What's New in Neurofeedback

DK Games announces soon-to-be released "Renaissance Art" for EEGer. Release is anticipated in January. This game set includes nearly 600 paintings from the following artists - Bosch, Botticelli, Bruegel, Cranach, Durer, Ghirlandaio, Giorgione, Lotto, Messina, Michelangelo, Raphael, Solari, Titian, Van Eyck, and others. For more information, see www.skiltopo.com/wanda .

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Links at http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain

 

In the 19th century, mental health was grounded on morality and common sense. People were committed to institutions for masturbation, grief, foolishness, and laziness. Woman suffered from "uterine derangement" or "seduction and disappointment" (Moul, 1998; Weston State Hospital problems at admission, 1864-89). In the 20th century mental health fell under the spell of Freud's psychosexual fantasies and only later was mental illness conceived as sets of maladaptive behaviors, regardless of origin. Behavioral classification became a cottage industry in the US after the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was published in 1952. In 1968 the DSM was revised, with little fanfare, as the European influence of Freud and his colleagues continued and many psychologists still consider the mother-child relationships as the source of mental and emotional disturbances. This was the heyday for Bruno Bettelheim and others who sold others on schizophrenigenic mothers who induced temporal lobe hallucinations in their children and refrigerator mothers who rewired otherwise healthy cerebellums in autistic sons and daughters.

Since 1968 the DSM has been periodically updated: in 1980 (III), 1987 (III-R, or revised), 1994 (IV), and in 2000 (IV-TR, or text revision), and now we've past the original deadline for DSM-V (2007). Mental illness is now brain illness, functionally if not structurally. We still examine the tiremarks left behind by trauma, but now the scarring is in the brain and not the psyche, and we can measure brain activity clearly, in part or in whole. We still have all the wonderful baggage of Psychology -- attachment, love, consciousness -- and now we add physics, energy itself, information, the tools used to understand the creation of the solar system and the galaxies. The brain is an energy regulation undergoing evolutionary changes akin to galaxies, but infinitely more complex due to the rapidity of the interactions in humans (galaxies move very slow relative to each other). The rules of attraction still apply, but so do a myriad of others. Mental illness conceived as energy disregulation of the brain may be the easiest to understand, to detect, and to resolve. Brain activity can be monitored via blood flow, oxygenation, energy manifestations, and metabolically and through this cold and dry information we may model the emotional states of an individual.

Emotions emerge in the smallest mammalian brains, and appear to be absent in reptiles, probably as emotions hinge on learning. We do not feel unless we know we can feel something different, learn our way out of this hole. The primary emotions are joy, sadness, and disgust and they emerge in the infant at 3 months, which is only a 400 gram brain. Anger rears its head by months 2-6 (700 g) and surprise during the same 6 months. Fear begins around 6-8 months (900 g) and peaks at 18 months with stranger anxiety, unless one has autism. The complexity of emotions increases with brain volume and self-conscious emotions emerge in the 2nd year of life. We show empathy, jealousy, and embarrassment between 18 to 24 months (1,100 g) and these develop into pride, shame, and guilt by the toddler years (30 months, 1,200 g). But that is the human brain, and the primate brain needs only a smattering of neurons to understand important concepts like fairness, justice, and special needs. The capuchin with its 52-gram brain shows an understanding of social fairness in that it will show its displeasure if another monkey gets rewarded better for the same behavior.

Plutchik (1980) conceives of four opposing pairs of primary emotions-- disgust/trust, joy/sadness, fear/anger, surprise/anticipation. Some theorists include desire, interest, contempt, distress, subjection, tenderness, and wonder as part of the elementary list of emotions. Panksepp (1998) divided emotions into a primordial set – fear, rage, and seeking – which are necessary for survival, and a social set – lust, panic, care, and play-- which are needed for social bonds. How emotions are incorporated into one's behavioral repertoire becomes one's personality, which has numerous models from a basic cortical wiring view of two axes (Eysenck), five groupings (OCEAN), or a continuum that weighs in how a child responds to reward, risk, and punishment. Our behaviors are often a direct function of imperfect knowledge such as of future events, outcomes, and other uncertainties.

Craig (2003) conceives emotional life in terms of responses to internal as well as external environments. He distinguishes between "classical emotions" such as lust, anger and fear -- feelings evoked by environmental stimuli that motivate us (e.g., copulate/fight/flee), and "homeostatic emotions" which are evoked by internal body states such as thirst, hunger, temperature needs, and sleep deprivation. The primate brain represents this information cortically, allowing a meta-awareness of the bodily condition. In another model, what I call the accelerater/brake model, the left prefrontal cortex (medial area, generally) activates in response to positive stimuli and makes us approach. This area can be conceived as the end of the pleasure pathway beginning in the forebrain bundle including the ventral tegmentum. The right prefrontal cortex (medial) activates to negative stimuli and helps us to avoid or withdraw, and and this can be conceived as the end of the pain pathway begun in the left periaqueductal gray area. In EEG research, focus has been on electrode sites F3-F4 asymmetry thought to reflect the balance of this system.

By grounding our understanding of emotions in terms of brain function and dysfunction, we may limit the explosive growth of the DSM approach to classifying mental illness and focus our treatment of emotional disturbances accordingly.

-DK

References

Craig, A. D. (2003). Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13: 500-505. http://www.jsmf.org/meetings/2007/oct-nov/CONB%20Craig%202003.pdf

Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3-33). New York: Academic Press.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reviews NEW &/OR USEFUL BOOKS - Focus on Dawkins and Dennett

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Kay Redfield Jamison
Well-known author of mood/creativity research discusses her own case of an unquiet mind.

Mood Genes: Hunting for Origins of Mania and Depression
Samuel H. Barondes
Our tendencies to be happy or sad is partly genetic.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Gustav Jung, Michael York (Narrator)
An autobiography put together at the end of Jung's life.

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
Rudy Rucker
Mathematician Rucker explores infinity in all its forms

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
M. Mitchell Waldrop
Science magazine reporter Waldrop introduces researchers--rebellious graduate students, Nobel laureates, and pragmatic businessmen--who are formulating surprising answers to complex questions about the universe. Line drawings.

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Carl Sagan Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.

Heterogeneity of causes and courses of ADHD.
Functional MRI reveals frontostriatal network deficit for ADHD
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19807721

Interaction between psychological health and traumatic brain injury: a neuroscience perspective.
Brain repair may be impeded due to poor mental health.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19882478

Psychoneurotherapy effect on brain electromagnetic tomography in individuals with major depressive disorder.
Excessive high-beta fronto-temporal activity was associated with depression.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19914046

Need for Individualization in Neurofeedback: Heterogeneity in QEEG Patterns Associated with Diagnoses and Symptoms.
Neurotherapy ought to be guided by neuroimaging assessment as well as behavioral and subjective evaluations.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19760143

What neurobiology cannot tell us about addiction.
We need integrative approaches, not reductionistic studies of addiction to understand this phenomenon.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19919596