“An attribute of adaptive immunity is the generation of memory cells that mount enhanced responses after rechallenge.”

Of course an immune system remembers – that’s part of its function.

When the subject is memory, let’s not disregard the multiple ways that our bodies remember our histories.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/26/8046.full “Inflammation induces dermal Vγ4+ γδT17 memory-like cells that travel to distant skin and accelerate secondary IL-17–driven responses”

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

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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”

This post has somehow become a target for spammers, and I’ve disabled comments. Readers can comment on other posts and indicate that they want their comment to apply here, and I’ll re-enable comments.

Stress in early life can alter physiology and behavior across the entire lifespan

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I’ll quote a few sections of this 2014 summary of 111 studies concerning stress, including the authors’ research:

“The brain is the central organ of stress and adaptation to stressors because:

  • It not only perceives what is threatening or potentially threatening and initiates behavioral and physiological responses to those challenges,
  • But also is a target of the stressful experiences and the hormones and other mediators of the stress response.

The stress history of parents is a significant factor in the resilience of their offspring.

Environmental stress transduces its effects into lasting changes on physiology and behavior, which can vary even among genetically identical individuals.

Stress in early life can alter physiology and behavior across the entire lifespan.

Structural stress memory is even more apparent with regard to gene expression in stress-sensitive brain regions like the hippocampus.

Individual history is important and that there is a memory of stress history retained by neurons at the cellular level in regions like the hippocampus.

Stress has a number of known effects on epigenetic marks in the brain, producing alterations in DNA methylation and histone modifications in most of the stress-sensitive brain regions examined, including the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.”

It seemed to be taboo to note that most of – and the largest of – detrimental effects of stress occurred during womb-life in the mother’s environment. The authors instead opted for a politically correct “the stress history of parents” phrase.

Referenced studies had findings relevant to the earliest periods of life, including Figure 1:

interactions

“Those organs that show the highest levels of retrotransposon [a repeat element (mobile DNA sequences often involved in mutations) type formed by copy-and-paste mechanisms] activity, such as the brain and placenta, also seem to be both steroidogenic and steroid-sensitive.”

However, Figure 1 was given a beneficial context, and other studies’ findings weren’t mentioned in their contexts of detrimental effects on fetuses of mothers who were stressed while pregnant.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/22/6828.full “Stress and the dynamic genome: Steroids, epigenetics, and the transposome”

Chaos – not balance – and competition for resources are the natural order

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This 2015 Amsterdam/New Zealand/Cornell shore-life study found:

“Species abundances in natural ecosystems may never settle at a stable equilibrium.

Species in one of the world’s oldest marine reserves showed chaotic fluctuations for more than 20 years. The species replaced each other in cyclic order, yet the exact timing and abundances of the species were unpredictable.

Our findings provide a field demonstration of nonequilibrium coexistence of competing species through a cyclic succession at the edge of chaos.

Our findings show that natural ecosystems can sustain continued changes in species abundances.”

chaos

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6389.full “Species fluctuations sustained by a cyclic succession at the edge of chaos”

The University of Amsterdam also participated in a 2013 study Evolution of microbial markets where evolutionary biologists studied microbes. Their related findings included:

“Cooperative interactions between individuals of different species.

Strategies important for microbes to optimize their success in potential biological markets:

  • (i) avoid bad trading partners;
  • (ii) build local business ties;
  • (iii) diversify or specialize;
  • (iv) become indispensable;
  • (v) save for a rainy day; and
  • (vi) eliminate the competition.”

A 2015 study How a well-adapted immune system is organized (the *.pdf file is linked because the html has errors) had a related finding that applied to our body’s immune system. The researchers found that the primary reason why each of our immune systems is unique is due to the effect of:

“Competition between receptor clones..NOT a biologically implausible centralized mechanism distributing resources system-wide.

The repertoire of lymphocyte receptors in the adaptive immune system protects organisms from diverse pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections.

Competitive dynamics can allow the immune repertoire to self-organize into a state that confers high protection against infections.”

Chaos and competition for resources are facts of life observed within ourselves and in nature from ocean life down to the microbe level.

Why are we often presented – as a fact of life – that what’s natural is for all aspects of our lives to be in balance? Emotional, economic, social, intellectual – you name it, we’re told that the natural model is one of “stable equilibrium.”

Two hypotheses of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy are relevant:

Trying for closure, though, becomes an act-out – a temporary fulfillment of a substitute need. But the underlying need remains unsatisfied, and soon drives further act-outs. Balance is never achieved.

With this viewpoint, can you see how behavior like the following shows the internal state of the actor as they attempt to thwart the natural reality of the situation?

  • A person in authority who demands that people cease their competition for a resource and instead, accept what the authority figure determines is fair and balanced. An example is limiting supplies with price controls after a disaster.
  • A person who disrupts cooperative behavior that provides a solution for the cooperators’ needs/wants and instead, interposes themselves in a directed solution. An example is requiring licenses for cooperative childcare.
  • A person who insists that peoples’ responses to chaos to form an optimal adaptation cease, and instead, conform to some other responses. An example is prohibiting free movement after a disaster.

It reveals even more about the internal states of people that the above examples become codified. Children are taught that the natural and solely acceptable way to behave is in accordance with these unnatural solutions.

There are some signs that unnatural solutions in society can be reversed. For example, here is a 2013 article about a UK village that benefited from removing all of its traffic signals and reverting to the natural order of human cooperation and competition.

At the individual level, though, it’s up to each one of us to recognize and reverse our unnatural states. We and the people around us will be pleased when we and they are no longer adversely affected by our unconscious act-outs that are driven by our internal states. There’s enough natural chaos without adding more with act-outs.

Our internal systems will suffer damage, for example, when our unconscious act-out is to be busy, always doing something, and we can’t relax. Stress adversely affects our internal systems until we understand and reverse the driving unnatural states.

Agenda-driven research on emotional memories

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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”

Problematic research on suppressing unwanted memories

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Brain hemispheres, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory , , ,

This 2014 French/UK human study found:

“Motivated forgetting mechanisms, known to disrupt conscious retention, also reduce unconscious expressions of memory, pointing to a neurobiological model of this process.”

There were multiple problems with this study.

1. The researchers excluded emotional content, although the study involved areas of the brain involved in processing emotions:

roi

How could the study’s findings apply to:

“The distressing intrusions that accompany posttraumatic stress disorder“

when emotional memories were excluded? It was an unsupported assertion for one of the researchers to state:

“The better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this process arising from this study may help to better explain differences in how well people adapt to intrusive memories after a trauma.”

2. The term “unconscious” was used 27 times, including in the title, without defining it. The cited studies defined “unconscious” several meaningfully different ways. How could the findings achieve validity when they contained an undefined term?

3. The experiments involved short-term memories and visual perception, and the subjects took longer to visually perceive objects that they had been directed to suppress than those that they had been directed to think about. However, the researchers didn’t show that these experimental results could be extrapolated into findings about long-term unconscious memories.

4. Data manipulation:

  • The researchers noted:

    “We did not observe less hippocampal activation during no-think than think trials.”

  • This data didn’t fit what they wanted to find, so they:

    “Restricted the search volume to anatomically defined regions of interest.”

  • They still couldn’t make their predetermined finding, so they discarded:

    “An outlier which compromised the significance of this effect.”

The above process didn’t support the statement that immediately followed:

“Thus, suppression robustly engaged the brain regions associated with memory control, and this was accompanied by reduced activation in the hippocampus.”

Didn’t the reviewer have something to say about these four problem areas?

It was a letdown to read the details of the study when its title held out such promise for informing us about the unconscious influence of memories. Per the Scientific evidence page, it would really help a person as a first step to become somewhat aware of their unconscious memories and feelings, especially when these are expressed through behavior.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/E1310.full “Suppressing unwanted memories reduces their unconscious influence via targeted cortical inhibition”

A missed opportunity to study odor-evoked emotional memories

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory

The researchers of Can a study exclude the limbic system and adequately find how we process value? published another study. In this 2015 human study, subjects were monitored with fMRI scans while making choices on the identity and pleasantness of rewarding food odors.

I feel that the researchers missed quite a few good opportunities to advance science. Instead of making peripheral assessments of limbic system areas and citing numerous other studies, they could have included emotional content in their study and drawn their own conclusions.

Consider these opportunities:

  • Wouldn’t the odors used in the study such as chocolate cake and pizza and strawberry and potato chips – and other “comfort” foods – potentially be associated with emotional responses?
  • Don’t most humans have memories that include pleasant food odors?
  • Wouldn’t it have been informative to ask the subjects during fMRI scans to identify what emotions were evoked by the pleasant food odors?
  • Wouldn’t these resultant fMRI scans be expected to potentially show more strongly activated limbic system areas, given the hippocampus’ position as the seat of emotional memories?
  • Wouldn’t the additional emotional responses and memories and subsequent limbic system area activations potentially influence the subjects’ value judgments?

Instead, the researchers peripherally included limbic system areas in the study. The supplementary material included passages such as:

“Identity-specific value signals were found in not only the OFC, [orbitofrontal cortex] but also the ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] and hippocampus.”

Like the previous study, the current study’s focus was to provide evidence that areas of the cerebrum were in control when people made value judgments. The term “value” in the current study meant:

“the pleasantness of the odor.”

Like the previous study, areas of the limbic system weren’t addressed until the tail end of the supplementary material. The researchers cited other studies in an attempt to dismiss the role of the ACC in making value judgments, then said:

“Although we are unable to distinguish between these alternative explanations, our findings suggest that value-related signals in ACC—whether signed or unsigned—are specific to the identity of the expected outcome.”

Since the current study found that “identity” was encoded by cerebral areas, the above sentence was written to nudge the reader into inferring that the cerebrum dominated value judgments of “the pleasantness of the odor.”

The researchers similarly cited other studies in the last paragraph instead of specifically discussing how they studied the participation of the hippocampus part of the limbic system. They then speculated that the hippocampus’ contributions to value judgments in the current study were explained by the referenced studies:

“We speculate that the hippocampus is involved in retaining sensory-based information about specific rewards, which may be linked to value-based representations in OFC for later consolidation.”

Like the previous study, the researchers were begrudgingly diverted away from their focus on cerebral areas when they were forced to acknowledge the limbic system’s contributions to value judgments of “the pleasantness of the odor.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/16/5195.full “Identity-specific coding of future rewards in the human orbitofrontal cortex”

Why is it so difficult to live your own life?

gettingwell4 5+ stars Premium, Memory, Primal Therapy ,

This 2015 Princeton/German study of fish schooling behavior reminded me of one of the difficulties an individual has in living a life of their own choosing. The study showed that the way social animals have evolved makes the individual likely to do what the group does.

Before looking at some details of the study, I’ll point out a natural pro and con of an individual going along with the crowd. A major survival advantage is that a predator won’t find it as easy to single out an individual from the group.

A major survival disadvantage is that a group is easily manipulated into a fate that each individual wouldn’t experience on their own. Here’s one instance of such an event:
Alfred Jacob Miller “Hunting buffalo” 1837

The difference in this study as compared with other literature on the subject was that there were a lot of equations presented:

“We demonstrate that we can predict complex cascades of behavioral change at their moment of initiation, before they actually occur.

Establishing the hidden communication networks in large self-organized groups facilitates a quantitative understanding of behavioral contagion.”

Does this sound like it could apply to humans?

“We define susceptibility as the likelihood of a fish responding given that it observes the initiator.

An individual will be more likely to respond (is more susceptible) if it:

  • Is strongly connected to the initiator (short path length), and
  • Has neighbors which are strongly connected to each other.

Shortest paths represent most probable paths.”

This passage definitely applied to humans:

“Such waves of evasion can spread extensively or may rapidly die out, resulting in a broad distribution of cascade magnitudes (number of responding individuals), a property shared with other spreading processes [e.g., neural activity, human communication].

In contrast to analyses of social contagion for online social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, individuals’ proximity to the core of the network is not predictive of social influence.”

Schooling and herding behaviors are largely no longer needed for humans to survive in today’s world. However, these can be seen all day every day.

Why are such leftover behaviors still around? They are certainly misplaced from their original contexts.

The places and times in which these actions and reactions were relevant to survival have passed. They don’t make sense in other contexts in the present.

To lead to answers, purchase Dr. Arthur Janov’s 2011 book “Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” and read the passages listed in the index under the “survival” term. I’ll quote the beginning of a paragraph from page 52:

“What’s happening here is that the body, in the interest of survival, is continually reacting to imprinted memory..”

An individual may find it difficult to live a life of their own choosing due to external influences such as those presented in this study. There are also difficulties in living your own life that have other origins, as delineated by principles of Primal Therapy.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/4690.full “Revealing the hidden networks of interaction in mobile animal groups allows prediction of complex behavioral contagion”

Why do we cut short our decision-making process?

gettingwell4 5+ stars Premium, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Dopamine, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Serotonin , , ,

This 2014 Zurich study found that people adapt their goal-directed decision-making processes in certain ways.

First, the researchers found that the subjects usually acted as though the computational cost of evaluating all outcomes became too high once the process expanded to three or more levels. Their approach to a goal involved developing subgoals. For example, for a three-level goal:

“Level 3 was most frequently decomposed into a tree of depth 2 followed by a depth-1 tree.”

A level 3 tree had 24 potential outcomes (24 outcomes = 3*2x2x2) whereas a level 2 tree followed by a level 1 tree had 10 potential outcomes (10 outcomes = 2*2×2 + 1*2).

Second, the subjects memorized and reused subgoals after their initial formation. The researchers found that this practice didn’t produce results significantly different than the optimal solutions, but that could have been due to the study’s particular design. The design also ensured that the subjects’ use of subgoals wasn’t influenced by rewards.

Further:

“It is known that nonhuman primate choices, for instance, depend substantially on their own past choices, above and beyond the rewards associated with the decisions. Similar arguments have been made for human choices in a variety of tasks and settings and have been argued to be under dopaminergic and serotonergic control.”

Third, ALL 37 subjects were unwilling to evaluate decisions that had initial large losses, even if they could see that the path to reach the optimal solution went through this loss outcome! The researchers termed this behavior “pruning” and stated:

“Pruning is a Pavlovian and reflexive response to aversive outcomes.”

The lead author relied on a previous study he coauthored to elaborate on the third finding. One statement in the previous study was:

“This theory predicts excessive pruning to occur in subjects at risk for depression, and reduced pruning to occur during a depressive episode.”

The current study’s subjects were screened out for depressive conditions, though. They were somewhat conditioned by the study design, but not to the extent where their behavior could be characterized as Pavlovian responses.

Fourth, the subjects’ use of larger subgoals wasn’t correlated to their verbal IQ.

So, what can we make of this research?

  1. Are shortcuts to our decision processes strictly a cerebral exercise per the first and second findings?
  2. Do we recycle our decision shortcuts like our primate relatives, uninfluenced by current rewards?
  3. Or is it rewarding to just not fully evaluate all of our alternatives?
  4. Do all of us always back away from decisions involving an initial painful loss, even when we may see the possibility of gaining a better outcome by persevering through the loss?
  5. Is it true that we excessively cut decision processes too short – such that many of our decisions are suboptimal – when we’re on our way to becoming depressed?
  6. Are we overwhelmed when depressed such that we don’t summon up the effort to cut short or otherwise evaluate decisional input?

Let me know your point of view.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/10/3098.full “Interplay of approximate planning strategies”