Emotions are particularly potent elements of neural networks. They have a central role in therapists' brain-based conceptualizations during therapy while also serving as a valuable focus during discussions with clients. Concepts related to emotions in personal functioning were outlined in Chapter 5. These concepts can be applied by clinicians throughout the process of therapy. The present chapter addresses how such applications unfold during therapy and emphasizes how such understanding can be shared with clients.

Clinical observations suggest that clients often feel threatened by the intensity, unpredictability, and uncontrollability of emotions. Clients often feel weak and inadequate simply because they are experiencing emotions, and they often sense that something is wrong with them for having strong emotional reactions. There seems to be a tendency for clients to perceive that emotions are synonymous with the self, and as a result, when emotions are negative or unacceptable, clients become convinced, or at least suspicious, that their inner core is unacceptable. Clients express particular distress when their emotions do not match the declaratively developed conscious value system to which the individual client adheres. The client experiences his inner self as being incongruent with what he wants his self to be.

Explicit discussion of the nature and likely evolutionary function of emotions can allow clients to accept emotions and then both use and manage them more effectively. Explaining the important role of emotions in the activation of neural networks seems particularly useful in such discussion.

Memory can be defined as the process whereby “knowledge is encoded, stored, and later retrieved” (Kandel et al., 2000a, p. 1245). On its surface, such a definition hints the brain is a static recording device waiting to take in and store the input offered to it. This is not the case. Instead, the brain interacts with the environment, including the external world and the person's own body, in multiple dynamic ways and changes form in response to these interactions. The form the brain takes subsequently influences its interactions with the environment in the future. Stated another way, “Memory is thus the way the brain is affected by experience and then subsequently alters its future responses” (Siegel, 1999, p. 24). Psychotherapy can be viewed as a process of recognizing how the brain has been shaped by its past and then applying this recognition to develop better ways to use the brain in future interactions with the world.

Memory can be viewed at various levels, each of which can offer different insights into human function. Global effects of experience on brain development can be viewed as one aspect of memory. Intracellular processes have been identified that support various memory processes. Connections between cells support memory in several ways, each of which offers its own implications for the development and maintenance of memories. Important processes related to intercellular connection include the strengthening of individual connections, long-term potentiation, habituation, and sensitization.

In order to understand psychological functioning in children as well as in adults it is important to understand how the processes unfolding during brain development influence psychological functioning over the course of development. Until recently, differences between the workings of children's brains and adults' brains were poorly recognized (if they were acknowledged at all). Medieval painters captured the issue on canvas: Madonna and Child paintings in the fifteenth century often presented Mary holding a tiny mature adult man in her lap rather than an infant; the image of the infant was treated as if the child was a miniature adult.

It is now recognized that a child's brain functions much differently than does an adult's brain, but often the extent and nature of the differences between the adult's brain and the child's brain are not fully appreciated. Adequate appreciation should include recognition that children's brains absorb, perceive, process, and respond to experiences in ways that are different from the processing in adult's brains. Adequate appreciation of differences should also include understanding that much of the information held in the mature, adult brain was taken in and integrated when the brain was much less developed and, as a result, much of the information on which the adult brain relies for processing current experiences is immature in structure and activity.

With regard to psychotherapy, interventions with a child's brain call for different approaches than interventions with an adult's brain. This is due to the availability of different capacities and processes.

Basic elements of brain function previously outlined include the input–process–output neuropsychological conception of brain function, interactions between higher and lower levels of the brain, neural networks, explicit memory systems, implicit memory systems, affect systems, and anxiety systems. It is important to consider these elements interacting together as a finished product, but in order to understand the brain in psychotherapy it is crucial to understand how the end product was achieved.

The processes constituting brain development influence how different areas of the brain operate in psychotherapy for clients at various stages of maturation. The processes of brain development also influence how the brain encodes experiences during childhood and then recalls and applies these experiences during functioning in adulthood.

It is important to consider the influences of both genetics and experience on the development of brain function and personality. It is also important to understand the dual developmental processes of creating and then streamlining neural connections. Finally, it is important to recognize the influences of myelination on the integration and mature activation of brain systems. Consideration of these contributors to brain development can support a more complete understanding of how clients perceive events and respond to them in psychotherapy and throughout life.

Genetics

The genetic code with which each person is endowed at conception contains a range of potentials available to be realized (Gilliam et al., 2000; Kramer, 2005). Some of the characteristics embedded in the code can be activated independent of events in the environment surrounding the organism.

Brain science at its current level of development offers enough facts to support a new way of approaching psychotherapy. This seems true even though the quality of the data available is not yet adequate to qualify brain-based psychotherapy as “empirically based” intervention. Despite the absence of clinical outcome research to support brain-based interventions, the neuroscience approach can positively influence theoretical conceptualization of the process of psychotherapy as well as immediate clinical application.

A framework for understanding brain processes related to psychotherapy was outlined in Part 1 of this book. Neuropsychologically based consideration of input, processing, and output of information by clients helps clarify the ways clients process experiences, and neuropsychological understanding of brain processes can thereby help identify the best means for guiding clients toward positive change. A richer and more complete understanding of how clients process and respond to their experiences in life is derived from recognition of levels of processing ranging from lower brain general arousal systems to mid-brain affective processing to higher cortical cognition; this understanding is enhanced by simultaneous recognition of the various ways each of these levels influences the others. The overarching concept of neural networks ties together the various systems managing information and behavior throughout the brain. The concept of neural networks suggests how past and present experiences are connected and how new, more adaptive connections can be developed.

Knowledge of brain structure and function has developed rapidly in recent decades; accompanying this increase in knowledge has been the rapid development of our understanding of how brain function relates to human behavior. The roles of specific areas of the brain in specific types of cognitive and emotional processes have been delineated and the complex patterns of interaction between specific areas of the nervous system required for thought and behavior have been increasingly well identified. Processes at the molecular and cellular levels and their relationships to memory, cognition, and affect have been described with increasing clarity. The biological underpinnings of specific psychiatric and neurological disorders have been outlined, and these findings have directly led to improvements in medical, psychological, and behavioral interventions for the various disorders.

The host of advances in the understanding of connections between the brain and behavior can support psychotherapeutic conceptualization and intervention (e.g. Cozolino, 2002; Pliszka, 2003). However, it is the author's experience that the vastness of the relevant literature combined with the complexity of the relationships between brain function and behavior, affect, and cognition serve to preclude the use of such understanding by many practicing clinicians. The terms alone are frightening: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, ventricular epithelium. The steps and interactions in the brain comprising so basic a task as focusing attention (Posner & Raichle, 1994) can leave a clinician feeling hopeless in regard to ever understanding enough about the brain to apply such information to clinical intervention.

Anxiety often offers the initial signal that neural networks are operating in unrecognized ways to disrupt the client's functioning. Anxiety often then guides the exploration of the network. In the case of anxiety related to the novelty intrinsic to psychological change, anxiety then signals the shift from processing past learning to creating a new future.

The next step implied by the description of novelty, anxiety, and The Empty Head is the facilitation of new neural connections in new, adaptive neural networks. Throughout discussion of neural networks and the activation of maladaptive functioning the importance of connecting adaptive networks to maladaptive ones has been emphasized. This process provides the basis for developing adaptive behaviors for the future. As the client confronts the sense of feeling lost that often accompanies change, networks associated with a history in therapy of confronting distress with the support of the therapist should be available to be activated. Such patterns compete with the sense of being lost and disoriented, reducing the intensity of such feelings. The client's relationship with the therapist accompanied by experiences of successfully coping with distress within the context of therapy can offer initial new networks with which to fill The Empty Head.

At this point in therapy the client needs to begin to develop neural patterns associated with positive coping, and these patterns need to be firmly connected to stimuli that previously triggered strong negative emotions, anxiety, and defensive behaviors that previously undermined successful adaptation to life.

The framework outlined in this book emphasizes two primary concepts related to the interface between the brain and psychological therapies. First, information is processed by way of a series of brain events characterized by an input–process–output flow of activity (see Chapter 2). This concept emphasizes that specific elements of brain processing are carried out in consecutive order, and that specific elements are carried out in specific locations throughout the brain. Second, each experience is based on a unique combination of neural activities that take place throughout the brain (see Chapter 3). This second concept emphasizes that specific structures throughout the brain participating in an experience must be identified in order to understand connections between the brain, personal experience, and psychological therapies. Newly developed imaging techniques used to observe the structures and functions of the brain have shaped the development of this framework for understanding the brain–psychological intervention interface.

Understanding the neuroimaging procedures that are primary sources of hypotheses regarding brain–behavior relationships on which the current framework is based can help the reader to recognize the vast amount that is known about brain function. Simultaneously, awareness of neuroimaging procedures can help the reader to appreciate the significant limitations inherent in each technology on which our knowledge of the brain is based. Finally, basic understanding of neuroimaging techniques that are increasingly the primary foundation for understanding the brain–behavior interface can help the reader assess research results more realistically and integrate them into the current framework more effectively.

Any research program is rightly evaluated on its unfolding ability to address, to illuminate, and to solve a broad range of problems antecedently recognized by the professional community. The research program at issue in this volume is cognitive neurobiology, a broad-front scientific research program with potential relevance to a considerable variety of intellectual disciplines, including neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropathology, developmental neurobiology, psychiatry, psychology, artificial intelligence, and … philosophy. It is the antecedently recognized problems of this latter discipline in particular that constitute the explanatory challenges addressed in the present volume. My aim in what follows is to direct the light of computational neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology – or such light as they currently provide – onto a range of familiar philosophical problems, problems independently at the focus of much fevered philosophical attention.

Some of those focal problems go back at least to Plato, as illustrated in Chapter 8, where we confront the issue of how the mind grasps the timeless structure underlying the ephemeral phenomena of the perceivable world. And some go back at least to Aristotle, as illustrated in Chapters 3 and 4, where we confront the issue of how the mind embodies and deploys the moral wisdom that slowly develops during the social maturation of normal humans. Other problems have moved into the spotlight of professional attention only recently, as in Chapter 1, where we address the ground or nature of consciousness. Or as in Chapter 7, where we address the prospects of artificial intelligence.

Introduction: The Problem

A perennial problem in the philosophy of language, and in the theory of mind, concerns the proper criterion for mapping the lexicon of one language onto the lexicon of another, or the concepts of one person's conceptual framework onto the concepts of another's, in such a fashion as to preserve sense, meaning, or semantic identity across the pairings effected by such a mapping (see Figure 8.1). This “translational” problem is part and parcel, of course, of the larger ontological problem of what meaning is and of what concepts are, and thus it is unlikely to be solved independently of some correlative account of both of these background matters. Disagreements on the former topic are sure to be entangled with disagreements on the latter topics, and so it is with those of us who defend a state-space semantics (SSS) approach to these problems against those who champion a language-of-thought (LOT) approach. For SSS theorists, concepts are functionally salient points, regions, or trajectories in various neuronal activation spaces; for LOT theorists, concepts are functionally salient wordlike elements in a languagelike system of internal representations. For both groups, however, the plausibility of their favored approach depends, in part, on the integrity and plausibility of the inevitably quite different accounts of “translation” that they provide.

The present paper takes up these issues as they are variously developed in three recent papers.

Dan Dennett is a closet Hegelian. I say this not in criticism, but in praise, and hereby own to the same affliction. More specifically, Dennett is convinced that human cognitive life is the scene or arena of a swiftly unfolding evolutionary process, an essentially cultural process above and distinct from the familiar and much slower process of biological evolution. This superadded Hegelian adventure is a matter of a certain style of conceptual activity; it involves an endless contest between an evergreen variety of conceptual alternatives; and it displays, at least occasionally, a welcome progress in our conceptual sophistication, and in the social and technological practices that structure our lives.

With all of this, I agree, and will attempt to prove my fealty in due course. But my immediate focus is the peculiar use to which Dennett has tried to put his background Hegelianism in his provocative 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. Specifically, I wish to address his peculiar account of the kinematics and dynamics of the Hegelian Unfolding that we both acknowledge. And I wish to query his novel deployment of that kinematics and dynamics in explanation of the focal phenomenon of his book: consciousness. To state my negative position immediately, I am unconvinced by his declared account of the background process of human conceptual evolution and development – specifically, the Dawkinsean account of rough gene-analogs called “memes” competing for dominance of human cognitive activity.