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.