The Neuropsychological Implications in the Brain Scan Era
Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2012 10:59 pm
Hopefully, I'm not the first to post on this topic. What really matters in the world of clinical pshrinquage is that Jaynes got people thinking about the connections -- and disconnections -- between the left and right brain hemispheres. Computer-aided brain mapping assures us that in most right-handed folks, the right hemisphere is the seat of most direct, sensory perception, while the left is the seat of most verbal-symbolic processing. In Freudian terms, "primary perception" tends to take place in the right; "secondary appraisal" (thinking about, interpreting, evaluating, assessing, judging, attributing meaning to, etc.) occurs in the left.
While it's a truly gross oversimplification to say so, it is in fact scientifically accurate that many (most? all?) in the new era of "neuropsychology" that psychiatric disorders are the results of disconnection between the two hemispheres with respect to accurate primary perception but =inaccurate= secondary appraisal that cannot be corrected immediately after the fact by interactive feedback looping with primary perception... because the connections are "knocked out."
The solidly grounded neurobiology underpinning Francine Shapiro's Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) was the door I walked through to grasp the implications of Jaynes's convictions relative to not only schizophrenia, but much else that troubles the mind. EMDR is widely used by the US Veterans' Health System to reconnect the processing between the two brain hemispheres in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The method is simple and intriguing, and one can Google "EMDR for PTSD" to find a number of accurate descriptions. But the method is less significant here than its neurobiological implications.
Shapiro's therapy has spawned a bunch of others more or less like it, but more significantly, has raised awareness of the utility of strengthening the neural connections through the corpus callosum that connects the two brain hemispheres. We now have a growing list of new therapies designed to do the same thing, including Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Steven Hayes's Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), Williams & Teasdale's Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Garrett's Self-talk Identification, Questioning & Revision with the Drop Drill (SIQR+DD).
It's clear from brain scans before and after patient participation in such therapies that getting the primary perception centers in the right brain to "converse more effectively" with the secondary appraisal centers in the left is strongly correlated to reduction of symptoms. And this is true with depression, anxiety, mania, addictions, obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias and more.
It may be considered politically or sociologically radical to say so, but I will do it anyway:
Jaynes seems to have stumbled onto the core conditioning that "stole the voice of God" (or the voice of "what is," if one is a Brahman; or "just plain empirical reality," if one subscribes to Immanuel Kant) from the minds of the masses in early, organized cultures. And that conditioning was the use of language to promote specific beliefs, values, idea(l)s, assumptions, convictions, principles, codes and rules in the minds of the otherwise reality-connected to =override the connections= between the primary perceptual and secondary appraisal centers.
One might call it "socializing" (Google =that=) for the sake of cultural organization by means of common, cultural beliefs -- or common =consciousness= -- to promote material progress. Another might call it "brainwashing" for the sake of "normalizing" the mind to specific beliefs, values, idea(l)s, rules, etc. that didn't square with experiential reality. Might the "authorities" (as Theodore Adorno and Robert Altemeyer have used that term) do so to promote cult-ure-wide agreement on the following?
1) Production imperative: the high value of societal contribution via material productivity,
2) Consumerism: the motive to part with earnings to consume what is produced, and
3) Tribalism (which may now be called "patriotism"): to motivate the group to defend the wealth it had created for its authoritarian masters against attempts by other masters and =their= tribes to expropriate it?
I know the two graphs immediately above are the stuff of social theorists like Thomas Malthus, George Hegel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, Martin Buber, Charles Cooley, Aldous Huxley, Jules Henry, Franz Neuman, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and most recently, Kevin Phillips and Chris Hedges.
But what twists my pretzel (and that of a growing number of clinical psychologists) is that the deeper we dig into the neurotic, borderline or psychotic psyche, the more we see how Jaynes's notion of "lost bicamerality" and "found split-ness" combine with the views of those social theorists to wrap up psychopathology into a very neat and simple package.
While it's a truly gross oversimplification to say so, it is in fact scientifically accurate that many (most? all?) in the new era of "neuropsychology" that psychiatric disorders are the results of disconnection between the two hemispheres with respect to accurate primary perception but =inaccurate= secondary appraisal that cannot be corrected immediately after the fact by interactive feedback looping with primary perception... because the connections are "knocked out."
The solidly grounded neurobiology underpinning Francine Shapiro's Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) was the door I walked through to grasp the implications of Jaynes's convictions relative to not only schizophrenia, but much else that troubles the mind. EMDR is widely used by the US Veterans' Health System to reconnect the processing between the two brain hemispheres in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The method is simple and intriguing, and one can Google "EMDR for PTSD" to find a number of accurate descriptions. But the method is less significant here than its neurobiological implications.
Shapiro's therapy has spawned a bunch of others more or less like it, but more significantly, has raised awareness of the utility of strengthening the neural connections through the corpus callosum that connects the two brain hemispheres. We now have a growing list of new therapies designed to do the same thing, including Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Steven Hayes's Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), Williams & Teasdale's Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Garrett's Self-talk Identification, Questioning & Revision with the Drop Drill (SIQR+DD).
It's clear from brain scans before and after patient participation in such therapies that getting the primary perception centers in the right brain to "converse more effectively" with the secondary appraisal centers in the left is strongly correlated to reduction of symptoms. And this is true with depression, anxiety, mania, addictions, obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias and more.
It may be considered politically or sociologically radical to say so, but I will do it anyway:
Jaynes seems to have stumbled onto the core conditioning that "stole the voice of God" (or the voice of "what is," if one is a Brahman; or "just plain empirical reality," if one subscribes to Immanuel Kant) from the minds of the masses in early, organized cultures. And that conditioning was the use of language to promote specific beliefs, values, idea(l)s, assumptions, convictions, principles, codes and rules in the minds of the otherwise reality-connected to =override the connections= between the primary perceptual and secondary appraisal centers.
One might call it "socializing" (Google =that=) for the sake of cultural organization by means of common, cultural beliefs -- or common =consciousness= -- to promote material progress. Another might call it "brainwashing" for the sake of "normalizing" the mind to specific beliefs, values, idea(l)s, rules, etc. that didn't square with experiential reality. Might the "authorities" (as Theodore Adorno and Robert Altemeyer have used that term) do so to promote cult-ure-wide agreement on the following?
1) Production imperative: the high value of societal contribution via material productivity,
2) Consumerism: the motive to part with earnings to consume what is produced, and
3) Tribalism (which may now be called "patriotism"): to motivate the group to defend the wealth it had created for its authoritarian masters against attempts by other masters and =their= tribes to expropriate it?
I know the two graphs immediately above are the stuff of social theorists like Thomas Malthus, George Hegel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, Martin Buber, Charles Cooley, Aldous Huxley, Jules Henry, Franz Neuman, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and most recently, Kevin Phillips and Chris Hedges.
But what twists my pretzel (and that of a growing number of clinical psychologists) is that the deeper we dig into the neurotic, borderline or psychotic psyche, the more we see how Jaynes's notion of "lost bicamerality" and "found split-ness" combine with the views of those social theorists to wrap up psychopathology into a very neat and simple package.