pavel sebastian's List: psychology&psychotherapy

• The neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould overturned much conventional wisdom by showing that brains can generate new neurons, a process called neurogenesis. Her research with monkeys showed those who had suffered stress or a lack of stimulation had lower levels of neurogenesis. The impact of nurturing in early years is not simply on our attitudes—which we might be expected to overcome—but on the physical capacity of our brains to develop. Gould’s work has been used to make a case for early intervention in deprived and dysfunctional families. Psychologist Walter Mischel tested four year olds on their ability to resist eating a marshmallow, and showed that childhood inability to defer gratification predicted low achievement and antisocial behaviour well into adult life.
• It turns out that messages which cause emotional disturbance impair our reasoning ability; this provides a physiological basis for the negative effects of labelling and stereotyping. Claude Steele, a professor of psychology, gave a group of his students a test that he said would measure their innate intellectual ability. White students performed better than black students. But when Steele gave a different group the same test, but stressed that it was a meaningless practice exam, the scores of white and black students were virtually identical. Similarly, women will do less well in a maths test if they are told it measures “cognitive differences between the genders.”

• But new insights into how our brains work also offer support to Conservative thought. In a recent essay (Prospect, May 2009) David Willetts admitted that the Tories had been wrong to dismiss the importance of inequality on social cohesion and individual wellbeing. Willetts has also praised the work of economic historian Avner Offer. In his book The Challenge of Affluence (OUP), Offer sums up his thesis in the first line: “Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.” He uses concepts from behavioural economics to explain why we fail to make the right decisions for the long term. The idea of Offer’s which has proven most attractive to Conservatives is the concept of “commitment devices.”

   

  These are the social institutions that have developed to protect us from our psychological frailties, encouraging us to act long term and be socially responsible. These devices include the family, the church and civic organisations. As we become richer, we mistakenly think we do not need them.
• At the heart of a previous attempt to transcend the left-right divide, Anthony Giddens’s third way, lay the concept of reflexivity. This is the idea that modern citizens do not see themselves as objects of impersonal religious, national or class forces, but as the authors of their own lives. Giddens talked about moving from class politics to a “life politics,”concerned with individual self-actualisation. This would help citizens reconcile their life stories with the social forces around them. But in the absence of the binds of tradition and deference, Giddens thought that we needed a new democratic discourse and new institutions and forms of solidarity to replace those which have been lost.
• New Labour claimed to have jettisoned the old collectivism of class and tradition, but it has in turn failed to build new forms of collective action, or even to make a case for them. Lacking a substantive critique of individualism, Labour’s appeal to people to engage in collective decision-making seemed pious and hollow. While listening to the neoliberal critics of collective action, new Labour portrayed localist and social conservative concerns about top-down modernisation as irrelevant or reactionary. Yet the new research validates the emphasis in these accounts on the need to respect the practices and meanings through which people have come to live their lives, and to recognise how difficult it may be to adapt to aspects of modernity. A symbol of Labour’s confusion is that it has been uncomfortable with the collectivist idea of a public-service ethos, yet willing to believe the central state can successfully guide human affairs.
• “progressive humanism,” which accepts the flaws in ourselves, understands our mental frailties and acknowledges the social nature of the brain. Such an approach would recognise that the way norms and social institutions have evolved is often a guide to the limits and possibilities of human nature. It would be a politics intolerant of the injustices and deprivations that sap our capability, but modest about the ability of any agency to impose solutions that don’t combine the push of reform with the pull of social meanings and connections. Its adherents would be enthusiastic collectivists but sceptical statists.
• Benjamin Libet. Re his research. There is an update. Cognitive subroutines get established early on for many routine cognitive operations, e.g. sentence structure, walking, opening doors, etc. Once these are in place, the trigger for their execution will start the subroutine. Where prefrontal lobe, executive function has developed, the SELF/agent, now has the job of not always instigating action, but interrupting the subroutine. So we have NOT decided to act, to pick up the glass, its just a “relflex” prior to conscious awareness, like a swatting at an annoying pest…which we could interrupt if we so chose.

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• There's an experiment, for example, in which people were playing a game but, in the first group, it was called a "competition game" and, in the other group, it was called a "community game." And, in the latter case, people acted less selfish even though it's exactly the same game.

• Every experience is given a score in your memory: good, bad, worse. And that's completely independent of its duration. Only two things matter here: the peaks -- that is, the worst or best moments -- and the outcome. How did it end up?
• My advice would be: Don't remove them from the site of the trauma to treat them elsewhere. You should try to make them feel better in the same place so that the memory of what happened to them will not be as bad.
• because moving away from the location is perceived as the end of an episode, and the evaluation made at that time will be stored in memory.

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• Yes, our lives are governed by the remembering self. Even when we're planning something, we anticipate the memories we expect to get out of it. The experiencing self, which may have to put up with a lot in return, has no say in the matter. Besides, what the experiencing self has enjoyed can be completely devaluated in retrospect. Someone once told me that he had recently listened to a wonderful symphony but, unfortunately, at the end, there was a terrible screeching sound on the record. He said that ruined the whole experience. But, of course, the only thing it ruined was the memory of the experience, (which was) still a happy experience.

• The basic premise on which Gestalt therapy rests is that of holism (Perls, 1973). The greatest value in the Gestalt approach, according to Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951, p.19): 

    . . . lies in the insight that the whole determines the parts, which contrasts  with the previous assumption that the whole is merely the total sum of its  elements. 
• Holistically we cannot attain an adequate concept of self by merely summing up the individual component parts of self -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Gestalt therapy is a philosophy of life based on the holistic epistemology outlined above. It is descriptive, integrative, and structural, emphasizing phenomenology, the here and now as well as a positive wholeness which emphasizes our creating our lives and discovering our strengths.
• Basically, Gestalt therapy is concerned with the interaction between the organism and its environment (Baumgardner, 1975). In the healthy organism, many needs are present at any one time. These organize themselves into a hierarchy of importance, as a natural process. The most dominant need forms, or becomes figure. In order to satisfy this need, the organism searches its environment for the desired object (sensory activity); when the object is found, the organism acts to assimilate it (motor activity). The concept of the connection between the sensoric and motor activities has been extensively discussed by the Gestalt psychologists for many years (for example, Koffka, 1935; Hartrnann, 1935). When the needed object has been assimilated, the Gestalt is closed, and a state of equilibrium is reached. The formerly dominant need recedes from awareness (becomes ground), and the energy thus freed is directed towards the next most dominant need. Organisms are thus self-regulatory or homeostatic. (Smuts, 1926; Lewin, 1935; Goldstein, 1939; Latner, 1973; Perls, 1973). In this way, the organism is regarded as being "born with the capacity to cope with life" (Simkin, 1976, p.17).

• Perls (1973, p. 3) stated that the first basic premise of Gestalt therapy is that 

    . . . it is the organization of facts or perceptions and not the individual  items of which they are composed, that defines them and gives them their  specific and particular meaning. 
• The figure-ground principle stated that every perception is organized into a figure which stands out from a background. However, these are not necessarily properties of the stimulus object, but rather of the psychological field.

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• The medical model is so called because it views the mind the way medicine views the body, as an object which is explained either in terms of neurophysiology and genetics or in the language of disease, medicine, and treatment.⁶ In Pain and Pleasure, Szasz argued that it is logically permissible to talk about the meanings of physical disease, in the sense of our reactions to them and interpretations of them. But to talk about meanings as causes of physical disease is to conflate two operationally and logically different concepts. In The Myth of Mental Illness, Szasz moved from psychosomatic disease to conversion hysteria to demonstrate that the classification of thoughts, feelings, and behavior as diseases or as diseased is a logical error. It confuses the logical category of the body with the logical category of the mind. The term "myth," in The Myth of Mental Illness, refers to a category error as described by Gilbert Ryle. Ryle defined a myth as not a fairy story but as the presentation of the f acts from one logical category in the language appropriate to another.
• he medical model is so called because it views the mind the way medicine views the body, as an object which is explained either in terms of neurophysiology and genetics or in the language of disease, medicine, and treatment.⁶ In Pain and Pleasure, Szasz argued that it is logically permissible to talk about the meanings of physical disease, in the sense of our reactions to them and interpretations of them. But to talk about meanings as causes of physical disease is to conflate two operationally and logically different concepts. In The Myth of Mental Illness, Szasz moved from psychosomatic disease to conversion hysteria to demonstrate that the classification of thoughts, feelings, and behavior as diseases or as diseased is a logical error. It confuses the logical category of the body with the logical category of the mind. The term "myth," in The Myth of Mental Illness, refers to a category error as described by Gilbert Ryle. Ryle defined a myth as not a fairy story but as the presentation of the f acts from one logical category in the language appropriate to another.