The Play Circuit

I'm tremendously excited about the possibilities of evoking the PLAY circuit of the brain (Panksepp, 2004) to evoke novel associations, enhance social relationships, and thereby shift people out of wagon rutted roads of habit. Tickling, joking, playing, rough and tumble repartee, is the very stuff of connectedness and ideas.

On my website www.bainbridgepsychology.com, there is a link to my YouTube channel. Click on playlists and Neuroscience, and I'm collecting videos about play in various species, including our own. Check out the brave puppy and the slow loris. But start with the Rat Tickler and the Polar Bear and Husky. Not to be missed!

And then go play with someone you love!

PS. I've also started a collection of videos of songs that capture adult attachment styles and what they evoke in relationship. Have some fun by seeing reading the introductory paragraph for the playlist about some of the attachment styles, and then see what style YOU think each song represents. Let me know if you have ideas of other songs to add to the collections!

Japan Conference Cancelled - Swine Flu

I just learned yesterday from the Japan EMDR (JEMDRA) Conference sponsors that the trip planning for next week has been cancelled due to the spread of swine flu. Apparently several major scientific/medical conferences all cancelled. The recent holiday with much traveling and cross exposure, the national reliance on mass transit as a fertile ground for spreading the illness and voila! Cancelled. So the 3 days of workshop that Dr Lanius and I were going to give won't be happening, now anyway.

This means I'll be scheduling clients for next week then after all, and may well have time to fit in one or more "intensive" treatments using the early trauma protocol.

Couples and Neuroscience

I attended a wonderful workshop yesterday at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, really the best one day learning fest I've had in years. Stan Tatkin described his amazing interventions using understandings from neuroscience in couples with disturbed relationships reenacting their own disturbed attachment histories.

If you want more information, go to www.ahealthymind.org. Though the Schore study group requires a password, you can click on Stan Tatkins and view his material.

The primary idea is that each person in a committed relationship has a primary and essential duty to help the other regulate themselves. That people can intervene in each other's emotional dysregulation by helping them calm, down-regulate, soothe. That it's mutual, and its biological. That the two are a team in the mutual down-regulation function of the relationship. Quite lovely really. Much much more in his material and trainings. He has a study group in Seattle for mental health professionals.

Also apparently the Alan Schore neuroscience study group also has openings for mental health professionals.

JAPAN WORKSHOPS

In a week I'll be traveling to Japan to give two workshops at the Japan EMDR Association annual conference. My introductory workshop will be about basics of assessment for dissociative disorders. My advanced workshop will be about the use of ego state therapy in conjunction with EMDR. My colleague, Dr Ulrich Lanius of Vancouver, British Columbia, will presenting a beginning workshop on the neuroscience of dissociation. His advanced workshop will be on the integration of somatic therapy with EMDR.

I'll be using cartoons to communicate with this Japanese-speaking audience, in addition to an interpreter. I am hopeful that the cartoons will facilitate understanding across the language barrier. In fact, they often transcend language, by their very nature. They speak to the right hemisphere of the brain.

The greatest compliment I ever got was after giving my basic Looking Through the Eyes Workshop using cartoons. A workshop attendee came up to me the next morning at breakfast in the hotel cafe. He said, "Dr Paulsen, thank you for your workshop. I didn't learn a thing!" I no doubt looked puzzled and perhaps a bit startled. He explained, "I attended this workshop 5 years ago. It changed the way I practice completely. I attended again yesterday to see if I had missed anything. I didn't. All of your cartoons stuck firmly in my mind, and I got it all the first time." The explanation delighted me, still makes me giddy, and reminds me why I include the cartoons in the first place.

Those cartoons are contained in my book, "Looking Through the Eyes of Trauma and Dissociation: An Illustrated Guide for EMDR Therapists and Client."

Polar Bear and Dog in Rough and Tumble Play

www.nifplay.org/polar-husky.html

Here's an extraordinary series of photos from the National Institute for Play illustrating Panksepp's finding that there is a hardwired PLAY circuit in the brain. It's found to activate more of the brain than any of the other circuits such as ANGER, SAD, FEAR, PANIC, etc. Panksepp reports that approximately 50% of ADHD in the United States may be related to insufficient "rough-and-tumble" play. The President of the National Institute for Play said that a study of serial killers found they had one thing in common --- a strict father than forbade play. Message: play heals? Laughter is the best medicine? I know tossing around ideas, scientific findings and metaphors with Panksepp yesterday felt like rough and tumble thought, and it was highly medicinal!!

The PLAY circuit of the brain

Here's a link to a YouTube video of Jaak Panksepp demonstrating how he discovered that rats feel JOY, suggesting that JOY is a hard-wired brain circuit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuceywaOUs

Tickling Rats

I had a great day in Seattle yesterday meeting with Jaak Panksepp and his gifted wife Anesa. I had the chance to hear a great deal about the leading edge of neuroscience as it relates to the leading edge of clinical practice. I got to tell Dr Panksepp about the hypothesized mechanisms of action for EMDR (actually bilateral stimulation, not all of Adaptive Information Processing theory) including: dual attention awareness, left/right brain rhythmic activation and rebalancing, whatever mechanism is involved in REM sleep, maybe pruning unuseful synaptic branches, and more. He was open, interested, and made useful comments.

His enormous contribution has been to experimentally identify brain circuits for emotions, and moreover to do so within a rigorous scientific methodology. Neuroscience is so in vogue that its tempting for scientists to put out a favorite hypothesis, and the professional communities run with it as if it were scientifically proven. Most leading-edge theories have the status of --- metaphor, he says, and the proponents cannot point to proof of the theories. That was sobering. At the same time it amused me, as a cartooning psychologist, because my psychological cartoons are metaphors, and purport to be nothing else. So I guess that puts metaphoric cartoons on a footing with neuroscience theories, if there is no proof to back them up! Most amusing thought.

I was especially concerned to get his thinking about whether step 3 of the Early Trauma Protocol developed by O'Shea could actually be what she and I have been hypothesizing -- that we were actually resetting or clearing the affective circuits, acting directly on the circuit itself, by utilizing the capacity of higher cortical processes. He said both that it sounded as if we were acting on the circuit itself, what he called "primary process," and said that of course we were doing so with the assistance of higher cortical processes by using the "arms length" imaging strategy (object cathexis). That it could hardly be anything else. Godel's Incompleteness Theorum strikes again.

There's so much more, not the least of which is the PLAY circuit (he uses all caps to make clear it is a hard-wired brain circuits, not just the vernacular "play." But I'm cogitating on all this. More on another day.



I'll be thinking about the circuits for some time and the further implications for clinical work.

Jaak Panksepp and Affective Circuits

I'm on my way into Seattle today to meet with the brilliant neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp. Author of Affective Neuroscience (2004, 1998) and countless articles and other publications, he has done more than any other scientist to identify and articulate the fact that we humans (and animals) have basic circuits in our brains, hardwired, for various emotions. We come to this world with the systems in place to experience anger, fear, sadness, panic (infant separation panic), play, seeking (like curiosity), lust, and shame (more complicated, more social, more cortical, but still....). Then we add a complex learning history on top of that and voila! Either adaptive, resourced high functioning, or incapacity, emotional pain, mental illness, to oversimply an extremely complex matter.

We're going to talk about a novel finding in leading edge EMDR practice, the Early Trauma Protocol developed by Katie O'Shea (see O'Shea & Paulsen, 2007 EMDRIA conference tape, or O'Shea's two chapters in Robin Shapiro's EMDR Solutions II book (2009). In step 3 of that important protocol, it appears that we actually are able to reset, or reboot, or clear the affective circuits. Then, subsequent trauma processing goes easier, because the client is not riding the emergency brake. That is (I think, we'll see what Dr. Panksepp thinks) the subcortical affective circuits are freer to conduct data to and through cortical processes without the inhibitory effect of maladaptive cortical learning exerting downward pressure on that data conduction.

Now, after I meet him, maybe I'll have to take that all back. We'll see. More later!