The title says it all - this article argues for the use of psychoanalytic techniques to create differing states of consciousness with the intent to map those states with brain imaging. The authors...

argue that viewing psychoanalysis as a method for elucidating subjective experience best motivates collaboration between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Sketching the crux of contemporary neuropsychoanalysis, we highlight the relative merits of a crosstalk with the critical neuroscience movement of neurophenomenology.

It's a short but interesting article.

Full Citation:
Cusumano EP and Raz A. (2014, Apr 29). Harnessing psychoanalytical methods for a phenomenological neuroscience. Frontiers in Psychology: Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis; 5:334. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00334

Harnessing psychoanalytical methods for a phenomenological neuroscience

Emma P. Cusumano [1] and Amir Raz [2]

1. Department of Cognitive Science, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
2. Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

Psychoanalysis proffers a wealth of phenomenological tools to advance the study of consciousness. Techniques for elucidating the structures of subjective life are sorely lacking in the cognitive sciences; as such, experiential reporting techniques must rise to meet both complex theories of brain function and increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies. Analysis may offer valuable methods for bridging the gap between first-person and third-person accounts of the mind. Using both systematic observational approaches alongside unstructured narrative interactions, psychoanalysts help patients articulate their experience and bring unconscious mental contents into awareness. Similar to seasoned meditators or phenomenologists, individuals who have undergone analysis are experts in discerning and describing their subjective experience, thus making them ideal candidates for neurophenomenology. Moreover, analytic techniques may provide a means of guiding untrained experimental participants to greater awareness of their mental continuum, as well as gathering subjective reports about fundamental yet elusive aspects of experience including selfhood, temporality, and inter-subjectivity. Mining psychoanalysis for its methodological innovations provides a fresh turn for the neuropsychoanalysis movement and cognitive science as a whole – showcasing the integrity of analysis alongside the irreducibility of human experience.
 

Introduction

This paper illustrates how the marriage of phenomenology and psychoanalysis can inform the scientific study of consciousness. In particular, we outline the potential psychoanalysis holds as a tool for fostering different states of awareness and gathering experiential accounts for the purposes of cognitive neuroscience. Methods for elucidating the structures of phenomenal experience are scantily present in the landscape composing the cognitive sciences. This lacuna – a palpable gap between subjective and objective techniques – calls for expert methods to discern and describe experience from first and second person perspectives. While readily embracing psychodynamic theory, proponents of the neuropsychoanalysis movement have largely overlooked the methods inherent to analysis. A central aspect of the psychoanalytic approach, the unstructured narrative interaction forms the backbone of analysis. Though unconventional in the context of experimental neuropsychology, to disparage the narrative dynamic would cripple the research potential of psychoanalysis (Bazan, 2011). For example, cognitive scientists stand to benefit from narrative approaches to guide participants to uncover unconscious aspects of their experience, cultivate meta-awareness, and elicit descriptive firsthand reports. Here we argue that viewing psychoanalysis as a method for elucidating subjective experience best motivates collaboration between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Sketching the crux of contemporary neuropsychoanalysis, we highlight the relative merits of a crosstalk with the critical neuroscience movement of neurophenomenology. We conclude by discussing how the development of new phenomenological techniques may leverage psychoanalytic methods in the clinical and experimental study of consciousness.
 

Neuropsychoanalysis in Flux

Neuroscientists, as well as psychoanalysts, are still trying to determine the nature of their collaboration in the burgeoning field of neuropsychoanalysis. Controversy regarding the relationship between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences dates back to Freud’s time, and continues to garner much attention today (Cohler and Galatzer-Levy, 2007). While some scholars consider neurobiology and psychoanalysis to be epistemologically and terminologically irreconcilable (Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, 2011), the organic basis of mental life is one of the founding tenets of psychoanalysis (e.g., Freud, 1910b, p. 209). Freud (1895) had anticipated a future in which the psychological and neural sciences would coalesce. Since the 1990s, this vision has gradually come to fruition: while neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have rekindled their interest in psychoanalytic ideas, analysts have increasingly turned toward the biological sciences (Fotopoulou et al., 2012). Overarching arguments continue to suggest that neuropsychoanalysis binds neuroscience and analysis by facilitating a crosstalk on topics of mutual interest (Solms and Turnbull, 2011). These global accounts inspire leading contemporary scholars to follow this intuitive lead and expound on the details of this cooperation.

Most research under the label of “neuropsychoanalysis” seeks to situate the concepts of psychoanalysis within the framework of contemporary neuroscience. Early collaboration, in the spirit of Freud, centered on understanding neuropathology from a psychodynamic perspective (Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000). This manner of clinically oriented investigation has since expanded to include studies of pathological behavior (e.g., depression and anxiety, Zellner et al., 2011), the neural mechanisms of psychodynamic psychotherapy (Gerber, 2011), as well as attempts to find biological measures for therapeutic outcomes (Shedler, 2010). Other research in neuropsychoanalysis fits with the preclinical cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. These investigations aim to develop models of the brain that accommodate and illuminate psychoanalytic phenomena such as repression (Bazan and Snodgrass, 2012), libido (Pfaff and Fisher, 2012), the dynamic unconscious (Shevrin et al., 1996; Berlin, 2011; Solms and Zellner, 2012), and dreaming (Zellner, 2013). As the investigatory domain of contemporary neuropsychoanalysis grows, so does the variety of empirical approaches: from neuroimaging techniques to experimental behavioral methods and animal studies (Fotopoulou et al., 2012).

Some analysts view neuropsychoanalysis as a weight on psychoanalytic discourse. Such clinicians see the movement as perpetuating the view that psychoanalysis needs biological bolstering to be complete, legitimate, and relevant (Blass and Carmeli, 2007). Other scholars have been especially critical of neuropsychoanalysis, suggesting that it could taint quality, and understanding of analysis among clinicians (Hoffman, 2009). These claims likely emerge in response to studies that purport to investigate the “scientific validity” of psychoanalytic theories (cf dream theory in Shirley, 2011). Alas, such scientism runs counter to the very epistemology set forth by the founders of neuropsychoanalysis, who encourage a balance between scientific objectivity and the subjective insights of psychoanalysis (Fotopoulou et al., 2012). Other critics argue that neuroscience is irrelevant to clinical practice, as the latter emphasizes uniquely personal accounts that are scantily amenable to scientific generalization (Pulver, 2003; Mechelli, 2010). Proponents of neuropsychoanalysis typically respond that while the entire spectrum of neuroscientific studies may be less clinically relevant to psychoanalysts, some studies undoubtedly are, for example animal studies that shed light on primal emotional behavior (Panksepp and Solms, 2012). And while concerns about the integrity of clinical practice remain an important issue, analysts also warn against an insular psychoanalysis that fails to engage in a constructive and critical dialog with the larger scientific community (Safran, 2012).

The collaboration between neuroscience and psychoanalysis reflects greater questions about the nature of scientific research, discourse, and validation (Aron, 2012). By incorporating phenomenological domains into traditional experimental paradigms, neuropsychoanalysis are reshaping the boundaries of science. Findings from neuroscience, moreover, increasingly govern our popular conceptions concerning behavior, psychopathology, and what it means to be human (Thornton, 2011; Young, 2011). Neuropsychoanalysis, therefore, joins the critical neuroscience movement in engaging the scientific community with discussions about culture, meaning, and the irreducibility of human experience (Choudhury and Slaby, 2011). Within this overarching search to unravel the relationship between the mind and body, a central question looms: can the objective third-person methods of cognitive science account for the first-person experience of subjective mental life?
 

Neurophenomenology and the Problem of Consciousness

The question of how and why humans are conscious – known amongst philosophers as the “hard problem” of consciousness – has provoked major debate concerning the nature of scientific inquiry. Most scientists posit that biological mechanisms subserve conscious experience, albeit little knowledge informs the details of such mechanisms (Chalmers, 1995, 2002). Neurologists have long recognized that we seem able to account for the workings of the human brain without recourse to influences beyond the laws of physical science (Eccles, 1965). Subsequently, many thinkers feel hard-pressed to speculate on the evolutionary and functional role of consciousness (Harnad, 2002). Such questions have led some philosophers to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusory heuristic (Churchland, 1981). These thinkers argue that conscious experience just is the neurobiological correlate of consciousness – a position that most neuroscientists hold as their “spontaneous philosophy” (Varela, 1998, p. 31; Dennett, 2001). Others disagree and argue that a description of mind that refers only to biological substrates and processes necessarily leaves something out. These scholars insist that consciousness is irreducible to information processing in the brain (Velmans, 2009) and emphasize that our conscious experience presupposes “every statement, model, or theory” of natural science (Thompson, 2004, p. 394). Such philosophical discord persists, reflecting and motivating practical challenges in the study of consciousness at the experimental level.

One response to the puzzle of consciousness comes from neurophenomenology, a movement founded by Varela et al. (1992). According to Varela, the hard problem is established on a deeply ingrained, falsely dualistic understanding of mind and brain. Instead of trying to philosophically “solve” the hard problem, he proposed that cognitive scientists take a methodological approach (Varela, 1996). In order to elucidate how and why experiences arise from neural processes, scientists require careful descriptions of experience to match the refined objective descriptions of brain functioning (Jack and Shallice, 2001; Lutz, 2002); however, researchers have largely eschewed such first-person methods. This trend partly owes to the recent focus in cognitive science on imaging of the living human brain alongside a long-standing ambivalence towards introspective reports (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). Thus, while researchers are now equipped with many advanced methods for imaging and modeling the brain in fine-grained detail, sophisticated methods for describing and discriminating subjective experience continue to lag behind. Varela advocated bridging this methodological gap by incorporating the experiential techniques of phenomenology into a circulating dialog with the third-person methods of cognitive science. His neurophenomenology seeks to give an “explicit and central role to first-person accounts and to the irreducible nature of experience, while at the same time refusing both a dualistic concession or a pessimistic surrender” (Varela, 1998, p. 32). In doing so, neurophenomenology does not solve, but rather “dis-solves” the hard problem (Varela, 1998).

Proponents of Varela have realized the neurophenomenological project in different forms and under a variety of labels. Some scholars focus on the philosophical details of the collaboration between phenomenology and cognitive science (Gallagher, 2003). These theorists tease apart difficult phenomenological issues, such as the nature of indexing the self (Zahavi and Roepstorff, 2011), and conducting investigations into experiential realms pertinent to clinicians, including the phenomenology of psychopathology, (e.g., Sass et al., 2011). Neurophenomenology is also a growing scientific research program that seeks to modify and complement traditional methods of neuroscience for better phenomenological inquiry. For example, cognitive scientists have adapted a neuroimaging paradigm to allow for periodic “experience sampling” of subjects during experiments (Christoff et al., 2009). Some investigators utilize experimental participants who are already expert at observing and describing their experience, such as Buddhist meditators (Farb et al., 2007; Lutz et al., 2008). Other scholars have proposed that researchers may harness hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestion to alter subjective experience and encourage particular states of awareness (Lifshitz et al., 2013, 2014). One group of researchers in neurophenomenology focuses on developing first-person methods (Depraz et al., 2003; Vermersch, 2009) as well as second-person interviewing techniques for aiding subjects in attending to and articulating their experience (e.g., Petitmengin, 2006). Across all approaches, both theoretical and applied neurophenomenologists aim to bind first-person approaches with the techniques of modern cognitive science to uncover the basic structures of consciousness (Gallagher and Schmicking, 2010).

Psychoanalysis seems apposite to the goals of neurophenomenology; yet neurophenomenologists have largely overlooked psychoanalytic techniques and theories. Instead, neurophenomenologists have turned to two main sources of inspiration: Western Phenomenology (e.g., following philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty; see Schmicking, 2010) and Eastern contemplative traditions including Buddhist practices (Thompson, 2006; Schmicking, 2010). Research in neurophenomenology centers on training or guiding participants to discern and describe their experience with awareness and impartiality (Petitmengin and Bitbol, 2011). The neurophenomenology approach encourages individuals to reflexively observe consciousness from their first-person perspective and to recount accurate and detailed subjective reports (Lutz and Thompson, 2003). Although the inclusion of psychoanalysis in the neurophenomenological toolbox has yet to occur, Western Phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory do overlap (Karlsson, 2010; Csordas, 2012). Indeed, the existential psychiatry movement of the early 20th century bridged the two disciplines in letter as well as in spirit (Halling and Dearborn Nill, 1995). Moreover, current efforts in neurophenomenology such as the “explicitation interview” harken to psychoanalytic techniques. The explicitation interview is a practice of “guided retrospective introspection” that incorporates inter-subjective guidance and non-leading suggestions to promote awareness of processes that typically remain implicit and un-seen within the field of experience, also known as “meta-awareness” (Maurel, 2009; Vermersch, 2009). Similarly, analysts describe the therapeutic process as “making the unconscious conscious” and commonly gage the completion of analysis by when the patient can freely articulate whatever comes to mind (Freud, 1910a; Wachtel, 2012). Thus, psychodynamic methods already suffuse established neurophenomenological protocols for cultivating meta-awareness in untrained participants.

The motives and objectives of neurophenomenology resonate with the call to neuropsychoanalysis. Both movements point to the need for a psychological theory in neuroscience that avoids fracturing or reducing human experience into a collection of functions and abilities. Just as neurophenomenologists emphasize the “embodied mind” (Clark, 1999; Thompson and Varela, 2001), neuropsychoanalysts urge scholars to reimagine the “minded brain” (Panksepp and Solms, 2012). Both groups argue that without a theoretical framework that operates at the level of the subject, neuropsychology fails to capture the psychological at all (Bazan, 2011), as well as stress the need for a “neurophenomenal level of analysis” in experimental neuropsychology (Panksepp and Solms, 2012). Like its phenomenological counterpart, neuropsychoanalysis can be seen as a direct effort against the implicit biological reductionism in cognitive neuroscience. Current research in the neuropsychoanalysis community appears biased toward the traditional methods of cognitive neuroscience. To analysts, collaboration with cognitive neuroscience runs the risk of reducing psychoanalytic “meaning” to neural “cause.” In line with the outlook Varela espoused, a turn toward the methodological in neuropsychoanalysis could help assuage these concerns, shifting the emphasis from psychoanalytic theory (e.g., testing the scientific validity of psychoanalytic concepts) to psychoanalytic methods (e.g., incorporating technical aspects of the therapeutic process into experimental protocols). However, while both neurophenomenology and neuropsychoanalysis call for a theory of experience at the subject level, only the former has generated an empirical program for incorporating that theory in practice. In closing, therefore, we propose that neuropsychoanalysis may present a new incarnation of neurophenomenology.

Concluding Remarks

The practical realization of neuropsychoanalysis-as-neuropheno-menology presents many challenges. For example, is it possible to harness elements of the intuitive therapeutic process in an experimental context? Whereas Varela called upon Western phenomenology and Eastern contemplative traditions for their systematic treatment of firsthand experience, analysts often cite one of the hallmarks of psychoanalysis as the “imprecise” treatment of firsthand experience (Bazan, 2011, p. 2). Written accounts of therapeutic methods (e.g., the specific strategies that an analyst employs to bring out the unconscious stories of their patients) tend to take the form of case studies. Descriptions of more universal or underlying therapeutic techniques are sparse; analysts train in vivo, by engaging in clinical internships and undergoing analysis themselves. While philosophers and analysts have considered the mechanism of psychoanalytic insight and the relation between psychoanalytic insight and the structures of experience as described by cognitive and phenomenological science, these topics remain largely pristine on the proverbial “To Do” list of neuropsychoanalysis research (Strachey, 1934; Karlsson, 2010). And yet, phenomenology and psychoanalysis both draw on the premise that the vague nature of experience hardly precludes its careful articulation, analysis, and interpretation. A dialog between neuropsychoanalysis and neurophenomenology, therefore, would engender more precise ideas concerning the specific psychoanalytic techniques that can inform a correlation between firsthand descriptions of experience and third-person data.

One approach would advocate for including individuals who have undergone analysis as neurophenomenology participants. In the same way we treat seasoned meditators or phenomenologists, we can exploit the process of discerning and describing the psychoanalytic experience. This idea is scarcely new among analysts: “(One) might manipulate different neuropeptides, in research participants who are themselves psychoanalysts, and then have them describe their subjective states, using their expertise in doing so (with reference to the theoretical concepts that we use). Approaches such as this are rather radical, but they have huge potential, and appear to be remarkably underappreciated” (Solms and Turnbull, 2011, p. 9). To consider analysts and analysands experiential experts on par with, say, trained meditators raises many a problem. And yet, experiments involving either psychoanalytically trained individuals or Buddhist monks would both necessarily involve a second-person component – such as the explicitation interview – thereby exploiting a similar experimental approach.

Spanning an array of literature from clinical science and consciousness research, here we show how neurophenomenology casts a fresh light on the neuropsychoanalysis movement. While proponents of neuropsychoanalysis emphasize the importance of bringing a subject-oriented approach to cognitive neuroscience, these scholars have largely neglected the task of incorporating psychodynamic methods in an experimental setting. Cognitive scientists, however, stand to benefit from drawing on psychoanalytic techniques. Given their expertise in calling the unconscious mind to awareness, analysts could help researchers promote meta-awareness and gather subjective reports that effectively describe the structures of experience. At the same time, focusing on the possibilities of methodological exchange between neuroscience and psychoanalysis offers an answer to concerns within the neuropsychoanalysis community. Rather than foisting neuroscientific methods and models onto the theories of psychoanalysis, mining analysis for its phenomenological capabilities would ensure the integrity of the psychodynamic identity in a domain increasingly tinged with neuro-reductionism. Such an approach would allow neuropsychoanalysis to flourish because of, rather than despite, the different perspectives of its comprising disciplines.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
 

References available at the Frontiers site.

Daniel Dennett - Is Free Will an Illusion? What Can Cognitive Science Tell Us?

Daniel Dennett recently spoke on free and cognitive science at the Santa Fe Institute. He has argued against Sam Harris's rejection of free will, but he does not reject determinism, making him a compatibilist. 

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent.^[1] Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.

Here is a summary of his position from his Wikipedia page:

Free will

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms,^[17] Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.^[18]

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

1. First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
2. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
3. Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
4. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
5. Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
6. Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.^[19]

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.^[20]

I do not buy the determinist argument and I tend to support conditional free will (perhaps limited is a better word).

Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (2013), Breaking the Spell (2006), Freedom Evolves (2003), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Consciousness Explained (1992), and many other books. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. His latest book, written with Linda LaScola, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013).

Is Free Will an Illusion? What Can Cognitive Science Tell Us?

Published on May 17, 2014


Daniel Dennett
May 14, 2014

Serious thinkers contend that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe -- one in which events are the singular outcomes of the conditions in which they occur. The alternative view, that free will is prerequisite for personal responsibility and morality, is the basis of our legal and religious institutions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett unravels this conundrum and asks whether we must jettison one of these notions, or whether they can co-exist. He then asks: if free will is an illusion, as many scientists say, should we conclude that we don't need real free will to be responsible for our actions?

A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine (My Review)

 

Mike Jay is the author of A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine (2003/2014), an in-depth case study of one of the first and best documented cases of what the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM) would eventually name paranoid schizophrenia.

[NOTE: This post goes with an earlier post of a BBC documentary on the history of "madhouses" that appeared here earlier today.]

Here is the ad copy for the book from Amazon:

Confined in Bedlam in 1797 as an incurable lunatic, James Tilly Matthews is one of the most bizarre case studies in the annals of psychiatry. Often cited as the first thorough case study of what we would today call paranoid schizophrenia, Matthews drew intricate diagrams of the "influencing machine" that he believed to be reading and controlling his mind. But his case was even stranger than his doctors realized: many of the incredible conspiracies in which he claimed to be involved were entirely real.

A Visionary Madness traces the story of antiwar advocate James Tilly Matthews through the political and social upheaval of the late eighteenth century, providing a vivid account of the unraveling of Matthews's mind, a snapshot of late eighteenth-century psychiatry, and its relevance to current narratives of madness, conspiracy theories, mind control, and political manipulation. Digging deep into historical records and primary sources, author Mike Jay carefully untangles truth from delusion, providing evidence that Matthews was a political prisoner as much as a madman: he had been working as a double agent in the French Revolution and was privy to political secrets the British government feared he might expose. In the process, Jay illuminates the murky revolutionary politics of the 1790s and situates Matthews' visionary madness within the wider cultural upheavals of a world on the brink of modernity. The details of Matthews' treatment in Bedlam reveals the birth-pangs of early psychiatry and its struggle to free its patients from the harsh regimes of the eighteenth-century madhouse. A fascinating and fast-paced narrative history, A Visionary Madness raises profound questions about the nature of madness and the birth of the modern world.

Matthews had believed he was brokering a peace treaty between England and France, and went to France in 1793, but the Girondists he was speaking with were removed and frequently executed by the Jacobins. Matthews quickly fell under suspicion for his Girondist associations and was suspected of being a double agent. 

Matthews suffered three years of confinement in France following the Jacobin coup d'etat (during what would later be known as "The Reign of Terror"). The French released him in 1796 believing him to be a harmless lunatic. By the point, after three years of nearly constant pleading for his release, which was generally met by silence, he was well on his way to losing his mind (and in fact, it was during this confinement that the first obvious symptoms began to appear).

When he returned to England in 1796, he was locked up in Bethlem Hospital, commonly known as Bedlam, after disrupting a debate in the House of Commons. He was committed as an incurable "lunatic."

Not long after his admission, and as part of a review process in which he sought his release, Matthews became forever entwined with Dr. John Haslam, a physician with an interest in the "insane," and a younger man with a lot of ambition. After the hearing for Matthews' release ended, Haslam saw in his patient a unique opportunity for a case study.

In 1810, Haslam produced the book, Illustrations of Madness (original title: Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate." Haslam's book grew out of the release hearing and from his need to dispute the two doctors who testified to Matthews' sanity. The book contains verbatim accounts of Matthew's beliefs and hallucinatory experiences and is the first full study of a single psychiatric patient in medical history.

The special brilliance of this book is that Jay, more than 300 years after the events described took place, is able to contextualize Matthews' life and experience in such a way that we can see how the events he lived through helped shape and define his particular and unique form of mental illness. For those of us who work in the field, the way we understand psychosis could be completely reframed by this book.

It becomes clear as we read that psychosis is not random, is not purely organic (genetics), and is not lacking an internal logic. Matthews was "driven crazy" by circumstances and temperament, and even in the depths of paranoid delusions about "influencing machines," he comes across as rational and lacks the thought disorder characteristic of schizophrenia. After all, he was able to convince family and friends, as well as the two doctors who testified that he was completely sane.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this case study is that it marks a transition in how mental illness is experienced by the individual. Until this case, most if not all records of psychosis involve influence and control by God, demons, spirits, and other supernatural forces. But Matthews, and millions of people after him, there is now the influencing machine. The rise of science in the Enlightenment created a new source for fear and paranoia - technology.

Jay does a remarkable job of explicating the "air loom" that Matthews believed was controlling him and many other people (if not all people). Here is a brief description of the "air loom" from Wikipedia:

Matthews believed that a gang of criminals and spies skilled in pneumatic chemistry had taken up residence at London Wall in Moorfields (close to Bethlem) and were tormenting him by means of rays emitted by a machine called the "Air Loom". The torments induced by the rays included "Lobster-cracking", during which the circulation of the blood was prevented by a magnetic field; "Stomach-skinning"; and "Apoplexy-working with the nutmeg grater" which involved the introduction of fluids into the skull. His persecutors bore such names as "the Middleman" (who operated the Air Loom), "the Glove Woman" and "Sir Archy" (who acted as "repeaters" or "active worriers" to enhance Matthews' torment or record the machine's activities) and their leader, a man called "Bill, or the King".

Matthews' delusions had a definite political slant: he claimed that the purpose of this gang was espionage, and that there were many other such gangs armed with Air Looms all over London, using "pneumatic practitioners" to "premagnetize" potential victims with "volatile magnetic fluid". According to Matthews, their chief targets (apart from himself) were leading government figures. By means of their "rays" they could influence ministers' thoughts and read their minds. Matthews declared that William Pitt was "not half" susceptible to these attacks[3] and held that these gangs were responsible for the British military disasters at Buenos Aires in 1807 and Walcheren in 1809 and also for the Nore Mutiny of 1797.

In 1814 Matthews was moved to "Fox's London House", a private asylum in Hackney, where he became a popular and trusted patient. The asylum's owner, Dr. Fox, regarded him as sane. Matthews assisted with bookkeeping and gardening until his death on 10 January 1815.[4]

Here is Matthews' incredibly detailed illustration of the "air loom":

Interestingly, in addition to the notes Haslem kept on Matthews, Matthews kept notes of Haslem and how he conducted himself, as well as his treatment in Bethlem. These notes became evidence looked at by a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1815, following Matthews death. The hearings led to Haslam's dismissal and to reform of the treatment of patients in the Bethlem Hospital.

It's a fascinating and captivating narrative, and it is told without a lot of jargon. This books is highly recommended for therapists and for those who know someone suffering from psychosis. 

Mental: A History of the Madhouse (BBC Documentary)

Most people have heard the word bedlam, and know that it refers to a chaotic, noisy, and disorganized state of being. The origin of the word is the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, originally founded in 1247, making it likely the oldest psychiatric hospital in Western Civilization. The city of London took over the asylum in 1546-47.

Conditions in Bethlem were often horrid at best, thus the term bedlam - from the fourteenth century, Bethlem had been referred to colloquially as "Bedleheem", "Bedleem" or "Bedlam."

Typically, the hospital appears to have been a receptacle for the very disturbed and troublesome and this fact lends some credence to accounts such as that provided by Donald Lupton in the 1630s who described the "cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chaines, swearings, frettings, chaffings" that he observed therein.

At various times in its early existence, the doors were opened to citizens of the city to come and observe the people kept there (likely beginning in 1598 as a way to create income) - its proximity to two playhouses made it part of a night out for some people.

The hospital was rebuilt in a new location in 1675 and 1676, but it was shoddy work and within 200 years it would need to be rebuilt again.

Anyway, there is a lot to know about Bethlem, but it is only one of the many "madhouses" discussed in this fascinating documentary from the BBC.

Mental: A History of the Madhouse

Published on Feb 10, 2014


Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years.

Here is some more from the Wellcome Trust Library site - which is where the image at the top was also found.

Among the interviewees were patients, members of medical and nursing staffs, the historian Dr Peter Barham, and Dr Henry Rollin FRCP FRCPsych, emeritus consultant psychiatrist at Horton Hospital, Epsom, and former Librarian of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Dr Rollin described the grimly low levels of medical care in many of those asylums, and of care in general. Historic film footage of crude brain surgery was shown. Of prefrontal leucotomy Dr Rollin confessed "I had the misfortune to recommend sixteen patients [for the operation] ... it was of no benefit whatsoever, and some of them had the tragedy of personality change." It seemed at times that the only escape from the tyranny of routine lay in the menace of maltreatment. A former psychiatric nurse in Newcastle told of a difficult patient being dragged away and having a bucket of cold water being poured over him by a staff member who then jammed the bucket on the patient's head. A young woman who suffered panic attacks went to one asylum and ended up staying inside for thirty-three years.

As an illustration of a classic old-style asylum, the programme focused on High Royds near Leeds (illustration top), which had all the right qualifications: a Psycho-type silhouette at twilight, miles of corridors, once fine but now decayed Victorian decoration, the indispensable looming water-tower, and of course a proposal to turn it into luxury residences when it closed in 2003.

High Royds. Drawing by Paul Digby, 2003-4. Wellcome Library no. 643245i

The Wellcome Library has a large drawing made by an artist in High Royds in 2003-2004 as part of the ritual commemorations that were felt to be required at the time of its decommissioning. It looks like drawings done by patients to describe their gloomy life in the asylum. In fact, as film of the High Royds corridors showed, the drawing is merely an atmospheric representation of the actual interior in which patients spent their "empty and repetitive asylum life". There was a "quasi-prison atmosphere" (Dr Rollin again). The film-makers found articulate people who were able and willing to describe their experiences at High Royds and other asylums, whether as patients or as staff. These interviews are priceless.

The film-makers were careful not to make High Royds seem like a scapegoat: after describing episodes of brutality towards patients, the commentary stated that there was "no evidence of this kind of treatment at High Royds" which on the contrary was "in the forefront of the drugs revolution" in therapy. Some of the reminiscences on the High Royds website are quite complimentary, though others, it must be said, recall much unpleasantness. Other asylums in Newcastle, Sussex and Buckinghamshire also featured in the narrative, often with superb historic film footage.

The film showed the long process leading to the closure of the asylums. The first real "breaking point with the Victorian period" (Barham) was the 1959 Mental Health Act. Dame Pat Hornsby Smith MP called for "sympathy and understanding" to be the principles underlying treatment of the mentally ill. In 1961 Enoch Powell as Minister of Health 1960-1963 started a war on the asylums with a remarkable speech seizing on the image of the "looming water-tower and chimney combined" as the emblem of the asylum. Powell urged "the elimination of by far the greater part of this country's mental hospitals as they are today". He lost battles but won the war when Care in the Community was introduced. But Dr Rollin was no happier about the new arrangements than about the bad old days of the asylum. "The whole concept of Community Care is a disaster: I don't think the community cares" (NIMBYism was one of the problems he had in mind).

Daily Om - Moving Through Darkness: The Places We Go

Today's Daily Om looks at the ways we can sometimes find ourselves off track in our lives -- and why that might happen.

Moving through Darkness

The Places We Go

by Madisyn Taylor
May 19, 2014

Often it takes something major to wake us up as we struggle to maintain an illusion of control.
In life, most of us want things to go to the places we have envisioned ourselves going. We have plans and visions, some of them divinely inspired, that we want to see through to completion. We want to be happy, successful, and healthy, all of which are perfectly natural and perfectly human. So when life takes us to places we didn’t consciously want to go, we often feel as if something has gone wrong, or we must have made a mistake somewhere along the line, or any number of other disheartening possibilities. This is just life’s way of taking us to a place we need to go for reasons that go deeper than our own ability to reason. These hard knocks and trials are designed to shed light on our unconscious workings and deepen our experience of reality.

Often it takes something major to wake us up, to shake us loose from our ego’s grip as it struggles to maintain an illusion of control. It is loss of control more than anything else that humbles us and enables us to see the big picture. It reminds us that the key to the universe lies in what we do not know, and what we do know is a small fraction of the great mystery in which we live. This awareness softens and lightens us, as we release our resistance to what is. Another gift gleaned from going to these seemingly undesirable places is that, in our response to difficulty, we can see all the patterns and unresolved emotional baggage that stand in the way of our unconditional joyfulness. Joy exists within us independently of whether things go our way or not. And when we don’t feel it, we can trust that we will find it if we are willing to surrender to the situation, moving through it as we move through our difficult feelings.

We can take our inspiration from any fairy tale that finds its central character lost in a dark wood, frightened and alone. We know that the journey through the wood provides its own kind of beauty and richness. On the other side, we will emerge transformed, lighter and brighter, braver and more confident for having moved through that darkness.

A well-known American poet, Robert Frost, once famously said, "The only way out is through."

Very often, when we find ourselves far from where we wanted to be, either through mistakes we made or the simple ways that life can confound our expectations, there is a reason for the detour.

While we struggle with our loss of control, or self-criticism, we easily lose touch with the big picture. This is when it helps to have friends for support and encouragement, and some form of spiritual practice that can allow us to sit peacefully with our feelings of confusion.

If we do not allow the feelings, we never see the potential for growth that a tough situation provides. In doing so, we only compound the problem and put off dealing with it. The next time it comes up, it will be bigger and more challenging.

Often, if we are willing to listen, there is a quiet voice within us that can help us find our way out of the darkness. But we have to listen.

Robert Berezin - Do Lower Life Forms and Inanimate Matter have Consciousness?

 

Robert Berezin is the author of Psychotherapy of Character: The Play of Consciousness in the Theater of the Brain (2013). This is from his personal blog - a post that offers a basic outline of his views on consciousness inspired by a video on panpsychism and complexity theory.

His views  are very close to my own, as far as I can tell from this post.

Do Lower Life Forms and Inanimate Matter have Consciousness?

Published May 16, 2014 | By Robert Berezin

Regarding the question whether consciousness is a property of animal brains vs. pansychism I come down 100% that consciousness exists solely as a brain function that is created by the limbic cortex. Pansychism is the belief that all life forms, and even molecular, atomic, and sub atomic particles have consciousness. Neil Theise, MD, makes the case for pansychism in his brilliant video “Complexity Theory & Panpsychism”. His illumination of fractals, and the centrality of interactions with the environment throughout the quantum levels going through invertebrates, single celled organisms, DNA, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles is illuminating. I agree with all of his observations with one major exception.

I differ from his conclusion that they have sentience and consciousness. Sentient means capable of feeling. It comes from the Latin sentientem – feeling, and sentire – to feel. It came to mean conscious in 1815. Theise believes that an organism or particle has sentience because it has interactive relatedness with its environment. He claims that they ‘sense’ other particles which implies consciousness. I will present my understanding of sentience and consciousness. Then I will address how it is a fantasy to attribute consciousness to automatic functioning and environmental adaptation.
Human consciousness begins when an infant is approximately six weeks old. Its development begins with the fetal limbic system. The function of the fetal amygdala and limbic system is to map the survival interactions with the maternal environment. This brain circuitry links the body, hormones, subcortical brain, and the cortex—the amygdala for impulses of fear and pleasure; the hippocampus for gluing memories; the cingulate gyrus for attention and autonomic functions, such as heart rate and blood pressure; the hypothalamus for regulating the autonomic nervous system; and the thalamus, the relay station from the sub cortex.

The morphogenesis of the limbic system is progressive and continues in the newborn. At six weeks old, the newborn’s foundational appetites and rudimentary emotions morph a sufficiently high level of order to crystallize into a feeling of tenderness and sweetness. This constitutes the cohered feeling of the being of the baby. Yesterday there was no feeling of the baby. And suddenly it is here. Yesterday, he was simply an infant. Today, he is a human being. This ‘feeling of the being’ is a synthetic creation of extremely high levels of order in the limbic cortex which has been maturing through fetal life and the first six weeks after birth, during which the infant continues to map his survival environment with his mother.

And so it begins. Consciousness is born. The baby is now a sentient being. The ‘feeling’ of the baby is a synthetic persona created by the limbic cortex. This ‘self’ has no representational form. It is not knowable through the senses, thinking, or imagination. It cannot be seen. It is not an idea. It does not lend itself to being understood or comprehended. It only touches and is touched by feeling. The litmus test for the presence of this ‘feeling’ is that the mother (and others) are now touched by the presence of a tender feeling from the baby. Prior to this, the mother is predisposed to love her baby, and does, but there is no actual feeling relatedness. Then everything changes and she does feel him. It is analogous to the appearance of the embryonic heart. At one point there is no heart. And then it is there beating and pumping blood. At one point there is no feeling of the being and then it coalesces and there it is.

This is the beginning of consciousness, which is organized as a rudimentary play in the theater of the brain. This play is composed of a non-representational feeling persona of the baby in relationship with a non representational feeling persona of the mother, also a synthetic creation of the limbic cortex. Over the next three years higher and higher levels of symbolic form develop in the limbic cortex. When sufficiently mature, the personas then have form as representational images of self and others. This is the way we ordinarily know ourselves. However, even though the original ‘being’ of the baby is supplanted, its mapped circuits remain throughout life as the agency that generates the feeling of our being. It is the anchor of our loving. It is the quiet voice inside of us. It is our innocence. It is the source of our creativity. It is the source of our conscience. It is the fountain of our aliveness. None of this is mystical or magical. It is just the way consciousness is organized in the brain.

Consciousness is anchored in feeling – judgment, thinking, and relatedness are all anchored in feeling. Antonio Damasio illuminates this in his brilliant book, Descartes’ Error, Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. The rest of the body operates automatically, autonomically through the subcortical brain and has no consciousness – the uterus, the liver, intestines, etc. They function responsively, but they are not conscious and have no consciousness. Like Dr. Theise, I discuss the life functions of an ameba in chapter five of my book. There is certainly a distinction between an alive organism and inert matter. I agree that there is rudimentary ‘isness’ in the ameba and all life forms. The live ameba exercises its life functions and reproduces under the directions of its DNA. It is different from a dead thing. If it dies, then it no longer ‘is’. However, the ameba has a discrete repertoire of actions that it exercises automatically in relation to its environment. Even though it is alive. It is an automaton. It operates purely automatically, like our liver. It has no brain. It has no intention. It has no self awareness. Aliveness, ‘isness’ does not mean there is consciousness. There is no limbic-cortex to synthesize a feeling-being. Consciousness is the result of evolution. It emerged as an adaptational creation of the brain to interact effectively with the salient environments of the organism, and was selected for.

To attribute sentience to automatic functioning is the result of speculative imagination. And there is no actual evidence that this true. There is no evidence that an ameba has consciousness. Similarly, trees, clams, grass, worms, lobsters operate their life functions with a larger repertoire of automatic actions. But they too have no consciousness. You can physically touch a tree but it does not feel you. You can take a hatchet to a tree and it employs self preservative mechanisms to seal off the wound. But these are automatic processes. There is no consciousness.

I am by no means an expert on ant colonies and bee hives. And I certainly understand that they operate in many ways as if they are one organism. Nonetheless, their complex group behavior does not imply that they are anything but complicated automaton-drones surviving and replicating. It remains a leap to attribute consciousness to their organized behavior. Richard Dawkins in the “Selfish Gene” repeatedly says the attribution of selfishness to a gene is a device, and it in no way implies that they actually have consciousness. Nonetheless people leap to the false conclusion that genes are sentient. They are not. When sixty million human sperm are injected into a female and they race to mate with an egg cell floating in the fallopian tube, this is just automaton activity. The sperm certainly are in a competitive race. This is what they do. But they are not thinking, “Oh my god, Larry is catching up with me, I better step on it.”

Mammals and birds do have limbic cortical brains. Although, different from ours, they have consciousness. They are sentient beings. Furthermore, when considering non-alive entities like DNA and molecules and atoms, we cannot attribute sentience. Dr. Theise conclusion that they are ‘sensing’ other particles is a fantasy leap. Sub atomic particles don’t ‘sense’ things. They automatically react to their environment according to the laws of physics. Theise goes one step further which raises a caution flag to my mind. He utilizes string theory. String theory is very attractive to many people. But it has no actual proof. Just because one can conceive of things outside our experience or imagine other dimensions, does not make them true. Such believed imaginings are not any different from other beliefs which have no proof. To then operate as if string theory is true and to derive implications leads to the construction of a misleading house of cards. Higgs-Bosons are valid, quantum foam has no evidence whatsoever.

All of existence formed from the collision of randomness and order. Both inanimate particles as well as life forms evolve and take hold as a result of natural selection and the laws of physics. The idea that all matter has sentience has no foundation. Its like a modern form of Lamarckism. Everything in the universe interacts with an environment. It is no more credible that evolution comes from acquired characteristics than the idea that everything has consciousness. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that everything has Mind, and then that there is a universal Mind.

Jeremy Rifkin - A World Beyond Markets (The Zero Marginal Cost Society)

 

Jeremy Rifkin's new book is The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014). His previous books include The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (2009) and The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (2013).

First up is a talk by Rifkin at The RSA in London and then an Authors at Google talk from April.

A World Beyond Markets

29th Apr 2014; 18:00

Listen to the audio

(full recording including audience Q&A)
Please right-click link and choose "Save Link As..." to download audio file onto your computer.

Watch the video (edited highlights)


Has capitalism become a victim of its own success?

One of the world’s most popular public thinkers and political advisors, Jeremy Rifkin, argues that capitalism will no longer be the dominant paradigm in the second half of the 21st century.

Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons; “prosumers” are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products; young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.

In this era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares; Rifkin visits the RSA to explain how we are learning to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends.

Chair: Jonathan Schifferes is a senior researcher with RSA’s Action Research Centre.

Here is the Google Talk Rifkin gave in April on his new book.

Jeremy Rifkin: "The Zero Marginal Cost Society" | Authors at Google

Published on Apr 15, 2014


In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin describes how the emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism.

Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, and abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.

Now, a formidable new technology infrastructure—the Internet of things (IoT)—is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead. Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with a nascent Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects everything and everyone. Billions of sensors are being attached to natural resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks, recycling flows, and implanted in homes, offices, stores, vehicles, and even human beings, feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network. Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods.

Rifkin concludes that capitalism will remain with us, albeit in an increasingly streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, says Rifkin, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons. --macmillan.com

About the Author: Jeremy Rifkin is the bestselling author of twenty books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. He has been an advisor to the European Union for the past decade.

Mr. Rifkin also served as an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, and Prime Minister Janez Janša of Slovenia, during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security.

Mr. Rifkin is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania where he instructs CEOs and senior management on transitioning their business operations into sustainable Third Industrial Revolution economies.

Mr. Rifkin holds a degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

This Authors@Google talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

Christian Jarrett Questions the Recent Brain Stim-Lucid Dream Article

Last Tuesday (May 13), I posted on the new research in Nature Neuroscience that suggests low-current (gamma range) brain stimulation can induce lucid dreams. Perhaps all of us who jumped on that story were a little hasty.

Shortly after the original research came out, cognitive neuroscientist Christian Jarrett, writing at his WIRED blog, Brain Watch, posted a serious critique of the research and the conclusions reached.

Too bad - it seemed promising, and maybe it still is when the technology is more refined.

Psychologists Give People Control of Their Dreams Using Brain Stimulation. Really?

05.12.14 | By Christian Jarrett


Image: Old Visuals Everett Collection/Getty
My dreams are often like a bad TV night – full of repeats that I’ve slept through many times before. Other people are luckier. Their dreams are more like a movie experience, but one where they not only get to choose the film, they can also take directorial control and influence the course of events. This is known as “lucid dreaming” and considered a half-way house between sleep and wakefulness.

In a study out this week, a team of psychologists led by Ursula Voss at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, claim to have given non lucid-dreamers the power of lucid dreaming by applying weak electrical current to the surface of their scalps and into their brains.

The rationale behind the study is simple. Past research has associated lucid dreaming with electrical brain activity in the low gamma range – around 40Hz. Voss and colleagues therefore used transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to promote gamma activity in frontal and temporal regions of their participants’ brains, in the hope that this would provoke lucid dreaming (tACS is similar tDCS, which I’ve written about on this blog before).

I have to admit this reasoning tickled my BS-detector a little. Neurobunk research conducted in the 1960s made the mistake of assuming that because experienced meditators exhibit brain activity in the alpha range (around 10Hz), then teaching people to express alpha brainwaves would give them a shortcut to the peace and enlightenment associated with years of meditative practice. It was an elementary case of confusing correlation for causality and results were disappointing.

Despite my initial skepticism, it turns out that, aside from a small sample, this new dream research is well conducted. Voss and her team tested 27 healthy volunteers (15 women, 12 men, none of whom usually have lucid dreams) on four successive nights. Each night, the participants were zapped with electricity in a different frequency range or – and it’s important they included this condition – with no electricity at all (known as a “sham” treatment). The stimulation was delivered after between two and three minutes of uninterrupted REM sleep. Shortly afterwards the participants were woken and they answered questions about the dream they’d just had.

The main result is that stimulation specifically delivered in the low gamma range, at 40Hz, and to a lesser extent at 25Hz, was associated with a greater experience of lucid dreaming, as compared to stimulation at other higher and lower frequencies or to sham treatment. “Our experiment is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to demonstrate altered conscious awareness as a direct consequence of induced gamma-band oscillations during sleep,” the researchers concluded. Excitable headlines have followed, such as “Brain Zap Could Help You Control Your Dreams” and “Having Nightmares? Control Your Dreams With Electric Currents“.

Despite the robust methodology, I think these headlines are getting carried away. Here’s why. Lucid dreaming was defined by higher scores in participants’ feelings of insight (knowing that they were dreaming); dissociation (taking a third person perspective); and control (being able to shape events). I looked up the paper where the researchers first described their scale for measuring these factors. If I understand correctly, the participants rated their experience of these three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I had such an experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively.

Yes, these scores are significantly higher compared with stimulation at other frequencies and with sham treatment, but they are nonetheless incredibly low. A real life creation of the dream control depicted in the movie Inception, this is not! I suppose this study is a proof of principle, so let’s wait and see what comes from future research.

But actually one more thing – these kind of studies that examine the impact of brain stimulation seem so crude. Do the researchers really know what neural effect the stimulation is having and why? I don’t think they do – the explanation in this paper is typically sketchy. “We assume that lower gamma activity is mediated by activation of fast-spiking interneurons that are known to generate gamma oscillations in cortical networks … These networks have been proposed to gate sensory processing, which might also enable lucid dreaming in a temporarily specific manner.” Got that? No, me neither.

Hallucinating Yourself Can Be Both a Symptom and a Tool

Dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization have always been a coping mechanisms the human brain can employ when reality is too intolerable. Occasionally, this can result in the experience of seeing one's double, or doppleganger.

But what happens when it's not part of mental illness, and not organic (often the insular cortex)? Can the experience of an external twin ever be a good thing?

How to Learn to Love Your Doppleganger

Hallucinating yourself can be both a symptom and a tool.

By David Levine | Illustration by Taleen Keldjian
May 15, 2014

WHAT ARE YOU DOING running through the streets in your underpants?” asks Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club. “We both use that body.” He is addressing his unnamed doppelganger (German for “double walker”), whose life he has gradually usurped. The movie, a smash hit grossing $100 million, is just one recent example of our long-standing fascination with the idea of double selves, which stretches from ancient Egyptian and Norse mythology, through German folklore (in which it was considered a harbinger of death), into the hands of Edgar Allan Poe, Groucho Marx, and Brad Pitt.

Freud was one of the first to attempt to treat doppelgangers scientifically, calling them the “return of the repressed.” He argued that they are an aspect of the psyche that is out of control, and will persist until directly confronted and defeated. Modern science has taught us that, in one sense, he was right: Doppelgangers are the result of a fracture in the process by which we construct our identity.

In the fall of 2011, a 15-year-old girl came to the Department of Neurology at the University of Geneva suffering from seizures. She told Olaf Blanke, a neurology professor at the university, that during her seizures she saw her own double. Her visions happened during the aura stage—the initial stage of a seizure when patients are still conscious but their vision and senses begin to blur. First, the girl would feel nauseous and extremely warm, and then she would see a transparent body rising from her stomach. The body would shape itself into a mirror image of her own self and look back at her, giving her the impression that this was her “soul” leaving her body. As her seizure wound down, it would re-enter her body.

The girl was diagnosed with a lesion in her insular cortex, the part of the brain involved in perception, self-awareness, and regulating the body’s homeostasis. The brain generates our experience of self by merging information about our body from external sources such as the eyes, the ears, and the skin, and internal sources such as the heart and the stomach. Blanke and his colleague Lukas Heydrich, who examined her, say that such a lesion in the insular cortex prevents the brain from integrating the body’s external and internal perceptions, resulting in a corrupted sense of self. “We found that the system representing the internal and external bodily states is no longer in sync,” explains Heydrich. “The brain tries to solve this conflict by coming up by the most plausible explanation: a second self in the form of a doppelganger."

In a study¹ in the journal Brain, Heydrich and Blanke noted that all of the epileptic patients they saw who reported seeing doubles also had a lesion in the insular cortex. Heydrich and Blanke’s research suggests that when lesions are surgically removed, doppelganger visions disappear. Other causes of doppelganger visions, however, are less understood. Schizophrenics, for example, also report seeing doubles, but the reasons behind these visions are not clear, in part due to lack of research. Such symptoms are usually treated with medication.

Blanke and his colleagues found that doppelgangers can also be induced.  Blanke was able to evoke a vision of a double by stimulating patients’ temporoparietal junction, which integrates and processes inputs from the external environment and from within the body. “To a certain degree, we can induce something that resembles a doppelganger, e.g. a full body illusion,” Blanke says, although it wouldn’t be as strong of an experience as a full-blown hallucination.

Blanke’s colleagues Jane Aspell and Heydrich were able to make subjects identify with virtual avatars.² The researchers flashed images of subjects’ bodies to them (which represented an external input) in synchrony with their heartbeats (which represented an internal input). After a few minutes, the subjects said they felt a stronger identification with their virtual body than their corporeal ones, and thought they were physically located where their avatars were—despite being 2 meters away from their avatars.

Seeing a vision of yourself might not just be a symptom of a disease, but potentially also an aspect—even if an extreme one—of the psychology of a healthy person. Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton spoke about seeing a doppelganger during a 36-hour march through the mountains and glaciers of the islands of South Georgia, referring to it as a “divine companion” who helped him cope with the journey’s hardships. When explorer Ann Bancroft was injured during her 1,900-mile journey through Antarctica, she found comfort in the presence of a doppelganger that was stronger than her, uninjured and walking alongside her with ease. “It was a good medicine, it was what I needed,” Bancroft later wrote.

The late psychologist Julian Jaynes echoed the view that doppelgangers are a coping mechanism when he said that their calming effects could be seen on “shipwrecked sailors who have conversations with an audible God for hours in the water until they were saved.” “From a medical point of view it makes sense,” Heydrich says. “Dissociation and depersonalization have always been a coping mechanism.”

The coping aspect of doppelgangers could be used for therapy. Blanke, for example, used a robotic device to stroke the backs of 30 volunteers. “As the robot strikes, the subject watches a virtual body receiving the same stroking pattern on its back,” Blanke explains. “The stronger they identified with their avatars, the more pain reduction they reported.” The technique could have applications for chronic pain sufferers.
“You could propose that because you identify with the virtual image, and dissociate from the physical body to a certain degree, the perception and the neural representation of the pain is diminished,” Heydrich says. “I am sure that one day people will be able to evoke ‘positive hallucinations’ to feel less pain or other unpleasant feelings…in a similar manner that people can be taught to meditate or use cognitive behavioral techniques to overcome fear.”

Fight Club ends with a battle to the death between Durden and his double, suggesting that only one can survive. But the reality of doppelgangers is more complex. Blanke decided to hold off on surgery on his 15-year-old patient until her brain was more fully developed. In the meantime, she said she was relieved that there was a medical explanation for her symptoms. What’s more, she had developed a strong affinity with her double. “It meant something special to her—a connection with a part of herself that was familiar and somewhat reassuring,” Blanke says.

David Levine (@Dlloydlevine) has written for Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, Good Housekeeping, BioTechniques, and Robotic Trends. He is co-chairman of Science Writers in New York (SWINY). 

References
1. Heydrich, L. & Blanke, O. Distinct illusory own-body perceptions casued by damage to posterior insula and extrastriate cortex. Brain 136, 790-803 (2013).
2. Aspell, J.E., Heydrich, L., Marillier, G., Lavanchy, T., Herbelin, B., & Blanke, O. Turning body and self inside out: visualized heartbeats alter bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception. Psychological Science 24, 2445-2453 (2013).