[FRIAM] is this true?
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Mar 8 13:34:29 EST 2019
Glen -
Another interesting question to speculate around (as usual)!
On the face of it, the question of whether there are brain changes in
response to therapy or pharmaceuticals, would seem to be very trite or
another form of the mind/body (mind/brain) question. My trite answer to
the implied trite question would be a simple "yes".
I think you are asking something more sophisticated though? If we
believe that there are *some* kinds of changes to the brain (such as
Dave's examples below) when we "change our minds" or "see things
differently" then in fact there is a "plastic" change which persists
past the direct effect of the drugs or the therapy session.
I think you are asking *what* the specific brain changes are that might
be effected through A) Therapy and B) Antidepressants/??? and C) a)
supported/enhanced/accelerated by b).
I have no personal experience with B (excepting of course, the
self-medication with alcohol, fats, carbs and mood-alterations that come
with their timely application). The experiences I have with A) ranging
from a good bartender to a good life-partner to a good friend to a
licensed therapist, suggest that significant changes *can* be made.
Those made with a "casual" conversational partner under the influence of
alcohol tend to be a lot more elastic. I've never worked as a
bartender but can imagine how much mood-swinging, life-change-claiming
experiences they observe in their customers. I've observed angry as
well as sloppy drunks who seem to resolve their angst while "under the
influence" only to return to roughly the same position with their angst
the next day/weekend and go through the same alcohol/rant/rave induced
denoument over (and over and over). From what I've observed (less
frequently) pot smokers, binge-eaters, binge-shoppers and gamblers go
through a similar cycle.
if/since the goal is often to effect more plastic change, then it is
natural to seek mechanisms that support that. I personally have tried
some therapy and had mixed results. I wasn't specifically seeking
relief from depression as such, but depression was surely part of the
complex of symptoms I was feeling. I was seeking to make some "changes
in perspective" which I hoped would lower the cognitive/emotional burden
I was feeling from navigating my life as it was structured. I was
stuck in not wanting to change the structure of my life, finding aspects
of it hard/tiring/confronting to endure, and wanting to "adjust my
attitude" to fit my circumstances "more better". Of course, the net
result included recognizing that *some* of the aspects of my life *would
change* as I changed my attitude toward them. This included primary
and secondary relationships, and work/career as well as my relationship
with the larger social sphere as I apprehend it.
Both therapists asked me when I interviewed them if I was seeking
anti-depressant medication. I didn't know if that was A) them
observing/diagnosing me as "depressed" on first meeting; B) vetting me
for someone who also needed a consult with a licensed psychiatrist who
could make such prescriptions; C) doing triage to see if my
self-proclaimed reasons (which didn't include acknowledging depression)
for seeking therapy were misleading (in that specific way); D) vetting
me for someone who was seeking a "quick fix".
The second therapist DID offer and provide me with some EMDR treatment
(eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). I was skeptical, but
approached it as a mild form of hypnosis. She was relatively new to
the method and I was also perhaps "indulging her" in getting some
practice while I got to experiment with whether such things *could* have
an effect. My (very subjective) answer was that it could absolutely be
effective. When it worked, I swear I felt an immediate (and mostly
plastic) shift in my larger mental state. It seemed to work as
advertised in breaking some kinds of persistent beliefs I held about
myself or the world. One important caveat that is fundamental to the
psychotheraputic model... it only worked when I really wanted it to.
The trick (not unlike some of my recent rants here about "asking the
right question") seemed to be to frame the problem/question/belief at
hand properly before we could actually effectively make any headway.
We often spent an entire session trying to agree on what the underlying
"belief" I wanted/need to change *was* and then do the actual EMDR
(including some pre and post analysis) in a subsequent session. My
therapist seemed a little frustrated at how much time/energy we expended
narrowing it all down to "the right question" and we agreed this was at
least *partly* a consequence of me living so strongly (belligerently?)
in my head. I think she also *learned* from my example that "getting
the question right" was key. It felt to me that the few successful
EMDR sessions we had (small handful) DID help to unkink some of my
deeper beliefs and I DID obtain some immediate and persistent relief in
my life from it. It may also be the case that since I wasn't seeking
relief from any specific identifiable events or circumstances, that EMDR
wasn't the perfect fit.
I brought up EMDR because I felt that it's mechanism (which is a little
under-understood I think) may not be that dissimilar to conventional
anti-depressant or complementarily? microdosing of psi drugs in that it
helped me get *past* the built-in (ego?) defenses that were holding
various beliefs in a sacred place. From what I hear with conventional
anti-depressants, they can relieve the psychic anxiety or increase the
energy to a level that allows the individual to proceed to change habits
which they might otherwise be unable to due to under/overproduction of
neurochemistry. I would suggest that the anti-depressant mechanisms
change the *dynamics* of the brain which *allows* the function to shift
enough that the *structure* can become changed through some amount of
repetition (shift in habits of being/thinking) which would reflect the
"change to the brain" you are suggesting. I assume the same thing
(through different mechanisms?) applies to psi microdosing. Instead of
adjusting the *gross* or *familiar* neurochemistry, they tweak more
subtle (or lesser known?) mechanisms which allow for/induce behavioral
(thought as well as activity) changes in a way that can lead to the
brain-function/structure changes you are suggesting.
On reflection, the EMDR experience I had *felt* like something shifted
physically/biochemically very abruptly and plasticly. I don't remember
ever feeling like the beliefs I had "changed" were at risk of
reverting. In that way it felt like I'd achieved a /denoument/ of some
kind which I suppose doesn't have to represent significant physical
changes?
Mumble,
- Steve
On 3/8/19 9:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Not necessarily "a crock."
>
> Pretend, anthropomorphize a bit, that the brain is an entity with at
> least three observable behaviors: 1) establishing and/or modifying
> physical 'circuits' in response to stimuli of category A; 2)
> 'activating' specific subsets of the overall circuitry in response to
> stimuli of category B; and 3) 'emitting' electromagnetic wave forms in
> response to stimuli of category C.
>
> Ignore for a moment the fact that all three categories of stimuli and
> all three behavioral responses probably occur simultaneously in most
> cases. [Maybe not the rewiring, as that seems to have multiple unique
> constraints.]
>
> We then collect a lot of data of the sort, stimulus X(n) evoked
> behavior Y, with Behavior Y being an instance of 'rewiring' (p),
> 'local activation' (q), or 'emission' (r).
>
> If we observe that stimulus X(1) and stimulus X(6) evoke an instance
> of (p) we might, being a bit careless with our language, state that
> the two different stimuli "change the brain in the same way." Being a
> bit more careful, we might say only that Stimuli X(1) and X(6) belong
> in the same category A, B, or C.
>
> Given this framework, I would venture a guess that Therapy and Drugs,
> as stimuli, would not evoke the same behavior. I would expect Therapy
> to result in behaviors of the 'rewiring' type while Drugs evoke
> 'activation' type.
>
> This would allow me to address Nick's concern, "odd dualism by which
> some brain changes are REALLY brain changes and some are not" by
> asserting that there is no 'real/unreal' dualism, but there is a
> useful category distinction to be made.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2019, at 9:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>
>> Sorry. See correction, below. The point is, if the therapist
>> convinces the patient, by rational argument, to do the Right Thing,
>> whatever the right thing would be, we don’t tend to think of this as
>> a brain change. But of course it is. So, what is this odd dualism
>> by which some brain changes are REALLY brain changes, and some are
>> not? Thus, we see again, as we must always see, (};-)] that brain
>> state materialism is a crock.
>>
>>
>>
>> N
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:*Nick Thompson [mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net]
>> *Sent:* Thursday, March 07, 2019 8:30 PM
>> *To:* 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* RE: [FRIAM] is this true?
>>
>>
>>
>> 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 */[NST==>are<==nst] /*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/
>>
>>
>>
>> *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 <mailto: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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>> --
>> Frank Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>> 505 670-9918
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>
>
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