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Great Expectations

which includes dopamine to get attention but also many other neurotransmitters, to indicate more precisely what type of pleasant or unpleasant stimulus this is. This means that when the boss's secretary gets the package — the message from the amygdala — she also gets a briefing paper about where it belongs: the anger file, the sadness file, the disgust box, or whatever.

Emotions and expectation

Emotions, as I mentioned earlier, are about movement — the very reason that brains evolved in the first place. An emotion is a behavioural impulse attached to a piece of information that creates an urge to do something. Emotions are therefore always about expectation and they follow on from pattern matches made by the amygdala. This means that emotions and expectations are really the same phenomena and cannot be separated. They urge us to be happy and celebrate, to feel desire and pursue a goal, to be sad and withdraw, to be angry and attack, to feel disgusted and walk away, and so on. Our emotions are a set of expectations that represent a preliminary classification from the amygdala, telling the boss's secretary, "This is how I expect you to respond to this information".

The boss's secretary, the anterior cingulate, has dopamine (essentially a stimulant that works like cocaine) as her preferred modus operandi. She recognises anything sprinkled with dopamine as priority information. Dopamine doesn't itself define a message as bad or good — you can have a 'bad' or a 'good' trip on cocaine — so what the secretary does with the package from the amygdala depends on what other chemical signatures are attached to it. The dopamine is just there to get her interest. And the amount of dopamine determines how much attention she gives it. The more dopamine, the more attention.

A lot of things we do routinely happen automatically. For example, if we like pulling a cigarette out of a packet and lighting up, the amygdala enables that to happen mindlessly. It doesn't need permission from the boss's secretary. But if the boss's secretary sends a missive down to the amygdala saying, "No more cigarettes," the amygdala might be sufficiently intimidated to respond, "Oh, can we please have one?" So it sends back a message more heavily laced with dopamine, to urge her to let it fulfil the expectation of smoking.

To help her decide what to do, the boss's secretary has a strategy. She says to herself, in effect, "Well, before I interrupt the boss about this, I'd better know a little bit more about what it's all about and what might be going to happen." So she sends a message down to the memory store, the hippocampus, saying, "Send me up details of something we've experienced that is similar to this circumstance, so I can see better what is going on here." In other words, she just doesn't take the amygdala's assessment on trust; she knows it's usually too black and white. So the hippocampus offers up memories to her that the emotionally tagged stimulus from the amygdala brings to the fore, through metaphorical association. If she is impressed enough to think the gathered information warrants the input of her boss, she
adds her own sprinkling of 'cocaine' to the file, to get his attention, and sends it in to him saying, "Boss, sign this straight away!" And we all know who really runs the show. Most of the time, it's the boss's secretary.

So the common denominator for this entire neuronal pathway in the brain is expectation. It starts with the orientation response to the amygdala, which then puts on the first emotional tags to get the attention of the anterior cingulate, the boss's secretary, who then has to arrive at her own expectations, on the basis of the additional information she calls up and uses to decide whether or not to send the information on to her boss in the frontal lobe.

The dopamine pathway is the part of the brain that Professor Solms found to be damaged in stroke victims who stopped dreaming. In other words, in these patients, the communication lines for generating expectations had been damaged. So the secretary stops getting her mail from the amygdala and, as a result, she and the boss are left twiddling their thumbs, with nothing much to do. It is, then, expectations that fuel dreams, which is what the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming predicts.

I would like to stress why it is important for human givens therapists to have a subtle and sophisticated understanding of what we mean when we talk about emotions and say it is important to calm people's emotions down. It doesn't mean that we are 'anti-emotion'. The human givens approach is about increasing the richness of human expectations — which are emotions — and refining them, so that our patients can take a wider perspective on reality and get their needs met more effectively. It is the crudeness of expectations that leads to the expression of crude emotions and behaviours, and that leads to crassness and cruelty in our culture and the inhumane way society is run.

Not so long ago, as a treatment for mental illness, so primitive were we that surgeons used to stick knives into the anterior cingulate and scramble up that part of the brain. This operation was known as a frontal lobotomy. In doing it, surgeons completely destroyed their victim's capacities for humanity, often reducing them to "the level of a household pet", an outcome not seen as undesirable.[7]

Today, there is a different barbarity in the mental health system and society at large: the excessive use of mind-influencing drugs. We should be aware that any artificial drug introduced into this amazing brain circuitry of ours is a totally crude instrument. Just as cocaine, alcohol, nicotine or chocolate target the dopamine expectation pathway to give good feelings, and yet do damage if overused, so do over-prescribed, mood-altering medicines. They are little different from alcohol or cocaine, which are just primitive, easy ways of creating pleasant trance states and avoiding the effort required to make the experience of life worthwhile, as nature intended.

Obviously, some drugs are stronger than others. Cigarettes, like cocaine, are stimulants but so mild (though highly addictive) that they don't disrupt the functioning of the observing self, so smokers don't become less capable of acting responsibly. The emotional tag attached to smoking is weak enough not to disrupt the functioning of consciousness, whereas we all know that too much alcohol can play havoc with consciousness, as does too much cannabis, heroin or cocaine.

Expectation and depression

Professor Mark Solms recently participated in a Radio 4 programme called In Our Time: science and dreaming.[8] Towards the end, another participant, Professor V S Ramachandran, a leading brain researcher at the University of California, San Diego, made a throwaway remark that there is a connection between long amounts of REM sleep and depression. Solms contradicted this, saying that people dream less when they're depressed and, presumably because this is not Ramachandran's field of expertise, he let that go unchallenged. This was a great pity because Solms's statement was misleading.

We have maintained for some years that there is a connection between dreaming and clinical depression. Indeed, this insight is at the core of why good human givens therapists are among the most effective at treating depression. When people get depressed, their sleep patterns become disrupted and they typically wake in the mornings still exhausted and unable to motivate themselves. This is described in Human Givens.[3] Depressed people enter REM sleep much earlier than non-depressed people. They continue in REM sleep for much longer. Normally, in a non-depressed person, 90 minutes pass before the first REM sleep period and it lasts for a maximum of 10 minutes, often less. In a depressed person, the first REM period occurs within about 50 minutes of falling asleep, in some cases 20 minutes, and can last for up to 50 minutes. So, in depressed patients, there is a massive increase in early onset of REM sleep and duration of initial REM periods. But it isn't the longevity of the REM periods that is critical but the intensity of the PGO waves and the amount that they are fired.

In an experiment on a cat, for example, PGO waves were artificially and continually triggered off in the brainstem, and the cat responded as though there were hallucinated creatures around it, just as a psychotic patient might. But eventually the cat's brain had no energy left to fire the response and the cat collapsed as if dead.[9]

This experiment indicates that the PGO waves, or orientation response, tap into an attention energy store, and that, once the energy in it is used up, the animal will collapse exhausted. To recap, then, the critical factor is not the number of dreams recorded but the intensity and amount of firing of the PGO waves (which in humans is demonstrated in rapid eye movements and muscular twitching). So, in depressed people, it is the intensity of the REM state and the upsetting of the balance between REM sleep and slow-wave sleep (slow-wave sleep is the state in which the brain normally repairs tissues, boosts the immune system and re-energises itself) that determine if the brain will become dysfunctional or not.

It follows from the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming that depressed people should have depressed dream content. Nobody has found other-wise. And, if content is related to mood, that is another indication that dreams are not random epiphenomena.

Expectations can be both positive and negative. We can have happy dreams that make us feel fulfilled, joyous or content, and we can have sad, distressing dreams. If depressed people dreamed happy dreams, Freud might be right, and expectation fulfilment theory would be wrong. But they do not have happy dreams. In their dreams, they act out their depressive expectations of life going wrong. We know that, in an emotionally disturbed person, the expectation circuitry in the brain has been selectively activated and is continually firing off strong negative emotional messages. We know this from studies of the physiology of the brain and now we can explain it psychologically. It is negative catastrophic expectations that disturb people and induce panic attacks, anger, anxiety, depression, etc. When people can't fulfil their natural expectations, or their expectations are unrealistic or harmful, they develop mental illnesses.

Expectations of pain

In depressed people we see that their ability to have positive expectations of getting their needs met has collapsed and they are left only with expectations of pain. They expect terrible things to happen and feel powerless to stop them happening. This lopsided use of imagination explains why humans are so prone to depression. Animals only get depressed when their fundamental physical needs are not met, because they have no imaginations to get them worried.

A young man once came to me with a vomiting phobia, arising from feeling sick whenever he ate in public. When he was at secondary school he thought that, once he got to university, the fear would go away. But it didn't, and he worried about it so much that he became depressed and suicidal.

However, in just one session of counselling, I helped him to see that this was not a big problem at all and that it affected less than one per cent of his life. He could still play soccer. He could still do his exams. He could still have a laugh with his mates. Once he had consciously stepped out of the emotional frame of mind where his expectation was that his entire life was ruined, he could see that the problem was insignificant. He was comfortable and could live with it. When he came back to see me the second time he felt totally different. His depression had lifted and he was enjoying life at university and hardly ever thought about vomiting. Yet all I had done was change his expectation — his emotionally charged view of what he thought was going to happen.

It is always emotionally charged patterns like this that keep people locked in various forms of emotional distress. We depress ourselves by mis-using our imaginations and conjuring up in our minds emotionally arousing expectations of disaster (instead of solving our problems and getting our

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References

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell 2006

This article first appeared in Volume 11, No, 1 (2004) of the Human Givens journal.

JOE GRIFFIN is a psychologist and psychotherapist. He is co-founder with Ivan Tyrrell of the human givens approach.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top