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Archived Comments for: Decade of the Mind

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  1. But what about the Psychotherapies in the 'Decade of the Mind'?

    Richard Gipps, CASPD, Salomons, Canterbury Christ Church University

    23 February 2008

    In his paper Manfred Spitzer adds his support to the call of neuroscience colleagues to instigate a ‘Decade of the Mind’ to follow on from the recently ended ‘Decade of the Brain’. I was surprised at, and wish to comment on, the rather small place offered to psychotherapy within this proposed new era – within, that is, an era which one might have thought would have provided a considerably more hospitable abode for it than the previous neurocentric one.

    Spitzer starts by referencing evidence suggesting that drug therapy for depression may work in part by promoting growth of neurones damaged by the stresses of the depressive episode. ‘And talk therapy?’ he asks. Here we are given three choices: either talking causes hippocampal neurogenesis which in turn causes remission; or it is simply correlated with it; or ‘talking to [sic] an ill patient [sic] may be akin to typing into a word processor “don’t crash” after your computer has just crashed.’ Spitzer then comments, ‘Recent empirical research on the unconscious workings of our mind has revealed that “talking” may in fact be a quite superficial approach to brain function’ citing Haidt’s (2005) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom as his empirical evidence. The first – talking – option is then dropped in what follows, except for a partial role in treating PTSD before the genuinely efficacious use of drugs to ‘erase’ haunting ‘memory traces’ can be deployed.

    The first thing to be said is that to call psychotherapy ‘talk therapy’ may be as misleading as calling neurosurgery ‘scalpel therapy’. The problem is not in the name, but in the kinds of inferences the label encourages us to make. For example, if we start to think in terms of ‘talk therapy’, we might start to think that psychotherapy is supposed to have its effects purely through the representational content of the verbal transactions that are carried out between the two participants. Or we might think that it amounts to a kind of discussing of one’s problems and attempts to find solutions to them.

    If on the other hand we acknowledge the possibility that psychotherapy involves, and works through the development of: an emotionally powerful relationship; the activation and gradual modification of fundamental spontaneous and embodied (i.e. not primarily reflectively mediated) patterns of interpersonal expectation and trust; stabilised patterns of affective responding to others who can gradually be perceived more realistically; the exposure and response prevention to highly charged and previously avoided internal emotional responses; or, if the CBT tradition is more one’s style, the exposure to and renegotiation of previously avoided external stimuli – then the epithet ‘talk therapy’ will begin to look less apt as a characterisation of what psychotherapy may be doing. None of this of course is to say that the psychotherapies do indeed work, if and when they do, in the ways described above, i.e. in the ways they themselves have variously theorised their own impact. The point is rather a rhetorical one: to think of psychotherapy as ‘talking to’ (or even talking with? – or perhaps sometimes even listening to?) a patient may lead to characterisations of it which make the ‘epiphenomenal’ charge – the view that psychotherapy is akin to ‘typing into a word processor “don’t crash” after your computer has just crashed’ – appear to stick far more easily than perhaps it ought.

    And what of the evidence for efficacy of the psychotherapies? First, in the proposed ‘Decade of the Mind’, and unlike in the ‘Decade of the Brain’, perhaps we can be forgiven for directing our investigation primarily at the impact of therapy on cognitive and emotional processes rather than on the brain. If we insist – and my belief is that we would surely be right to do so – that changes in emotional and personality functioning are underpinned by changes in neurological functioning – then the large body of evidence for the effectiveness of the psychotherapies (Roth & Fonagy, 2004) could itself be taken as prima facie strong evidence for the mutative effects of psychotherapy on the brain.

    Spitzer is keen that the ‘Decade of the Mind’ should involve the development of the contribution of neuroscience to education – i.e. to understanding the neural mechanisms through which effective learning occurs. I wonder what would happen if we were to describe the role of the teacher as simply that of ‘talking to’ his or her students? The idea that real education might take place through such a mere ‘talking relationship’ might then begin to look absurd: surely real learning consists, as it were, and within the constraints of the now admittedly rather disturbing computer metaphor, of actually programming and reprogramming the children who attend our classes, not simply inputting words into the word processing documents filed in their imaginations. Then again, if we ditch the idea that education consists in mere ‘talking to’, we might arrive at a model of learning – as a fundamental engagement of the whole human being in a recursive and living process of change and growth – that might not be a bad place to start when trying to understand how the psychotherapies work.

    References

    Roth, A. & Fonagy, P. (2004). What Works for Whom: A Critical Review of Psychotherapy Research, 2nd Revised Edition. New York: Guilford Press.

    Competing interests

    No competing interests to declare.

  2. proposed difinition of MIND

    PRAMOD KUMAR, Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, M.G. Road Lucknow (U.P.), INDIA

    10 April 2009

    Mind may be explained as M.I.N.D where M= denotes memory, I= mean intelligence, and N= represents all neural activities and lastly D= represents, drive / movements.<br> Here, we propose the protocol for study of MIND as part of neurobehavioral studies which includes all parameters representing the outcome/details of MIND.<br>PRAMOD

    Competing interests

    As a psychologist I proposes that a detail study of MIND is not possible with out study of living being.So the need of time to study the animal experimentation is needed in live studies.In neurosciences the study of mind is on proposed pattern of MIND is necessary.<br>With Thanks,<br>PRAMOD

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