[FRIAM] is this true?

[Nick Thompson]

Of course therapy alters the brain.  How on earth else could it work?  So, the question wouldn’t come up if people didn’t suppose that some brain alterations and not REALLY brain alterations.  I don’t know how those people make that distinction. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2019 6:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] is this true?

 

Therapy and drugs can certainly change a life.  I had a friend who worked for a research organization at the University of Pittsburgh.  He had a Ph.D. in psychology.  At the time I worked in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He became interested in my work and wondered if there were opportunities for him there.  He investigated and was offered a position.  As a faculty member your job was to find a problem solve it and publish the results and then seek funding for further work but usually you had the freedom to pursue whatever problem you wanted to within reason.  He was not used to this lack of structure and he became unhappy.  One night he called me and was in desperate straits.  I did what it could to encourage him.   He entered therapy with a psychiatrist.  Over the months he became more productive.  After making some contributions in scheduling and planning software as I recall, he went to work for a startup and did some excellent work developing visualization tools.  He was head of a group of a dozen or more developers and scientists.  The group became a separate business.  After a couple of years it was bought by a fortune 50 company and he was made head of the division it became. 

 

I don't know whether or how his brain changes but his life certainly did.

 

Frank

 

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 4:58 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

ketamine would not be the first drug that was utilized to augment therapy. MDA, MDMA, even LSD were all studied as ways to enhance, optimize, therapy.

 

An therapy, some kinds of it anyway, have also been demonstrated to produce very mild altered states of consciousness — somewhat less than hypnosis, somewhat greater than attending an old fashioned Catholic Mass.

 

davew

 

 

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019, at 3:25 PM, glen ∅ wrote:

>From https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/ketamine-depression.html

> After all, therapy and prescription drugs like antidepressants change the brain in surprisingly similar ways.

 

Does therapy exhibit changes in the brain similar to drugs (like antidepressants or not)?  I wish the author had provided a citation or 2.

 

 

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