<< PREVIOUS PAGE

“This trembling web”: The brain and beyond

know that every time we access a memory, for instance of a famous film star, the effect is long term inhibition of other film stars in a similar category. This is the superstar phenomenon. The more times you access a particular member of a category, the harder it is to access and remember the competitors and, as a result of this, things that you access a lot will spring to mind spontaneously a lot. So if you have a category concerned with childhood or past experiences, and if you are encouraged to ruminate and access particular memories repeatedly, then not only are you making it more likely that these memories will spring to mind, but you are also reducing the probability of accessing other memories which might have less negative effects on mood.

Griffin: And perhaps that's why empirical research shows that when people are depressed they give a much more negative version of their childhood than they do when they are out of depression.

Robertson: Ah yes, the mood state. There's a phenomenon that I'm sure you know about, called state-dependent learning, which means that people are more likely to access memories if the state is re-invoked with which these memories are associated. So if you had traumatic experiences in your youth and you were depressed and anxious for a time as a result of them, these memories are the ones likely to be accessed if you become depressed and anxious again in later life. And the more you access them, the more likely you are to access them, so it's a vicious circle of positive feedback. I've little doubt that people are at risk from any therapy that focuses on ruminating on the past.

Griffin: And that kind of therapy is still widespread. There was a research study done, involving most of the GP practices in Oxfordshire, which compared those which had a large amount of counselling input, those which had a moderate amount and those which had a very small amount. The finding was that the higher the counselling input, the higher the prescription rates of antidepressant medication.

Robertson: Very interesting. There was a famous randomised study done in the United States during the 1930s with children in deprived neighbourhoods who were at high risk of delinquency and other things. They set up a counsellor support system for children in the treatment group, involving home visits, getting the children to go out to programmes and trying to enrich their impoverished environment. The control group had none of this. The children were followed up for years, and 25 to 30 years later there was an incredible difference between the two groups in terms of imprisonment, alcoholism, delinquency. But it was in favour of the control group!

Griffin: My goodness!

Robertson: The control group did far better. And the interpretation of the study was to question the psychological effects of being seen as someone whose family cannot cope and who is in need of this paternalistic input. What are the consequences of being labelled in such a way? So I think one should not lightly refer someone to a professional for counselling or therapy! Obviously, there are certain cultural contexts. In New York in the 1980s, if you didn't have your therapist, who were you? But a lot of children are being referred for counselling and psychological assessment these days and you have to wonder what the consequences of that are.

Griffin: And not just for the people going in for counselling. One of the things that we have reservations about is the fact that most counsellors trained in Britain are required themselves to have long term personal counselling.

Robertson: Yes.

Griffin: I recently heard a professor of psychology boast that his trainee counsellors had to have 450 hours of personal counselling. Now if that personal counselling takes the form of rehearsing what went wrong in their lives, the counselling is resculpting their brains and their own mindsets. And both I and other colleagues have had a number of trainee counsellors come to us who weren't emotionally unbalanced prior to the onset of this form of long term counselling but, in the process of their counselling training, became emotionally disturbed.

Robertson: I can believe that. I have to say that I and others have noticed a change in the personality of friends or acquaintances who have gone into long term psychoanalytical therapy for training purposes. It may be that spending so much time introspecting about yourself may take away some of the idiosyncrasies from the personality that one presents to the outside world. Too much introspection, I think, can have negative effects.

Griffin: Indeed, if you look at almost all cases of emotional disturbance that one comes across clinically, whether it's clinical depression or people who are highly anxious, what they have in common is a very high level of emotionally arousing introspection.

Robertson: Exactly.

Griffin: And they seem to get better when they switch to an external focus and start connecting with reality and generating positive life experiences.

Robertson: Yes. One of the studies of depression treatment that I've been most impressed with recently is the one by John Teasedale and his colleagues in Cambridge, which was published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology last year. They used mindfulness meditation training for people with a history of depression who were in remission and achieved a statistically significant reduced level of relapse. The people were trained to develop a certain detachment from the thoughts and emotions associated with downward spiral into depression by learning to control their attention and not allow themselves to be dragged down into their highly habitual, almost hard-wired processing system. That's an example, I think, of the therapeutic use of attention.

Griffin: And of course it's an approach that's been used for thousands of years in the traditional psychologies of the East, where they talk about stepping back into more objective awareness.

Robertson: And to me, in the context of what we were talking about earlier, that is almost the antithesis of the ruminative replaying of traumatic events.

Griffin: Yes it is.

Robertson: It's teaching people to maintain a broad focus of attention in the presence of these thoughts and thereby helping break some of the synaptic connections between these memories and the usual cognitive processes that follow on from them.

Griffin: The nice thing about the study you mentioned is that it shows there is not just one route for achieving that therapeutic effect. Cognitive therapy achieves it by teaching people to dispute the emotionally arousing negative thinking that's going on and here we're getting the same benefit using a different method. When you get similar effects from two different theoretical approaches it often suggests that there's a more fundamental underlying pattern there. Most of the major inputs into cognitive therapy, for example, were formulated 40 or 50 years ago and it seems to me that it doesn't accurately reflect the neurophysiology of the brain as we understand it today.

Robertson: Absolutely true.

Griffin: For example, there is much more awareness now that a lot of data processing is done at a subconscious level, through the sensory and limbic systems, before it ever reaches consciousness, which receives only a very small, selected output from that. If data is first of all processed at a subconscious level, surely that would indicate that emotions can arise prior to the thought, which is rather the opposite of what cognitive therapy implies.

Robertson: Yes, cognitive therapy's theoretical model is that faulty cognitions cause emotional distortion, yet if you treat depression pharmacalogically, people come out of it. So it seems that the causality might be the other way — that thoughts change in line with the mood changing. But that again is the problem of Cartesian duality. It is the bi-directionality of the physiology and the cognitive systems that we have to be thinking about.

Griffin: And again, developing your point that it might be the other way around, the more emotionally aroused we get, the more the limbic system is in control, and then the more polarised and simplified our thought processes become, so we go into more black and white thinking. All forms of distortion which the cognitive therapists have identified can be classified as forms of polarised or black and white thinking. And that's the sort of distortion we would expect from emotional arousal because it's relating to a part of the brain that thinks in 'either/or' terms: am I going to run away or am I going to fight? It is the neocortex which is able to paint in the thousands of shades of grey between the extreme poles. So if people are emotionally aroused we might expect them to have distorted thought processes.

Robertson: Yes, exactly. One consequence of high arousal is a considerable narrowing of the focus of attention to the stimulae which are causing the anxiety. These may be internal or external. Our working memory systems have very limited capacity, and homing attention in on the threat stimulae uses up that capacity. Which means that there isn't the cognitive room to engage in more sophisticated non-black and white thinking. So I completely agree with what you've said.

Griffin: A crude example of that might be where a student goes in to write their finals and they are so tense that their mind just blanks.

Robertson: That's right, particularly if the type of learning that they have engaged in a night or two before has been last minute rote learning as opposed to more reflective learning, in which information has been encoded into their existing knowledge structures more gradually over the previous two weeks. If the information has been encoded in a deep form by relating it to existing knowledge structures, then that knowledge is going to be much more easily accessed in spite of the anxiety-filled working memory system.

So there might be an interaction between the type of learning and the type of anxiety and it may be that the anxiety partly comes because the type of learning that is done on a shallow level at the last minute is much more unstable and harder to access. And that might cause more anxiety and a vicious cycle again.

Griffin: So some good advice implied there for any readers studying for exams in the near future!

Robertson: Yes, that's right! It is true also, I guess, of handling stressful situations. If people are well practised and well rehearsed in coping strategies suited to a range of situations, then the more these have been applied in different situations, the better able people will be to deploy them in a given stressful situation.

Griffin: I understand that. I think this idea of sculpting our brains by the way we focus attention is an exceptionally fruitful way of understanding mind/body connections. You mention attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in your book and the massive increase now in children, particularly, apparently, in boys. Do you have any thoughts on what might be going on there? Or what we might do about it and why it's arising?

Robertson: Yes. I do some work in attention deficit disorder and I take quite a biological approach to it, in the sense that there is no doubt a small percentage of children, as you say mainly boys, whose brains seem a bit different. But there is a much larger percentage who show similar patterns of behaviour — problems of attention, problems of impulse control, etc — but whose brains probably aren't all that much different. There's no doubt that one of the things we learn from our parents and schools is how to attend and how to deploy our own attention — you know, what to look at and how to

READ ON >>

<< PREVIOUS PAGE

© Human Givens Publishing Limited, Joe Griffin and Ian Robertson (2000)

This article first appeared in Volume 7, No, 3 (2000) of the Human Givens journal.

PROFESSOR IAN ROBERTSON is professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin, director of Trrinity College Institute of Neuroscience, and is visiting professor at University College London, with a further appointment in Toronto. He was formerly a scientist at the medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and is one of the world's leading researchers on brain rehabilitation, on which subject he has published numerous scholarly books and scientific papers, including Mind Sculpture.

> 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 about psychosis and the new thinking on its causes at the following MindFields College seminars:

Understanding the mental health continuum

Brief psychotherapy strategies

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 about psychosis and the new thinking on its causes at the following MindFields College seminars:

Understanding the mental health continuum

Brief psychotherapy strategies

Return to top