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Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category

Mind-bending Movies

Posted in from the viewing room, movies, neuroscience, psychology on June 10, 2008| 1 Comment »

I love movies. I’m an addict. I think it’s my insatiable thirst for stories which hooks me. I’m not a fan of the blockbuster kind of movie that’s all special effects though. I like a movie which draws me in and absorbs me in the characters and the story. Of course, that fits with my other great addiction – books. I’m really never without a book and I’m often reading more than one book at a time.

I think movies are called movies, not just because they are “moving pictures” but because they can be so “moving” – they can stir our emotions so strongly. How do they do that? Well, here’s a slightly disturbing piece of research. Using the fMRI technique (the brain scan that shows which areas of the brain are active at any given moment) researchers observed which parts of the brain became active at particular moments in different movies and they used an interesting tool called “ISC” (Inter-subject Correlation) to see if different people had the same parts of the brain lighting up at the same moments. They picked a Hitchcock movie, “Bang! You’re Dead!”, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, an episode of “Curb your Enthusiasm”, and an unedited video clip of a concert. The results were very different –

  • The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers’ minds;
  • High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”;
  • Lower ISC was recorded for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

In other words, Hitchcock really was the master. His movie evoked the most similar responses in peoples’ brains.

“Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers’ brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means,” the researchers wrote. “The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers’ minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him ‘creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.’ “

The researchers claim that these techniques pave the way for the development of “neurocinematic studies” – oh my!

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Living in the present – it’s what we do

Posted in from the living room, life, psychology on June 5, 2008| 6 Comments »

It’s a strange thing, the present. We consider three time zones, don’t we? The past, the present and the future. A lot of patients I see are suffering because they are trapped in one of these time zones (and it’s not the present!). We experience the past through our use of memory. The past doesn’t exist. Not any more. We can only bring it back to life by remembering. Remembering is something we do. The future doesn’t exist. Not yet. We can only bring it to life by imagining. Imagining is something we do. So if we do remembering to experience the past, and imagining to experience the future, then what do we do to experience the present?

Usually when I think about experiencing the present, I concentrate on my senses, and becoming aware of what I’m hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling or touching. Amy, at livelessordinary, has written beautifully about just that way of living in the present.

I was reading “Donner un sens a l’existence“, by Jean-Philippe Ravoux, recently. Jean-Philippe is a French philosopher who has written about the philosophical basis of “Le Petit Prince”. He makes a strong point about the present which, when I read it, made me suddenly stop and think. Some of the greatest truths are the simplest ones. He says that living in the present is about acting. He says that we can ONLY act in the present. The present is the ONLY time we can DO anything. When I read that point, it was as if a penny dropped. Until then I had considered living in the present as a fairly passive affair – a time of sitting still, being quiet, savouring, sensing consciously and mindfully. Well, I still think all that is true, but look at all the verbs in that sentence! The present isn’t something that just happens to us, or passes us by. It’s what we do.

The way to live in the present is to be conscious of what you are choosing to do.

What are you doing right now? Reading? Thinking? Drinking tea or coffee? Remembering? Imagining? All these actions are your actions. These actions, these choices, are how you create your experience of living. William Glasser understood that when he developed Reality Therapy. Living in the present – it’s what we do!

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Figuring out how your brain handles the meanings of words

Posted in neuroscience, perception, psychology on June 2, 2008| 8 Comments »

fMRI is definitely the “in” tool in neuroscience. It allows a scientist to see what areas of the brain light up while a person is doing something. A study I recently came across is using this technique to work out how the brain deals with words. More specifically they are mapping the areas of the brain that light up when someone here’s a word associated with a “concrete noun” – a noun related to something experienced with one of the five senses.

Hmm, not quite sure how interesting that is, but then I read this –

“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” he said. “So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”

This is SUCH an important point in understanding how human beings function. Our nervous systems involve a whole network involved in sensing stimuli from the environment and a whole network involved in carrying out actions. These two networks are intensely and complexly (is there such a word?) linked up to each other. At a simple level, that implies we sense things then we act in response. In fact, it’s more complicated. Some neuroscientists and philosophers have suggested that sensing and acting are actually two aspects of the exact same thing – that sensing is a kind of an act. That seems right at some level, but it’s also quite challenging. This particular insight from these researchers makes that idea a little clearer I think. We can see that the brain actually represents what it perceives by using the areas that are involved in carrying out the actions normally associated with the object being perceived. In other words, perception and understanding are fundamentally entangled with acting.

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It’s good to talk……except sometimes it’s not!

Posted in from the consulting room, health, psychology on June 2, 2008| 12 Comments »

I find that people are all very different. One of my core values as a doctor is that there are no one-size-fits-all medicines or approaches. Because people are different, the ways in which they get better differ, and the treatments which work best for them are different. That’s why I have concerns about the more extreme “evidence based medicine” fanatics, who see only two classes of treatment – “proven” and “unproven” (as if you can be sure what’s going to work for an individual before you’ve even met them)

One of the significant differences I see between people is that some really need to talk. They want to talk, and encouraging them to talk about their traumatic experiences is a way of enabling them to cope and to improve. Others, however, are quite unlike that. Some, even if encouraged, really do not want to talk about past traumas. I think it’s important to understand these differences between people and to offer them the kind of help which is best for them.

Psychologists have studied the particular issue of talking about trauma post 9/11. Their work was reported today on the BBC news site. What I found very interesting was their discovery that contrary to popular opinion that it’s always better to talk about such things, they found a significant number of the people who did well after that event, had chosen not to talk about their feelings at that time.

So, it appears, it’s good talk……..sometimes, and for some people, but don’t apply that advice indiscriminately.

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4 verbs which make us human?

Posted in life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, science on May 20, 2008| 3 Comments »

Let’s consider four verbs which highlight essential characteristics of human beings.

SENSING

All living creatures are sensate. All have sensory organs to pick up stimuli from the environment – light, sound, odours, temperature and so on. As human beings we have a particularly elaborate sensory system, possibly THE most elaborate of all creatures, however, being sensate is a characteristic we share with all animate beings.

FEELING

I have a large hardback copy of Gray’s Anatomy on my bookshelf. I bought it when I was studying anatomy at Medical School back in 1973. I still find it fascinating. The section on the nervous system and the brain shows something incredibly striking. All the nerves which carry the signals from the sensory organs travel first of all to what is termed “the old brain”, the “limbic system” more or less. That always amazed me. Why do all the sensory signals go there? This particular area of the brain is the main emotion generating and processing centre. It’s responsible for those feelings you get of fear, of arousal, of anger, and so on. Modern techniques of brain imaging are helping us to understand this better. It seems that we have developed in a way which allows signals from our sensory equipment to first of all create emotional states. This has a survival advantage. For example, we can quickly develop the “fight or flight” response to successfully deal with any threats around us. Obviously emotions are considerably more elaborate than this. Anthony Damasio is really interesting to read about this subject. “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain” is a good starting point. But I can also recommend his “The Feeling of What Happens” and “Looking for Spinoza”. You might also like “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel C Dennett and “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. What all of these authors show us is how this particular function of the brain allows us to respond to stimuli from the environment far, far more quickly than we could if we had to become aware of everything consciously first, then figure out what to do about it. That thinking thing comes next! Although it’s not possible to really know the emotional content of another creature’s mind, from observing behaviour patterns it would seem that other animals also have emotions.

THINKING

Those two great parts of the brain known as the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for what we term “cognition”…….thinking. In its entirety, the human brain is THE most complex structure in the known universe. Amazing, huh? And it’s inside your head! There’s way too much involved in thinking for me to explain here but it involves memory, imagination, awareness, concentration and systems of assessment. Once signals have been processed in the old brain (and acted upon!), this “new brain” picks up the trail and processes what’s going on. It’s thinking that let’s us make choices. Some other creatures think too, but, as far as we know, not to nearly the same extent as human beings do. One of the things we’ve done with these capacities is to develop language which gives us the ability to handle and manipulate symbols and to think both abstractly and synthetically. And that leads to the fourth verb – the one which seems to be uniquely human –

MEANING-SEEKING

We don’t just pick up signals, we don’t just generate feelings, we don’t just think about the signals and the feelings to make choices, we do something else. We try to make sense of things. We are always asking the questions “Why?” and “How come?” We are insatiably curious but we are also insatiably trying to understand the world and our experiences. The way we do this is by telling stories. We put everything together and attribute values and meanings to weave narratives which enable us to make sense of the world and of ourselves. We do this in a host of complex ways. Viktor Frankl showed how this is one of our most fundamental drives. See his “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Richard Kearney shows how we use storytelling for this purpose, and Owen Flanagan shows how we inhabit “spaces of meaning” to create our distinct worldviews and narratives.

So, there you have it. Four verbs which make us human – sensing, feeling, thinking and meaning-seeking.  Let me just add one further level of complexity. I’ve presented this is a logical, step-wise way – inspired by those evolutionary biologists – but on a moment to moment basis, these activities of the human being are continuously active and interactive. What sense we make of something influences what we sense and vice versa. Feelings influence thoughts and vice versa. And so on.

What do you think? Do you agree that these four verbs capture what it is to be human? Have you any others you think I should add?

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Discovering yourself in your networks

Posted in from the reading room, personal growth, psychology on April 23, 2008| 5 Comments »

I’m very taken by network theory. Linked is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read, and books like The Medici Effect, and Smart World develop aspects of network theory too. Currently I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and he makes this simple but thought-provoking point –

Individuals in group settings exhibit behaviours that no one could predict by studying single minds. No one has ever been bashful or extroverted while sitting alone in their room, no one can be a social climber or a man of the people without reference to society, and these characteristics exist because groups are not just simple aggregations of individuals.

What characteristics do you think you have which only appear when you are in a group?

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William Glasser’s Five Basic Needs

Posted in books, from the reading room, personal growth, psychology on March 25, 2008| 21 Comments »

In his Choice Theory, William Glasser make the point that we are all born “genetically programmed” to have five basic needs. However, we don’t all have each particular need to the same degree as another person. Our personal mix of these five needs will tell us a lot about our personal motivations and what lies behind the choices we make in life. The five needs are

  1. Survival
  2. Belonging (love and loving sex)
  3. Power
  4. Freedom
  5. Fun

He makes suggestions to help you figure out the strengths of these various needs in your own life.

If you have found that you are less willing to take risks than most people, you have a high need for survival.

The key to assessing the strength of your need for love and belonging is how much you are willing to give.

To assess the strength of your need for power, ask yourself if you always want to have your own way, to have the last word, to own people, and to be seen as right in most of what you do or say.

If you can’t stand the idea of following rules, conforming, or even staying in one place or with one group of people for very long, you have a high need for freedom.

If you enjoy learning and laugh a lot when you do, you have a high need for fun.

You get the idea? Of course, you could say that ALL of us have ALL of these needs. The point is to understand which of these resonate most strongly with you. Because that’ll be your prime motivator.

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The past is past. It’s the present you need to pay attention to.

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on March 24, 2008| 6 Comments »

William Glasser, in his Choice Theory, says this –

I disagree with the usual psychiatric thinking that you can learn from past misery. When you focus on the past, all you are doing is revisiting the misery. One trip through the misery is more than enough for most people. The more you stay in the past, the more you avoid facing the present unhappy relationships that are always the problem.

I’m with him on that – “One trip through the misery is more than enough for most people” – what a great quote! Whilst telling the story of the past can be important part of making sense of an experience and of understanding something of another person’s life, the solutions to the present suffering or distress don’t lie in revisiting. It’s not enough to just “get it out”. What matters is what you are choosing to DO today. How are you coping with life NOW as you are living it. That’s an empowering point of view because you can’t change the past, but you sure can change something about what you are doing today. Glasser believes that “present unhappy relationships that are always the problem”. Well, I’m always wary when I see that word “always”! It’s unlikely that there is a single cause, or type of cause, for all problems. He says –

What I will teach him is that he is not satisfied with a present relationship, the problem that always brings people to counselling. His past could have contributed to the problem, but even though most current psychotherapies initially focus on it, the past is never the problem.

I do think he’s onto something here, even if he’s pushing  things a bit with his “always” and “never”. There are, of course, a number of psychological approaches which focus on the present as opposed to spending hours digging through the past but not all so explicitly attempt to uncover the present unsatisfying relationship as the thing to focus on. The following three quotes make this very clear –

There is no need to probe at length for the problem. It is always an unsatisfying present relationship.

Since the problem is always in the present, there is no need to make a long intensive investigation of the client’s past. Tell him the truth: The past is over; He cannot change what he or anyone else did. All he can do now is, with my help, build a more effective present.

In traditional counselling, a lot of time is spent both enquiring into and listening to the clients complain about their symptoms [which makes it harder to get to the real problem]……..what the client is choosing to do now.

I remember the first time I realised I was on the wrong path when counselling a patient with postnatal depression who had been sexually abused as a child. On one of the one hour sessions she said to me “Look, I really do appreciate you taking all this time to listen to me, but every time I spend an hour talking to you about the past abuse I feel worse. I think I need a break from this. I think I need to live now.” Well, that woman taught me an important lesson about counselling – that it wasn’t enough to just let someone talk about the past, and that the present is where we live now so we all need better tools to live now, not better tools to remember the last miseries. I also realised at that point that different people had different needs and there was no one model of counselling which would fit everyone.

As I’ve learned from patients and learned from further reading and training, I’ve discovered I’ve a great affinity for focusing on what’s in life NOW and what coping strategies we’re using NOW. But I haven’t had the thought before that the problem ALWAYS lies in a current unsatisfying relationship. Maybe that’s worth exploring a bit more, but, what has made sense for me so far is that there are different areas of focus (and therefore different priorities) for different people. Sure, for many people, the most significant area is relationships, emotions and feelings. But for others the most significant area is something physical, practical, maybe work-oriented. And for yet others, the focus is on something spiritual, their disconnectedness to whatever is greater than themselves, or their search for meaning.

What do you think? Do these theories ring true for you?

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Choice Theory – A New Psychology of Personal Freedom

Posted in from the reading room, life, psychology on March 18, 2008| 16 Comments »

I can’t remember how I stumbled over William Glasser’s Choice Theory or his Reality Therapy, but when I did I was interested enough to buy his “Choice Theory. A New Psychology of Personal Freedom” ISBN 978-0-06-093014-1.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It appeals to my personal philosophy in relation to psychology. One of the basic tenets of this book is that digging over the past to recount and relive old wounds and hurts is not helpful. Instead, the author claims, it is better to focus on your current relationships, your current thoughts and actions. His idea of “total behaviour” is holistic and highlights the connections between aspects of mind and aspects of body which enables us to make a better understanding of illness. It’s a psychology of hope because it rails against the dominant stance of “external control theory” – this is what most people do, most of the time – when things go wrong, people who use an “external control theory” feel like victims. This paralyses, disempowers and demotivates, and seeks to blame others for personal experiences.

I see parallels between this Choice Theory/Reality Therapy and Existential Psychology, Solution-Focussed Approach, Logotherapy and Positive Psychology. Together, these approaches build a framework of understanding behaviour and the mind which I find both useful and appealing.

Here’s the summary from the last chapter of Glasser’s book –

  1. The only person whose behaviour we can control is our own.
  2. All we can give or get from other people is information.
  3. All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
  4. The problem relationship is always part of our present lives.
  5. What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now: improve an important, present relationship.
  6. We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun.
  7. We can satisfy these needs only by satisfying a picture or pictures in our quality worlds.
  8. All we can do from birth to death is behave. All behaviour is total behaviour and is made up of four inseparable components: acting, thinking, feeling and physiology.
  9. All total behaviour is designated by verbs, usually infinitives and gerunds, and named by the component that is most recognisable.
  10. All total behaviour is chosen, but we have direct control over only the acting and thinking components.

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How we figure out what other people think

Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, psychology on March 18, 2008| 2 Comments »

How we figure out what other people think or how they are likely to act is a complex phenomenon, but here’s one interesting aspect of it. There’s a technique being used quite a lot these days to try and understand how our brains work. It’s called fMRI – which stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This is a scanning technique which allows us to see which parts of the brain kick into action when we are thinking or doing certain things. A Harvard team have used this technique while getting volunteers to answer questions about how strangers might think on the basis of having been given short descriptions of the strangers before hand. The interesting thing is that there was a clear difference in which part of the brain was used to answer the questions depending on whether or not the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves or not. When the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves they used the same part of the brain to answer questions about what the stranger might think, that we all use for thinking about ourselves (the areas we use for introspection, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC)).

In summary, we are more likely to refer to our own experience and ideas of ourselves when trying to guess how another person will think or act, only if we consider that person to be like us. If we don’t think they are like us, we have to use other cues – and those other cues, most psychologists think, come from observations and society’s rules, not from personal reflection.

This isn’t a huge breakthrough in understanding but I’m sure it does say something about why we are able to be more empathic with some people than we are with others, and probably also why communities are wary of strangers. It’s the basis of that old “you’re not from round here are you?” question which indicates the stranger is thought to be, well, strange!

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