Unconscious memories

Do the impacts of early experiences of hunger affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings today?

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This 2015 worldwide human study Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects found that people’s current degree of hungriness affected their propensity to acquire nonfood items.

The researchers admitted that they didn’t demonstrate cause and effect with the five experiments they performed, although the findings had merit. News articles poked good-natured fun at the findings with headlines such as “Why Hungry People Want More Binder Clips.”

The research caught my eye with these statements:

“Hunger’s influence extends beyond food consumption to the acquisition of nonfood items that cannot satisfy the underlying need.

We conclude that a basic biologically based motivation can affect substantively unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.”

The concept of the quotes relates to a principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy – symbolic satisfaction of needs.

I stated two fundamentals of Primal Therapy in An agenda-driven study on beliefs, smoking and addiction that found nothing of substance:

  1. The physiological impacts of our early unmet needs drive our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
  2. The painful impacts of our unfulfilled needs impel us to be constantly vigilant for some way to fulfill them.

Corollary principles of Primal Therapy are:

  • Our present efforts to fulfill our early unmet needs will seldom be satisfying. It’s too late.
  • We acquire substitutes now for what we really needed back then.
  • Acquiring these symbols of our early unmet needs may, at best, temporarily satisfy derivative needs.

But the symbolic satisfaction of derived needs – the symptoms – never resolves the impacts of early unfulfilled needs – the motivating causes:

  • We repeat the acquisition behavior, and get caught in a circle of acting out our feelings and impulses driven by these conditions.
  • The unconscious act-outs become sources of misery both to us and to the people around us.

In his book “Primal Healing” Dr. Arthur Janov gives two examples of critical periods only during which early needs can be satisfied:

  1. Being touched in the first months of life is crucial to a child’s development. The lack of close contact after the age of 5 wouldn’t have the same effect.
  2. Conversely, the need for praise at 6 months of age may not be essential, but it’s crucial for children at age 5.

As this study’s finding showed, there’s every reason for us to want researchers to provide a factual blueprint of causes for our hunger sensation effects, such as “unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.”

Why not start with hunger research? Objectives of the research should include answering:

  • What enduring physiological changes occurred as a result of past hunger?
  • How do these changes affect the subjects’ present behaviors, thoughts, and feelings?

Hunger research that would likely provide causal evidence for the effect of why people acquire “items that cannot satisfy the underlying need” should include studying where to start the timelines for the impacts of hunger. The impacts would potentially go back at least to infancy when we were completely dependent on our caregivers.

Infants can’t get up to go to the refrigerator to satisfy their hunger. All a hungry infant can do is call attention to their need, and feel pain from the deprivation of their need.

Is infancy far back enough, though, to understand the beginnings of potential impacts of hunger? The Non-PC alert: Treating the mother’s obesity symptoms positively affects the post-surgery offspring study referenced an older study of how the hunger of mothers-to-be had lifelong ill effects for the fetuses they carried during the Dutch hunger winter of 1944. The exposed children had epigenetic DNA changes from their mothers’ starvation, which resulted in relative obesity compared with their unexposed siblings.

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

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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”

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.

Dr. Arthur Janov Book Expo America 2008 Interview

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“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

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“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.”

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

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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”

If rodent training had beneficial epigenetic effects, how can the next step be human gene therapy?

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This 2014 rodent study detailed significant and lasting epigenetic DNA methylation in the hippocampus part of the limbic system as a result of fear-extinction training.

The researchers missed the boat when explaining in interviews how their research could apply to humans. What I understood from the interviews was that the researchers were focused on targeting human genes with some outside action.

Recommending human gene therapy smelled like an agenda. If these epigenetic modifications were induced by training in rodents, wouldn’t the next step be research into reversal training or therapeutic activity for humans?

The researchers also found:

“Importantly, these effects were specific to extinction training and did not occur in mice that had been fear conditioned, followed by a single reactivation trial, therefore arguing against the possibility that such epigenetic modifications are nonspecifically induced by the retrieval or reconsolidation of the original fear memory.”

This was fine for rodent studies where the origins of both the disease and the cure were all exerted externally. I didn’t see that it necessarily applied to humans.

After all, we’re not lab rats. We can perform effective therapy that doesn’t involve some outside action being done to us.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/7120.full “Neocortical Tet3-mediated accumulation of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine promotes rapid behavioral adaptation”

What happens next after a detox program predictably fails?

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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”

If research provides evidence for the causes of stress-related disorders, why only focus on treating the symptoms?

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This 2014 rodent research reliably induced many disorders common to humans. Here are some post-birth problems the researchers caused, primarily by applying different types of stress, as detailed in the study’s supplementary material:

Yet the researchers’ goal was to identify a brain receptor for:

“Novel therapeutic targets for stress-related disorders.”

In other words, develop new drugs to treat the symptoms.

Where are the studies that have goals to prevent these common problems being caused in humans by humans?

Where is the research on treatments to reverse the enduring physiological impacts to stress by treating the causes?

What do you think of this excerpt?

“Accumulating evidence suggests that traumatic events particularly during early life (e.g., parental loss or neglect) coupled with genetic factors are important risk factors for the development of depression and anxiety disorders.

Moreover, the brain is particularly vulnerable to the effects of stress during this period.

Maternal separation in rodents is a useful model of early-life stress that results in enduring physiological and behavioral changes that persist into adulthood, including increased hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA)–axis sensitivity, increased anxiety, and visceral hypersensitivity.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15232.full “GABAB(1) receptor subunit isoforms differentially regulate stress resilience”

Are stress-induced epigenetic changes to DNA inherited across generations?

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This 2014 Geneva/Cambridge plant study ended by stating:

“The unequivocal demonstration of transgenerational transmission of environmentally-induced epigenetic traits remains a significant challenge.

One of the critical activities erasing stress memories is conserved between plants and mammals.”

However, the researchers didn’t demonstrate that their findings were broadly applicable for mammals or organisms other than the specific plant variety they studied. Possible reasons for these limited findings were given in a 2015 Australian study referenced by Mechanisms of stress memories in plants:

“The majority of DNA methylation analyses performed in plants to date have focused on Arabidopsis, despite being relatively depleted of TEs [transposable elements] (15–20% of the genome) and being poorly methylated compared to other plant genomes.

These studies have lacked the resolution to provide the specific context and genomic location of the changes in DNA methylation.”

There are also significant differences in how epigenetic inheritance across generations may operate among different species per Epigenetic reprogramming in plant and animal development.

Neither the current study nor the above review addressed the behavioral aspect of stress-induced epigenetic inheritance across generations. For example, the behavior of a mother whose DNA was epigenetically changed by stress can induce the same epigenetic changes to her child’s DNA when her child is stressed per One way that mothers cause fear and emotional trauma in their infants:

“Our results provide clues to understanding transmission of specific fears across generations and its dependence upon maternal induction of pups’ stress response paired with the cue to induce amygdala-dependent learning plasticity.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8547.full “Identification of genes preventing transgenerational transmission of stress-induced epigenetic states”

We pay attention to the present through the windows of perception that we’ve developed from our past

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My paraphrase of the 2013 study’s findings:

  • We pay attention to the present through the windows of perception that we’ve developed from our past;
  • The rest of the world is blocked by our consciousness’ perceptual thresholds.

It was good to read an attention study that didn’t zap the subjects’ brains.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/4/E417.full “Prestimulus oscillatory power and connectivity patterns predispose conscious somatosensory perception”

Problematic research: If you don’t feel empathy for a patient, is the solution to fake it?

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If you don’t experience empathy for another person, this 2014 Harvard study showed how to use your cerebrum to manipulate your limbic system into displaying a proxy of empathy.

Is this what we want from our human interactions? To have a way to produce an emotion the same way that an actor would as they read their lines?

How to finesse the effect of “no empathy” was the focus. Because these researchers didn’t define a lack of genuine empathy as a symptom of a fundamental problem, they absolved themselves from investigating any underlying causes.

Nice trick in the academic world.

In the real world, in which we are feeling human beings, what may be a cause of no empathy?

Let’s say that someone is in a position that helps people. They have daily encounters where they may be expected to be empathetic, but they seldom have these feelings for others.

One hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is this condition’s origin may be that in the past, a person needed help as a matter of survival, and they weren’t helped. Their unconscious memories of being helpless impel them to act out being helpful in their current life.

This person’s frequent reaction to any hint in the present of the agony of not receiving help back when they desperately needed it is to act out what they needed to have done back then. Helping others also gives them momentary distraction from such painful memories, but any relief is transitory. So they repeat the process.

Let’s say that unconscious needs pressed them into making a career choice of actively helping people. They’re usually too caught up in their own thoughts and feelings and behavior, though, to sense feelings of the people they’re helping.

Something isn’t right, but what’s the problem? They see indicators such as: their actions that should feel fulfilling aren’t fulfilling, they seldom feel empathy, and so on.

Primal Therapy allows patients to therapeutically address origins of such conditions. A symptom such as lack of empathy for others will resolve as historical pains are ameliorated.

Or we can do as this study suggested: produce an inauthentic display – and thereby ignore the lack of empathy as a symptom – and never address causes of no empathy.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4415.full “Episodic simulation and episodic memory can increase intentions to help others”

Our early experiences are maintained and unconsciously influence us for years, if not indefinitely

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This 2014 Montreal study provided more evidence of critical periods during human development:

“Clearly illustrates that early acquired information is maintained in the brain and that early experiences unconsciously influence neural processing for years, if not indefinitely.

We show that internationally adopted children (aged 9–17 years) from China, exposed exclusively to French since adoption (mean age of adoption, 12.8 mo), maintained neural representations of their birth language despite functionally losing that language and having no conscious recollection of it.

We show that neural representations are not overwritten and suggest a special status for language input obtained during the first year of development.”

YES! GIVE US MORE STUDIES LIKE THIS ONE!

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17314.full “Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language”

Thalamus gating and control of the limbic system and cerebrum is a form of memory

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This 2014 German rodent study showed how the thalamus actively controlled and gated information to and from the cerebrum.

The researchers elaborated in news coverage on how thalamic control and gating represented a form of memory:

“Q. When asked if, given that

  1. Sensory signals en route to the cortex undergo profound signal transformations in the thalamus,
  2. A key thalamic transformation is sensory adaptation in which neural output adjusts to statistics and dynamics of past stimuli, and
  3. The thalamus, hypothalamus and hippocampus being part of the limbic system, might memory reconsolidation play a role in the cortico-thalamic pathway?

A. “It’s conceivable that the cortico-thalamic pathway is subject to long term plasticity,” Groh conjectures. “In fact, on a synaptic level, these inputs can change their strength and retain adjusted strengths for long periods. This process represents another – albeit much slower – form of adaptation which some interpret as memory.”

Q. Conversely, might the thalamic-cortical pathway affect memory?

A. “If particular sensory-evoked activity patterns would cause long-term changes in the cortico-thalamic pathway, and thereby change the way incoming signals are processed before reaching the cortex,” he opines, “then this would indeed reflect a form of information storage.”

In other words, there are ways in addition to our usual ideas about memory that the limbic system remembers.

Other items in news coverage included:

“Rodents, cats, primates and humans show a common architecture of two feedback pathways from cortex to thalamus in the auditory, visual and somatosensory (but not olfactory) systems.

In this study we looked at processing of touch information, and we’d like to know how homologous pathways affect visual or auditory processing. It’s fascinating that despite fundamental differences between visual, auditory and somatosensory signals, basic layouts of thalamocortical systems for each modality are quite similar.”

Other areas of research that might benefit from their study include any medical research involving the thalamocortical system that might involve inappropriate gating of sensory signals.

For a given stimulus, output neural response will not be static, but will depend on recent stimulus and response history.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6798.full “Cortical control of adaptation and sensory relay mode in the thalamus”

One way that mothers cause fear and emotional trauma in their infants

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This 2014 rodent study showed that infants learned to fear specific items in the environment that their mothers feared. The imprinting memory happened at a stage in the infants’ lives when they hadn’t yet developed the physiology to respond to the environment with fear on their own.

The learning cue was the mothers’ fear response – in this case, her distress odor, even when the mother was not present – coupled with the infants’ stress. The fear memory was stored in the infants’ amygdalae:

“These memories are acquired at younger ages compared with amygdala-dependent odor-shock conditioning and are more enduring following minimal conditioning.

Our results provide clues to understanding transmission of specific fears across generations and its dependence upon maternal induction of pups’ stress response paired with the cue to induce amygdala-dependent learning plasticity.”

There’s no scientific reason why this and related studies shouldn’t inform researchers who ignore the earliest stages of human life when studying limbic system disorders in humans.

For an example of researchers choosing to NOT be informed, look at Is this science, or a PC agenda? Problematic research on childhood maltreatment and its effects.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/12222.full “Intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear”

How painful long-lasting memories are stored and why they are so strong

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This 2014 rodent study provided evidence for a portion of the neurophysiology that underlies how painful long-lasting memories are stored and why they are so strong. The amygdala was the brain area studied.

The researchers were misguided in news coverage by focusing on solutions such as external mechanisms to forget these memories. The researchers should think in terms of how their research can help people who can help themselves instead of having something externally done to them.

After all, we’re humans who can participate in therapy, not lab rats who need to be fixed.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/51/E5584.full “Hebbian and neuromodulatory mechanisms interact to trigger associative memory formation”