More from Panksepp - the Periaquaductal Gray PAG and more

Over the weeks I've had the opportunity to talk at length with Dr Panksepp, several key insights have emerged, the things HE thinks are very important.

One is that the PAG (periaquaductal gray) area in the midbrain is key for the locus of consciousness and emotion. In the rat, if this area is ablated, there is nobody home in the rat. This area is a final integrating pathway and critical for the establishing of coherence. As such, he finds it more important than the amygdala in emotional processing. He finds that some of the emphasis on the amygdala in recent years has been overstating the findings, and that the importance of the PAG has been understated.

Smooth state switching is an important aspect of emotional well-being. Dissociative disorders represent an extreme example of state switching disrupted from trauma. Dr Panksepp says that state switching would be located in many parts of the brain, not just subcortically between emotional states. It occurs to me that the category of "states" represents emotional states per se, object relations states, and state-dependent learning, and so would be represented across all three levels of brain functioning. Indeed we see that clinically. State switching between emotional states, object-identified states, and state dependent learning are all relevant in the processing of trauma. In EMDR, looped processing occurs when states don't smoothly switch or are in conflict. It may be that cognitive interweaves are helpful for tertiary-processing state-switching challenges, ego state interweaves for secondary-processing state-switching, and somatic interweaves for primary process. That's my musing for the day.