Posted by BBob on July 1, 2000, at 21:46:04
In reply to My thoughts on thinking, posted by JennyR on July 1, 2000, at 16:27:01
Scott:
-----thanks for the comments above - (re:deceny). I certainly don’t hold the high ground on netequette and, in a successful climbing expedition, everyone in the party safely summits.
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shar - re: your question “Sort of like a distinction between pure (maybe even nonverbal) instinct, instinctual action, mediated instinctual action, up to "here's what I think about that.” That kind of continuum?----- Yeh, something like that. The categories you mention seem like well-defined constructs used by an academic community that I don’t really know, but the suggested range agrees with my animistic suggestion that instinct is part of a continuum of thought. Animal languages are said to be hardwired in their brains, but I am not convinced our learned languages and fabricated human constructs are always that free of driving instinctive and environmental mandates... unless we can successfully disassociate.
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harryb - re: your comment, “Never had it, am ignorant about it, (as I suppose are most docs who perform it), but this describes pretty well my concept of how ECT works.”----- I’m afraid I would agree. The efficacy of ECT is likely (IMHO) related to the way it massively disrupts troublesome associations within the brain. The risks are likely similar to those of other disassociative techniques, from drugs to cult membership to physical feats - the danger (besides broken bones or physical damage resulting from current in ECT) is the possible destruction of useful constructs. The ethical dilemmas arise in the way some people are not fairly warned of the risks, or are denied opportunities for a more gentle way to break away from troubling mental constructs, some of which might be rooted in social situations.
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JennyR:
------ jeez I like it when I can help more than hurt! I don’t really hang with the professional therapists, but my impression is their effort is aimed, as you suggest, at getting these subconscious notions integrated into the more highly constructed parts of the mind that rely heavily on language for their orientation. Even though I am a writer now, my personal desire is that we rely less on our constructed, often verbal parts of our mind, and instead that we heal, integrate and trust our deeper minds. There is a philosophical divide there, but the indigenous view often holds that the rocks, trees and other non-humans are our elders. In that view, our “old brain” would be the elder part. While many therapists might say we need to grow out of the primative influence of our old brain, other commentators suggest our old brains are damaged by the childish influences of our hastily constructed, unstable “new brain.”Rozack’s name was mentioned in a thread above - he is a Cal State (?) professor who for a while ran an ecopscyhology program. A less academic ecopsychologist, Mike Cohen, (ecopsych.com) is somewhat of a fanatic about the primacy of the old brain. It was after reading his material that I engaged in what seemed like a ridiculous exercise in which we say “I feel best when (observing some natural environment) because...” Well, as ridiculous as it was, that exercise preceded my eventual and gradual upturn from one of the darker periods of my recent life. I did not “go native” as i would have preferred, but by articulating with my verbally integrated mind my deepest preferences, I felt safer venturing into the no-mans-land of industrial society with the confidence that deep inside, I know what I really prefer. But that is me...
Well, nature-boy stuff aside, it is interesting that this thread evolved from discussing the possible impact of asynchronous activity between the mid-brain and the cerebrum to discussing the way “talk therapy” helps integrate the sub-vocal emotional constructs into the “higher, advanced” constructs of the very verbally oriented cerebral cortex. To me, this suggests some truth to Cohen’s idea that the old brain, when fed its traditional fare of natural environments, is the mature brain and the new brain, full of cultural constructs and verbalizations, is the one driving us to madness.
But then, wherever we go, there we are...
poster:BBob
thread:38054
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000630/msgs/38996.html