For What It's Worth

  • (Nov. 25, 2019)Psychology Today: Six Essential Principles of Brain Organization -Implications for the treatment of mental and behavioral disorders

    Here are the 6 simple brain principles from my Psych Today post:

    1. All aspects of mind and behavior depend on the brain.

    2. The brain is composed on many distinct networks, some of which interact.

    3. There are many different kinds of behaviors, and each depends on different brain circuits.

    4. It is not always possible to know by mere observation whether behavioral or mental processes underlie a given behavior.

    5. Different behaviors are conserved to differing degrees across mammalian species.

    6. The psychological capacities possessed by each group (order) of mammals depends on the brain circuits it possesses.

    What then are the implications of these principles for the treatment of mental and behavioral disorders?

    1. The names of mental and behavioral disorders do not reflect biological entities (brain centers). They are collections of symptoms.

    2. Symptoms can be understood in terms of the specific behavioral/cognitive categories and the networks that underlie them

    3. The two main scientific approaches to treatment, pharmaceutical and behavioral/cognitive approaches, both have their origins in 1940s behavioristic conceptions that marginalized mental states as explanations of behavior.

    4. The pharmaceutical approach used easily measured, relatively primitive, behavioral symptoms in animals to find solutions for complex psychological problems in humans.

    5. Ultimately people want to feel better subjectively—they want to feel less fearful, anxious, or depressed.

    6. Perhaps cognitive approaches, as currently implemented, are not the answer.

    7. Conscious emotional experiences depend on specific cognitive processes.

    8. To change subjective well-being it may be necessary to make subjective well-being the goal, as opposed to a byproduct of behavioral change.

    9. This is not to say that subjective well-being is totally ignored. All therapists presumably want their clients/patients to feel better. But the question is how to achieve that?

  • Sept. 26, 2019; Milan Italy:

    What’s wrong with the amygdala theory of conscious fear?


    I have written extensively about this, and in particular the misunderstanding that has resulted from the use of behavioral and physiological responses elicited by threats to draw conclusions about the contribution of the amygdala to the conscious experience of fear. Here are seven key issues.

    1.Behavioral and physiological responses elicited by threats do not always correlate with subjectively experienced fear; they should if they are by-products of conscious fear in the amygdala.

    2. Subliminal threats elicit both amygdala activity and behavioral and physiological responses in the absence of subjective awareness of the stimulus and without any feeling of fear.

    3. Blindsight patients respond to threats but without awareness of the stimulus and without reporting feelings of fear.

    4. Damage to the amygdala interferes with the ability of threats to elicit behavioral and physiological responses but does not necessarily eliminate feelings of fear.

    5. Medications used to treat fear and/or anxiety can have greater effects on behavioral (avoidance, timidity) or physiological responses (hyper-arousal) than on subjective feelings of fear or anxiety.

    6. Fear does not have an exclusive contract with the amygdala—we can fear dying from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, hypoxia, all of which depend on other circuits.

    7. The amygdala does not have an exclusive contract with fear– it is involved in other aversive behaviors (aggression) and appetitive behaviors (feeding, sex, maternal care).