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Consciousness and memory |
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Internal index:
#site_novelties, #folly and great sorrow(*), #dark_side, #finding past memories(*), #Resilience, #damaged development, #memory and dissociation, #symptoms and 'monsters'(*), #Pathological trance, #healing and traumatizing, #amine precursor uptake and decarboxylation, #delusions, #psychoanalisis, #transference(*), #true_life, #re-living(*), #The_rag_and_bone_shop(*), #Note, #consciousness, #not all think so (*) with new - basic - explanatory quotes also from new reports
April 16 2008
Basic - adds and
new
explanations are at first on #folly
and great sorrow, but not forsake #transference, #re-living, #transfert, #The_rag_and_bone_shop, #sensible_experience
Therefore
to specify real
design and aims of this file/chapter it is very suitable to confront it
wih Anmnesis: a
way fo
healing... and also, for refuting any risk of
misunderstanding, should be seriuosly considered the more bitter controversy
shared in the renewed file/chapter: Opinioni,
fatti, accuse / Opinion, fact, complaint
Novelties of the whole site
This
site and the
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be a fount of notices but an ENCYCLOPEDIC
gather of different
subjects:
one
another to
be read time by time, or better to
be CONSULTED
not only for learning.
All links and
quotations are continually refreshed - supported by SEVENtwentyfour.com
- but
so, if this Web site will always be
maintained
under speedy and diligently revised construction, also every suggestion
from every source will
be appreciated and followed.
...criticism
or suggestions? Send mail...On the matter of fact people
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lament
hindrances on looking through this site, and asked to be better
orientated. To favor this need the site's map changed: as first sight
one can begin from a simplified
page opening wide the whole indexed
files, both the Italian and the English and plurilingual ones, eventually before looking at the file prefacing
the English pages,
first chapter of the English book
now
PUBLISHED, PRINTED and
SOLD as a NORMAL BOOK - as was already the Italian
book from this site: Bambini
di ieri
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di oggi
->
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system and available
for purchase on www.BookSurge.com, www.Amazon.com, www.Abebooks.com, www.Alibris.com. (The book's listing will
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and in www.GlobalBooksinPrint.com)
But just after book published, further considerations suggested to better and more precisely complete the personal sources of knowledge: so the files My guides... my roots and Opinion, fact, complaint are so much amplified to occasion a latest, minor book to support the major one, a booklet dedicated only to explanatory data rather than to detailed descriptions.
now
PUBLISHED, PRINTED and
SOLD as a NORMAL BOOK - as was already the Italian
book from this site: Bambini
di ieri
= adulti di oggi.Adulti
di oggi
->
adulti di domani - print-ready in the BookSurge
system and available
for purchase on www.BookSurge.com, www.Amazon.com, www.Abebooks.com, www.Alibris.com. (The book's listing will
appear on www.BooksinPrint.com
and in www.GlobalBooksinPrint.com)But just after book published, further considerations suggested to better and more precisely complete the personal sources of knowledge: so the files My guides... my roots and Opinion, fact, complaint are so much amplified to occasion a latest, minor book to support the major one, a booklet dedicated only to explanatory data rather than to detailed descriptions.
Any way the site is continually up-graded: to be carefully informed also on the past more significant ones it is suitable to go to the dedicated file Novelties on the site.
To general Home:
Bambini
di IERI = adulti di oggi. Adulti di oggi -> adulti di DOMANI
GENERAL
English INDEXGeneral Considerations
The present file/chapter is a strict furtherance of the introductory one Anamnesis: a way for healing..., both handling from different sides the same topic: personal past and present linked to settle real personal lives, together with general knowledge of completeness of life-time as basic medical care implement since the contrary - oblivion - can hide harm, weariness, till true illnesses. This English file does not mirror exactly the Italian one Consapevolezza e memoria, since provided with different first hand quotations, references and links. Any way both are validated and completed by the parallel - English and Italian - Quando la cartella clinica č terapeutica and Anamnesis. a way for healing..., Dal SUBLIMATO al CONCRETO / From SUBLIMATED towards CONCRETE, and SUBLIMATIONS: visual schemes and scientific explanation files giving the theoretical improvement coming from another point of vue, together with some other files already partly printed on another book It's Abuse NOT Science fiction: Delgado & Skinner, Flashbacks, Memory Recovery and Screen Memories and also by the high-priority file TOTEM AND TABOO REVISITED: the awful and fertile rise of new SUPERSTITIONS. From this point of view should be added the suggestion to read and consider thoroughly the new chapter Sublimations: visual schemes and scientific explanation since syntetizing the main concepts of this whole work in not usual but impressive terms. Readers don't be stunned on finding some items presented just alike on two files/chapters since if the subject is the same the contexts diverge: on Anamnesis. a way for healing... and on CHILDHOOD: Times of mutability time, memory and ways for healing share their good side whilst here their dark side requires a most weighty place.Memory is a splendid possibility to hold on themselves the "running away" of passing times and feeling and acknowledgment. Memory can hold and substantiate the personal "fourth dimension": but against memory a powerful, flattering enemy arises: the search to cling to the present that gives security, a present that one would like to pass slowly in order to let savor the pleasure of living.... But in reality time runs and runs so fast and the more it runs the more one feels moving towards that abyss of finding oneself at the end of life with only regrets, a comtinuing source of abandonment and "ghosts", as written on this poignant and impressive testimony so concluding: At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like “had my balls cut off" (°) almost in the anatomical sense of the word.
(°) So to say "to have my balls cut off " is quite offensive: but why flattering, deceiving words as "security", "to reassure", "to slow down" don't be so much offensive?
At my
sister’s house this evening I saw
some photos of my niece and nephew when they were little. There was one
of F. at four years old and it made my stomach churn…. It seemed almost impossible
that he has
grown up so much and at the same time the baby he was
isn’t here
anymore: for my feeling the "baby" now is "dead". .
I had a sensation of being blocked, something which makes me feel terribly afraid and that I worry I can’t bear. The pain for that child no longer with us, that child who won’t come back anymore and who in a certain sense slipped away from me. How I didn’t experience him enough, how many things I missed in him and missed in myself. It’s a pain which brings a feeling of emptiness, a pain which opens an abyss – a kind of black hole in into which I fear I will fall.
I cling so much to the present that it gives me security, a present that I would like to pass slowly in order to let me savour the pleasure of living, yet runs so fast and the more it runs the more I feel that I am moving towards that abyss of finding myself at the end of my life with only regrets.
It’s a kind of grief, like that of losing the really passed away Aunt A., like that of when K. began to go out with P., it’s a kind of grief and an abandonment. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how difficult it is to make part of me understand that you can’t revive ghosts: that part of me doesn’t want to hear reason.
It would like to see just one time the face of that child, embrace him again. It is obstinate and doesn’t want to accept things as they are.
At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like “had my balls cut off" almost in the anatomical sense of the word.
I had a sensation of being blocked, something which makes me feel terribly afraid and that I worry I can’t bear. The pain for that child no longer with us, that child who won’t come back anymore and who in a certain sense slipped away from me. How I didn’t experience him enough, how many things I missed in him and missed in myself. It’s a pain which brings a feeling of emptiness, a pain which opens an abyss – a kind of black hole in into which I fear I will fall.
I cling so much to the present that it gives me security, a present that I would like to pass slowly in order to let me savour the pleasure of living, yet runs so fast and the more it runs the more I feel that I am moving towards that abyss of finding myself at the end of my life with only regrets.
It’s a kind of grief, like that of losing the really passed away Aunt A., like that of when K. began to go out with P., it’s a kind of grief and an abandonment. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how difficult it is to make part of me understand that you can’t revive ghosts: that part of me doesn’t want to hear reason.
It would like to see just one time the face of that child, embrace him again. It is obstinate and doesn’t want to accept things as they are.
At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like “had my balls cut off" almost in the anatomical sense of the word.
The
Dark Side
Memory,
the basic function to recall data, to get them at consciousness, or
simply to get able to bring something to mind...: there are a
lot of mixed-up cross-purposes which so often transforms every talk on
this
subject into a lot of ever more faulty - if not damaging - quid pro quo.At first it is to be considered that common place people too often mystifies appearance, "broadcast", advertisement, superficial brightness with the whole REALITY itself: to easy memorize is confused with more cleverness; the possibility to find something without conscious effort can be defined not only with the blundering term of intuition, but unfortunately even often it is "burglarized" with the solemn coming on of the mighty name of instinct.
But, very worse, common place people - also badly taught by bad "teachers"- doesn't acknowledge that memory's open go-between on and off function corresponds only to open conscious and at disposal pre-conscious, not to an unconscious great sorrow which doesn't allow to be remembered. Its "forbidden" contents shouldn't be compared with "normal" memory or "normal" oversights or forgetfulness. It is seriously misleading to confuse the normal short time's, middle time's and long time's memories - and their to be suddenly or hardly and problematically recollected from their more or less tidy archive - with the "unconscious unreachable gap": a gap which could be overcome only very slowly and with a long watchful delicate care to separate the forbearance of the scare from the possibility to manage - painful - memories and then step by step also to transform them into - even resilient - esperiences.
In the book Die froeliche wissenschaft Friedrich Nietzsche assumed that Folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow...: then blunting seems to be the final possible defense against hopeless suffering, accompanied in any time by displaced, biased "warnings". If it should even not be sufficient, a blind, wearing forgetfulness growing towards a sort of wicked stupidity seems may help. Providentially this isn't ever an unassailable cruel destiny: even a faint ray of hope could allow it to fade.
I have not to be ashamed to be as sick as I am... I need to move back into my healing zone... that means more in touch with memory and with pain than with anxiety and terror..., as writes a survivor of desperate tortures.Therefore the forbearing person can reach wholeness and self authenticity: having undergo a slow, ponderous progression towards real memories of sufferings can reach wholeness and self authenticity, no more replaced by distress displacement covered by pathological, inconsistent "anxiety and terror", deceiving the subject himself, then actual sensibilities can awake again, can further intensify, can further restore more and more skilled receptive feelings to multiply more and more varied stimuli.
It is the healing each of us longs for, and the healing that each of us must accomplish if we are to move forward into our fullest potential. Learning to experience emotions is one of the most difficult tasks that can be undertaken. Many people do not know that they are angry, even when rage flows through them like a river. Some do not know that they are grieving, even when sorrow is the only sun that rises for them in the morning. Most people think of themselves as experiencing emotions only when powerfully emotional currents erupt through their lives, disturbing routines devoted to activities, accomplishments, or survival. Emotional awareness - becoming aware of everything that you are feeling at every moment - is very difficult because we experience so much pain each moment. Becoming aware of our emotions means becoming aware of pain. It is challenging, difficult, and unpleasant. It is also more rewarding than most of us can imagine. That is because most of us cannot imagine a life free from compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and addictions, in which we act with an empowered heart and are free of attachment to the outcome. The alternative to becoming aware of your emotions is to continue masking the pain that you experience. When you do, your pain emerges in unexpected ways distorting your behavior, changing your words, shaping your perception's, and creating consequences that are as unwanted as they are difficult. This alternative no longer works.
Quotation from the Forewords
& Introductions. Welcome of the
book: The
Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness by
Gary
Zukav,
Linda
Francis.
Read too: Trauma
and Dreams by Deirdre
Barrett (Editor) Linda Francis, Harvard
University Press, 1996
(Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London,
England) Author also of: The Committee of Sleep : How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving- And How You Can, Too by Deirdre, Ph.D. Barrett
For years, the brain has been viewed as a relatively static entity, determined by the interaction of genetic preprogramming and early childhood experience. In contrast to this view, recent theoretical perspectives and technological advances in brain imaging have revealed that the brain is an organ continually built and re-built by one's experiences. We are now beginning to learn that many forms of psychotherapy, developed in the absence of any scientific understanding of the brain, are supported by neuroscientific findings.
Written for psychotherapists and others interested in the relationship between brain and behavior, this book encourages us to consider the brain when attempting to understand human development, mental illness, and psychological health. This book argues that the brain is an organ of adaptation, built by interpersonal experiences and capable of change during one's life. Written for anyone interested in the relationship between brain and behavior, it encourages us to consider the brain when attempting to understand others and ourselves.
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Thanks to concrete applications of the newest findings, readers will find this (Babette Rothschild, MSW). |
(But these concepts have a double-edged meaning since they can be "used" in a double-edged way: they can explain the possibility of healing even persons who have suffered terrible past mishaps, but can also suggest that the proneness to superstitions in humankind can rather easily allow too many people to be brain-washed almost before having realized that they own their minds.)
The most serious social side effect of pathological trance is the reduced awareness and disabled communication. Communication of information is critical for any system to function. Human systems as well as computer systems, ecological, biological, political and social systems and more all require clear, accurate, timely communication of information in order to function. The lack of clear, accurate, or timely communication between individuals is the basis for misunderstandings, disappointments, hurt feelings, resentment, and violence. The human, economic, agricultural, industrial and social systems that rely on people who are in pathological trance has disastrous consequences.
There
are
light
trances,
deep trances, short-term trances and life-long trances. There
are pain relieving trances and pain producing trances.
There
are healing trances and
pathological trances.
I have been studying trance for the past 25 years and I want to explore
with you just a few important areas where trances can be found:
hypnosis,
addictions, religions and work. So what is a trance? To many
psychologists
a trance is a state of limited awareness. Some psychologists would also
characterize trance as a form of sleep, or dreamlike awareness or a
kind
of altered state of consciousness. Certainly trance has long been
associated
with hypnotic states, and with the altered states of consciousness of
dervishes,
shamans and yogis. Meditation does produce strong trance states.
However,
in my opinion, trance
states are much more
common
than is normally believed. If the unusual trance
state of a
shaman or a yogi is desirable, then we might be tempted to believe that
all trance states are desirable states. Powerful yogic trance states
are
often created by the long term practice of meditation. When the mind is
temporarily anchored in trance, a yogi may become sensitive to subtle
influences
or may gain enhanced and subtle perceptions. In addition, yogic trance
states can also produce effects at a distance. Trance is a repetition
or
looping of consciousness. When the content of the trance has achieved a
resonance, special
types of psychic forces are generated. The
effects of these special psychic forces
are often identified with the behavior which produced them.
Trance-
for a yogi - is merely a tool consciously chosen to produce a specific
result. Trance for most other people is an
unconscious
choice
made to relieve pain or to avoid uncomfortable feelings or situations. Pathological
trance is unfortunately almost universally encouraged within business
organizations.
The more an employee can with single-minded determination execute the
orders
and policies of his organization, the more that employee is rewarded,
promoted
and respected. Single-mindedness, however, is a pathological trance.
And
trance always implies that there are areas where the employee is
"asleep",
unaware. When organizations encourage trance in their employees, and
since
trance disables communication, then there can be no wonder why there
are
so many system dysfunctions in the world. When, unlike a yogi,
we do not choose our trances, and we are unaware of the types and
nature
of the pathological trances in our lives, then there are things we are
unaware of. What we are unaware of causes more human suffering than the
sometimes painful knowledge of the truth. One
goal of a
robust
and magical life is to be as aware as possible of our options. When
our unconscious pathological trances cripple our options the result is
often disaster and tragedy in our personal lives, our society and in
the
environment.
Pay attention also to: FREE ONLINE TRAUMA SYMPOSIUM PRESENTED BY THE AMERICAN GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY ASSOCIATION AND FUNDED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY FOUNDATION AND THE AOL TIME WARNER FOUNDATION.
Counter transference: Effects on the Group Therapist Working with TraumaA discussion of:
1. Hazardous Terrain: Countertransference Reactions in Trauma Groups by Maggie Ziegler and Maureen McEvoy, pp. 116-140.
Objectives:
1. To learn to identify countertransference when working with trauma groups.
2. To learn to identify vicarious traumatization when working with trauma groups.
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Finding past memories...
Therefore, on RECALLING previously unaccepted PAST MEMORIES one can FIND ONESELF again and AWAKE again to self assured, but previously blocked then never developed emotions: including curiosity, fantasy and participation as well as future projects. In such a way, conscious affectivity and controlled aggressiveness could expand, DEVELOP and grow richer: feelings, true relationships, interests, skills and proficiency in learning, no longer enslaved by suffering or blunting can grow again and THRIVE. It has been said: Folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow: but so far - as written at the beginning - is furnished a bit of hope within such numb oblivion, the sleeping reason that breeds monsters can still be found and awaken.Conscious and Unconscious Processes: Psychodynamic, Cognitive, and Neurophysiological Convergences by Howard Shevrin (Editor), James A. Bond, Linda A. W. Brakel, RichaHertel, William J. Williams
The notion of an unconscious mental life has been a source of controversy for more than a century...
If you are hoping to see evidence that psychoanalysis is becoming a science, you'll want to read it. If you are one of those critics who claims that psychoanalysts can never agree on the interpretation of such matters as real people's unconscious conflicts, or a believer in the hermeneutic approach who feels that clinical judgments about important matters in patients' lives must be bent out of recognizable shape by the demands of scientific method, you must read it! Provides a model example of a methodologically rigorous project that nonetheless retains the richness of the clinical endeavour. Clinicians and researchers alike will be happy to see the clear example of intriguing and important psychoanalytic research.... Conscious and Unconscious Processes is essential reading for analysts who feel it is valuable to demonstrate the empirical basis for fundamental psychoanalytic assumptions.... Shevrin and colleagues... constructed a groundbreaking method through which to evaluate the notion of unconscious conflict. They have succeeded in demonstrating nothing less than evidence for the existence of the dynamic unconscious... The crucial importance of this work will be readily apparent to the interested psychoanalytic reader.
It is nevertheless always a very difficult and painful task, as a "survivor" wrote:
I cannot keep all things straight. the remembering goes back and forth and not straight in a line... Taking very shaky steps in a crooked and zig-zagging manner, approaching and avoiding the awful truth that this happened... but knowing there was a cause for my pain, and that this cause makes sense, allow these multi-level memories... [even if and when] the inner work, the therapy has lost [inevitably] its sweetness... So hard to go back and forth between therapy and life - whatever that is...However, if for the suffering persons this "crooked" way seems to give rise to more and more discouragement, notwithstanding FOR THERAPISTS it is exactly this ZIG-ZAGGING manner of the emergence of memories, which denotes and GUARANTEES the truthfulness of them: an all too bold precision has ALWAYS to be trated as warning sign, since, as in all testimony, this accuracy is always a trap. It can be prone to deceive and drag towards deceitful directions every times, towards a tricky area in memory recovery research, towards the accidental scrambling of [contaminated] memories, which without even realizing this, after having reappeared in flash-backs can be "changed" by others' suggestions, by fear, by unbearable pain, by inner unwillingness, by proneness to commonplace certainties (aka: 'collective consciousness’)...
Much of the journey involves a walk through Dante’s Inferno. Pain and every form of death are inherent to the process. This journey requires going much deeper than‘collective consciousness’ wants to go... (excerpt from ~ The Way of the Wound ~ by Robert Grant, PhD quoted in November Survivorship Monthly Notes).(Read and ponder the quotes below chosen in the transcript of the presentation by Kathleen Sullivan at The Fourth Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, August 10 - 12, 2001:
Ordinary memory tends to be more conscious, voluntary and flexible, while traumatic memory is usually more involuntary and unconscious, and is often rigid. Ordinary memory tends to be more oriented in time, whereas traumatic memory is usually frozen outside of time . . . coming more from our unconscious mind. And even while it is frozen in time, when it surfaces unconsciously or when we consciously remember it we feel like it is happening right now, at this very moment, as opposed to having happened in the past. Trauma memory is stored as state-dependent memory. According to Dr. Whitfield, state-dependent memory means we tend to remember better when we are in the same inner or experiential state that we were in when we first experienced or learned something.
This is why survivors and therapists talk so much about triggers. Triggers are stimuli that we felt or experienced during the original trauma. The memory gets attached in our mind to the triggers. And then later, encountering the triggers again will bring up the memory of the trauma. This is an example of state-dependent memory. The effect of encountering the trigger brings up the memory. Now I want to talk about a tricky area in memory recovery research - accidental scrambling of memories. Please bear with me. I will explain where I'm going with this. I'm not a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and frankly, I think the basis of their so-called foundation is purely evil. However, that does not mean that I don't believe my traumatic memories can't be contaminated after I've remembered them. I've talked with several therapists who are very dedicated to helping trauma survivors. They have confirmed what I've learned. This information I'm about to give you is simply to help us all sort out verifiable memories from those that can be used in a negative way to discredit us in public or in court.
This confirms moreover
that sleeping
reason breeds monsters, not only in the present and not only
in a
single
person. Monsters breed other and other monsters: monsters deceiving,
disqualifying,
harming or at least threatening creating solidarity among criminals to
cover - present and past - misdeeds. More often reason and truth are
sleeping
merely, but are not less damaging, either due to lack of skill in
listeners
/ healers or an - at least plausible - avoiding the awful
truth
in the victims themselves.
|
on our remembrance of things past... The Guardian - UK Thursday December 4, 2003 ...Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has beenobsessed with the subject of memory... Neuroscientists admit that by administering beta-blockers like Propranolol, they can induce false memories in susceptible people, particularly those who have suffered a traumatic experience, (torture) leaving them "open to memory distortion - so true and false become harder to disentangle...(Such a bold, stiff, opposed, ill-meaning and disparaging reasoning is defined in the site of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation where you can read also some samples of FMS FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER. Significant books by Elizabeth Loftus, just one of its main Authors are: Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial Elizabeth F.
Loftus,
Katherine Ketcham (1991) St. Martin's Press
|
this research
suggests memories
can be manipulated
because they act as if made from glass, existing in a molten state as
they are being created, before turning solid. When the memory is
recalled, however, it becomes molten again and so can be altered before
it once more resets. The
drug used by the
scientists is thought to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow
the memory to "harden" after it is recalled. The
researchers used propranolol,
a drug
normally used to treat
hypertension
in heart disease
patients but also known to cause
memory
problems.
Notwithstanding on the contrary these concrete scientific and technologic proofs do technically confirm the - for his time being only theoretic - Freud's core findings. To be then more "fair" when facts are to be praised, data regarding advantageous researches should be acknowledged: look at Stanford Report, Jan. 8, 2004
 |
Research
reveals brain has biological mechanism
to block unwanted memories BY LISA
TREI: For
the first time we see some
mechanism that could play a role in active forgetting |
Using brain imaging scans to identify the neural systems involved in actively suppressing memory, reinforcing Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression in a 2001 paper published in Nature by Michael Anderson titled Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control: the big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis.
Psychologists
offer
proof of brain’s ability to suppress memories by LISA TREI
For the first time, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oregon have shown that a biological mechanism exists in the human brain to block unwanted memories. The findings, published Jan. 9 in the journal Science, reinforce Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression. The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, a co-author of the paper titled Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories. It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction. The experiment showed that people are capable of repeatedly blocking thoughts of experiences they don't want to remember until they can no longer retrieve the memory, even if they want to, Gabrieli explained. Michael Anderson, a psychology associate professor at the University of Oregon and the paper's lead author, conducted the experiment with Gabrieli and other researchers during a sabbatical at Stanford last year. It's amazing to think that we've broken new ground on this ... that there is a clear neurobiological basis for motivated forgetting, Anderson said. Repression has been a vague and controversial construct for over a century, in part because it has been unclear how such a mechanism could be implemented in the brain. The study provides a clear model for how this occurs by grounding it firmly in an essential human ability -- the ability to control behavior. In recent years, the question of repressed memory has attracted considerable public attention concerning cases involving childhood sexual abuse. That was very controversial because it went through two pendulum swings, Gabrieli said. The first swing was that people thought, 'What a horrible thing.' The second was that people said, 'How many of these might be false memories?' Then people started asking does repressed memory even exist, and can you show that experimentally or scientifically? The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction.
For the first time, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oregon have shown that a biological mechanism exists in the human brain to block unwanted memories. The findings, published Jan. 9 in the journal Science, reinforce Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression. The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, a co-author of the paper titled Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories. It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction. The experiment showed that people are capable of repeatedly blocking thoughts of experiences they don't want to remember until they can no longer retrieve the memory, even if they want to, Gabrieli explained. Michael Anderson, a psychology associate professor at the University of Oregon and the paper's lead author, conducted the experiment with Gabrieli and other researchers during a sabbatical at Stanford last year. It's amazing to think that we've broken new ground on this ... that there is a clear neurobiological basis for motivated forgetting, Anderson said. Repression has been a vague and controversial construct for over a century, in part because it has been unclear how such a mechanism could be implemented in the brain. The study provides a clear model for how this occurs by grounding it firmly in an essential human ability -- the ability to control behavior. In recent years, the question of repressed memory has attracted considerable public attention concerning cases involving childhood sexual abuse. That was very controversial because it went through two pendulum swings, Gabrieli said. The first swing was that people thought, 'What a horrible thing.' The second was that people said, 'How many of these might be false memories?' Then people started asking does repressed memory even exist, and can you show that experimentally or scientifically? The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction.
EDITORS:
Photographs
of John
Gabrieli
and Michael Anderson
and brain
images are available online at http://newsphotos.stanford.edu
(slug: Memory).
The paper, Neural Systems
Underlying the Suppression
of Unwanted Memories, is available from the AAAS Office of Public
Programs
at (202) 326-6440 or scipak@aaas.org
Relevant Web URLs: http://gablab.stanford.edu.
Resilience and evolution
From Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary: re·sil·ience
Pronunciation: ri-'zil-y&n(t)s Function: noun
1 : the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress
1 : the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress
VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE:
Basic behavioral science research on the nature of and variations in personality is illuminating the sources of these differences and revealing ways to bolster people's ability to deal with life's difficult and painful aspects. Studies to date suggest that there is no single source of resilience or vulnerability. Rather, many interacting factors come into play.
Read here below a quote written by a very suffering, courageous "survivor":
[When] the pain and depression are deepening. Am I a masochist or is it just a relief to have the pain instead of the intolerable anxiety? even if only to restore the sadness over the anxiety. How crazy this sounds. But how right. It's called "being as sick as I am", and right now feels as bad as the compulsivity.Either a distressing anxiety and/or compulsivity, or a self-complying search of erratic novelties and/or capricious sentimentalisms are very unsteady ways: every selfishness conveys towards a NARROW, stiff path. Fragility is an attribute of "stiffness" when instead an elastic Resilience shows the capacity of a material to absorb ENERGY under shock, moreover to be improved by shocks themselves. Fragile materials ABSORB limited energy? Ductile materials absorb, tame and upgrade much energy. However if fragility is always associated with rigidity as the incapacity to absorb shocks, sometimes the almost similar "delicacy" can be present in a not rigid way: it can protect itself, but only within a narrow and limited space; the main and most worse case is the multiple personality disorder artificially induced or perhaps spontaneously coming from otherwise unberable suffering.
(In the file/chapter Consapevolezza e memoria one can find - damage: only in Italian - a very FIRST HAND emotional testimony referring to an artificially induced "multiplicity" till the first childhood.)
Nevertheless in confined space, and in precise times a similar non-rigidity can give way to a certain plastic flexibility: this is NOT an evolutive solution since it restricts the situation to a single direction, which can be defined in the more optimistic situation with the terms of conformist adaptability, in the worse one as the "induced indifference" of ... for example the guilt-free soldiers. In the best of cases the adult vulnerability brings only forth stagnation in a static environment to prevent every possibility of renovating those experiential enrichments too difficult and painful to be sustained and managed. Therefore children and young people are the "new" are the "different", are a big trouble upsetting this pseudo-adaptability. The despised children brought up according to this static world will miss the best of the developmental wealth, could not profit by each new experience, cannot modify the whole system of development, will grow only finalized to a static and narrow pseudo-maturity. Therefore they will not only miss the best of the developmental wealth, could not profit by each new experience, cannot modify the whole system of development with often devastating results. Generation after generation they cannot start new syntheses and renewals also since they miss and disparage their baby's and childhood's souvenirs if not the whole memory.
Flexibility and capacity to fit in well are thus NOT synonyms of ductile elasticity, which is, on the contrary, the resilient capacity to absorb and validate energy contributions: starting from there, new creative openings towards new evolutionary routes are always possible, and these assimilated experiences - whether good or bad - once integrated into one’s life constitute the sources of vital wisdom.
| A semantic note on the terms evolution and development is here required. EVOLUTION means something more than development: only entities, already present and still unvoiced, can develop, while great creative forces can promote, one could almost say GENERATE, evolutions in new and totally unexpected directions. |
A metaphor to visually explain these concepts: THE TREE.
- Originary personality as roots, plunging and nurturing into a rich or poor, favourable or difficult ground;
- Trunk as development with its regular year by year phases and improvements (or faults);
- Finally: the unceasing and unpredictable EVOLUTION of branches, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds.
Fragility
and vulnerability are the OPPOSITE
of RESILIENCE,
with its
capability to incorporate and be improved by the
force of hits:
so "human" resilience could also be considered as a way to master even
the worse damages by absorbing it into an evolutionary, increasing
wisdom.
(A quick remark: evolution is more than development:
only
what is already existent as blossom can "develop" whereas the
evolutionary
ways can more and more expand in new and manifold directions.
Look at Mental Health Problems and Young People: Concepts and Practice by Louise Rowling, Graham Martin, Lyn Walker
REFLECTION,
HOPE & RESILIENCE
Strenghtening
Foundations
Damaged development
However not only traumatic stress illnesses exist, not only an original great sorrow. As happens in analogy with the embryogenesis' biological "organizers", where function has to follow strict patterns of mode, times and ordered SEQUENCES to create "perfect" beings and not "monsters", also in the psycho-sociological and emotional field there are particular needs (to be emphatized: "NEED" not "wish") acting as organizers. Therefore, if they are not timely FULFILLED and in the correct series, they violate a basical Nature law: from an apparently "small" trauma at the start, this can perturb not only a crucial developmental phase but all the ensuing outcomes. Here is the new "monster" which can start a chain of errors worsening up to the point of sweeping away the whole of life in a vicious circle coiling in on itself, even beyond the suffering person until it overwhelms many existences in the present as well as the future: ones's own and other peoples'.(Look at the embryogenesis' biological "organizers":
A crucial developmental phase... can well happen in order to heal the worst traumatic sufferings, so all is NEVER lost after a faulty childhood:A Selective History of Induction II. Spemann's induction experiments The Spemann-Mangold organizer In 1901, Curt Herbst wrote that he thought it possible
to establish the occurrence of formative stimuli which are exerted from one part of the embryo to another, and to demonstrate eventually the possibility of a complete resolution of the entire ontogenesis into a sequence of such inductions.This prediction of inductive cascades was a bold statement, given that no sequence of events had yet been observed (1, 2). But that was soon to change. That same year, HANS SPEMANN (3) published one of the most significant and seminal papers in the history of embryology (4). his experimental analysis of lens formation in the frog.... In 1924, while working on the relatively large eggs of amphibians he discovered, together with Hilde Mangold, the existence of an area in the embryo, the portions of which, upon transplantation into a different part of a second embryo, induced the secondary embryonic primordia. The name "organizer centre" or "organizer" was given by him to those parts. For this discovery of the organizer effect in embryonic development, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935.
I am nothign but a foolish old woman who is still a child if she has ever been a child.... [But] an adult in strong need of regression can truly go back to an earlier stage of development... yes, even a missed or badly done one.(A crucial developmental phase...: how to know and PROTECT the perfect, basic discontinuity of the different stages of thriving...: this is exactly the main aim of the book Childhood: times of mutability revealed already in the plan of its title.)
So if folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow this isn't an ineluctable destiny. Development has NATURALLY a typical regularity of its own in its performing towards the Future, and likewise for the Past where such a basic regularity is held in the memory where it stays and can be regained. Nothing can be lost: neither the past facts nor even any disaharmonized or refuted developmental phase. Every time the whole sequence of deeds carried out and also of not-completed evolutions can be reactivated and performed towards a possible utter RIPENESS.
Unfortunately snaring "monsters" go on and on breeding other monsters. Unfortunately not always, only seldom, can these beneficial memories be regained: the opposing forces are too many: environmental, as well as human unwillingness, weakness and/or wickedness.
Even without reaching true madness, blunting can be disguised or covered not only by true pathological symptoms but more often by a swaggering and/or vain style of life, in a rough world of inconsistent "very high" and "very low" feelings - or even by their only shared exaggerate expression - investing both memory and mutual communication. Once the defensive dulling is activated (be clear that it happens in a totally unconscious way) it unrelentingly provokes a series of vicious circles, investing not only memory but also self-consciousness and social communication. The trodden dignity of the self, as well as that of the other, the reneged sensibility to RIGHTS and WRONGS and disregarded needs turn into susceptibility, claims, interpretations of reality, reduced to exasperated auto-referential differences being only apparently compensated by the availability of second and fallacious allurements and/or threats (the so-called give and take policy). The needs are only quantitative and unchangeable, defined for ever in the static concept of INFERIORITY and/or “superiority”. Research into the EXCEPTIONAL, which has not an evolutionary, but a "miraculous" character, opens scenarios of acritical expectations, of vain hopes (such as gambling), of contempt and desperation that aggravate the needs that have been overlooked. Fragility, incompleteness, failed experiences and openings, existential inadequacy… - all equipped with sham compensations - add public misconduct to personal misfortune by making the “inferiors” a very easy pray for whoever - credited as the “powerful” - wants to enslave them by allurement. At the same time, they find relief in further vindications that induce a further depersonalization, creating both enslavement and thoughtlessness towards the "superior", and maldisposition, up to maltreatment, towards the ”inferior”. It is a world - or rather: an imagined, immaterial world - made up of wants not perceived as needs or vice versa; reality avoided into inconsistent phobias (look at a well explained in the animation launched from the site Scienza e psicanalisi); malaise turned into wild hostilities; blind admiration for presumed exceptionality changed in the direction of proneness to incitement.... Anger so often assumed to be... a panic attack (!), as well as sexual whims mistaken as the only way to feel one does exist...
In such a delusive world one can crouch in silly, irrevocable frailty, or waste oneself by running towards erratic novelties, and/or pure outward appearance / amusement / excitement; one can equally and often alternatively cuddle up to sufferings "sine materia", or to guilt feelings without any sense; or can boast the real suggestibility believed instead to be emancipation; one can be proud of capricious sentimentalisms and/or selfishness propagandized as goodness; can flatter himself with envious longing for dependence and undeserved praise mixed-up with blind rebellions and blackmailings.... To sum up above all it is a fatuous but dangerous hatred of freedom and a despising of awareness (take a look at Aldous Huxley's classic book Brave New World, and then warn "our" not-brave "first" world).
Memory and dissociation
As written above, there are in actual extreme cases of either double or multiple personality, that is to say people who forget their true body, who believe they are another/ or unrelated different persons, and behave accordingly. Probably all this originates from different causes: however here is not the right place to discuss them.
Read this very telling books for accessible examples:
 F.Reta
Schreiber 'Sybil' 1975
Penguin books. There is
also a movie from this book:Sybil
(1976) (TV: director: Daniel
Petrie, actors: Sally Field = Sybil Dorsett, Joanne Woodward = Dr. Cornelia Wilbur). April 9, 1992 Shirley Ardell Mason (Sybil): January 25 1923 - February 26 1998 |
 Dissociation: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives by Steven Jay Lynn (Editor), Judith W. Rhue (Editor)
Covers the major aspects of dissociation, from the predominant models and diagnostic and treatment approaches, to research, clinical, and conceptual issues. Presents practical information for diagnosing and treating clients suffering from dissociative disorders, post- traumatic stress disorders, and the consequences of sexual victimization and cult involvement, and discusses social and cultural factors. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. |
Much more frequent
however are
cases of memory lapses where disturbing reminiscences are pushed back.
(In the main text DSM-IV
these are technically called dissociations).
They can regard real facts - objectively serious or even only
subjectively
disturbing - but they can then lead to the avoidance of, or even comply
with, the will to throwing away unbearable EMOTIONS,
and/or emotions unacceptable because they are embroiled together, or
cannot
adapt to displeasing facts.
Possible "dissociations"
from
memory or from awareness of the present can hit everyone, but this is
NOT
a problem concerning brain power, or age, or how long ago the facts
happened:
it is well-known
Memory preserved and memory
to be lost...
: look also to the recent movie Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
 Directed by Michel Gondry Writing credits (WGA) Charlie Kaufman (story) & Michel Gondry (story) ... Genre: Drama / Romance / Sci-Fi / Comedy Plot outline: A couple (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) undergo a procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship turns sour, but it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with. |
 Memory
Lane is the
story
- an emotional
autobiography of
an
elderly Italian film director commissioned by a French producer to make
a film on the life of Proust. During the preliminary preparations -
which
take him back and forth between France and Italy - Proust's
great
description
of involuntary memory
becomes real
for
him as he starts reliving key moments from his own past. In a series of
free associations (visual, tactile, acoustic) he experiences breaking
with
a group of partisans fighting the German occupation, falling repeatedly
in love with the same woman whom he fails to recognize after a long
separation,
taking her to Switzerland for an abortion, his relationship with his
twenty-year-old
son who mirrors back to him his own youth. The film has a simultaneous
foot in both the past and present. It embraces an entire life and, by
doing
this, touches the common experience of a whole generation. |
Symptoms and "monsters"
Nevertheless "oblivion" is neither a fault nor a weakness: it is like an unconsciously deliberate, even exhausting, interminable CENSORSHIP that demands an unrelenting effort, drawing in and wasting repeatedly energy, mostly from the sexual sphere. Therefore this drags increasing consequences, both of impoverishment and/or of actual risk. The EMOTIONS, these real vital, inherent factors of life, these sources of energy which can move us towards awareness and enriching experience, become instead only a dangerous conglomerate of explosive or rotten matter, out of all control. They are unfortunately also at any moment, at any subjectively "traumatic" occasion ready to explode or to wreck the whole person, often dragging his/her relatives and even acquaintances. In a series of joking poems, for this very reason extremely effective, R.Laing's book Knots gives an - only at first - amusing insight on how this lack of self-awareness could indeed seriously and unremittingly damage every relation beyond the wasted person, towards and against all his/her surrounding people and happenings.Pathological
trance is unfortunately almost universally encouraged within business
organizations.The
more an employee can with single-minded determination execute the
orders
and policies of his organization, the more that employee is rewarded,
promoted
and respected. Single-mindedness, however, is a pathological trance.
When,
unlike a yogi, we do not
choose our
trances,
and we are unaware of the types and nature of the pathological trances
in our lives, then there are things we are unaware of. What we are
unaware
of causes more human suffering than the sometimes painful knowledge of
the truth. One goal of a robust and magical
life is to be
as
aware as possible of our options. When
our
unconscious
pathological trances cripple our options the result is often disaster
and
tragedy in our personal lives, our society and in the environment.
The dissociative,
temporary "oblivion"
may be an occasional situation for everyone, but, as said above, it is
never a problem of age or temporal distance. Old people remember remote
experiences far better than recent ones, while the possibility of recalling
prenatal experiences has been proved some time ago.
(for ex.
there
was a whole session on it at the - noticed below - 5th°
International
Congress of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1977,
Rome).
Very mighty proposals
regarding
the recover of memory and its
outcomes can be also
reached
in the mainstream literature: the largest work (12
volumes, a series of seven individual novels that
constitute
one
larger one) - of the famed French writer Marcel
Proust is just
called A
la recerche du temps perdu (Remembrance
of Things Past).
"The memory of scents and tastes fills his thoughts and colors
his
health"
is written on the cover page of its hardcover
edition: it depicts how NOT conscious
reconsidering,
but the making the most of "involuntary memories", of sensorial sudden
happenings gave a profound sense to a continual searching passages of
past
life. Marcel Proust was a true humanistic writer, not a scientist, but
his "emotional autobiography". his way to take advantage of sensorial
flash-backs
have been praised as a great
discover,
which made even him and his work a "cult", his so enthusiastic
followers
jokingly defined "sick of proustitis".
Remembrance
of Things Past (3
Volume
Boxed Set) Marcel
Proust, Terence Kilmartin
(Translator), C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
(Translator). Many famed Film directors
tried to
get the Recherche
as a film: but not
as the whole, only
separately
some of the twelve books. The most recent film is Memory
Lane.
|
Scientists
find drug to banish bad memories by Richard
Gray, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/07/2007
It
failed to bring Jim Carrey happiness in the award-winning
film Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
but scientists
have now developed a way
to block and even delete unwanted memories from people's brains.
Researchers
have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories
while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at
the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought,
neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is
stored and even make it disappear. The research
has, however, sparked
concern among parliamentary advisers who insist
that new regulations are now needed to control the use of the drugs to
prevent them becoming used by healthy people as a "quick fix".... In a new study, revealed in the
Journal of
Psychiatric Research, psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal,
and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to "dampen" the
memories of trauma victims.
Prof Karim Nader, of
McGill University, said: When
you remember old memories they can
become 'unstored' and then have to be 'restored'. As
the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down
the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious
part of
the
memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without
being overwhelmed by the memory. The research suggests memories
can be
manipulated
because they act as if made from glass, existing in a molten state as
they are being created, before turning solid. When the memory is
recalled, however, it becomes molten again and so can be altered before
it once more resets.The drug used by the
scientists is thought to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow
the memory to "harden" after it is recalled. The
researchers used propranolol, a drug normally used to treat
hypertension in heart disease patients but also known to cause memory
problems. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for 10 days with the
drug or with dummy pills, while they asked to describe their memories
of a traumatic event that happened 10 years earlier.
|
Healing,
psychoanalysis, ripeness... and their opponents
Even when the
"repression"
is massive and malignant (often "helped" with alcohol or drugs,
if not authorized
or even forced with so-called medicaments
and/or elettroshock)
at any time
sudden violent flashes of vivid memories (rightly called FLASHBACKS)
can spontaneously either fleetingly unblock the memory, or progress
when
the censorial effort gives away. These do NOT occur due to a
a
particular
brain power, or a decision, or an external inducement, or some
"magical"
occurence. The flash-backs,
with their vivid emotional psychological reliving, are nevertheless
often
accompanied by a lot of real BODILY manifestations:
one can
perhaps
hypothesize the possibility that "these" specific memories can be
STORED
not in the brain itself but everywhere in the "visceral body", in the
nervous
cells of the A.P.U.D. system, in its so-called paraneurones,
which
surround
bowels and even lodges in perhaps all visceral systems (for example:
even
in the so called glomes).
(Look also at: Anmnesis: a
way for
healing...) and on the wide bibliography of Medline / PubMed
And for easier to-read other scientific subjects and bibliographies:
Look into at: Physical (somatic) memory
And on the wholesome physiological site one has to notice the PHEROMONES and their actions. It was in 1986 that Dr.Winnifred Cutler, founder of Athena Institute, and her colleagues conducted the first controlled scientific studies to document the existence of pheromones in humans. Prior to their landmark research there were no conclusive indications that pheromones were excreted by humans. By 1999, from a biological perspective, the term pheromone can be defined as a chemical excreted by animals that promotes behaviors [mostly for to] PERPETUATE THE SPECIES.... She published her first scientific paper on the subject back in 1986, and she has gone on to isolate these'naturally occurring ingredients' and bottle them...Read for example also:
Being
around breastfeeding mums alters the length of other women's menstrual
cycles, say researchers. Chemicals called
pheromones given off by the mums - or their babies -
Pheromones are chemicals which are emitted by one individual, causing a
physical or behavioural change in another.
Welcome
to the Pheromone Group website!
SCIENTIFIC DATARecord
from database:
MEDLINE Physiology
of the APUD system. Abstract
The characteristic
biochemical pathway of the APUD cell, namely amine
precursor uptake and decarboxylation, are illustrated by the
examples
of serotonin and catecholamine metabolism. Increasing understanding
of the origins of APUDomas as well as the biochemistry and
physiology
of the hormones they produce, has led to improved methods
of detection, imaging and treatment of afflicted patients.
APUD Neuroendocrine and Peptide Systems. Pearse postulated in 1969 the presence of a dispersed system of apud cells -- all of neural crest origin -- so proposed a far-flung 'APUD' neuroendocrine system, secreting peptide mediators. The amines and peptides function variously as neurotransmitters, hormones, and modulators of neural action. In the 1970s, the focus was on the amine metabolism that gave a unifying aspect to rather perplexing cells, scattered in many organs, which had been noticed and considered on an individual basis as clear (empty looking), or having granules reacting with silver salts. It turned out that most of these cell types made and released non-cytokine peptide mediators, to act locally or at a distance. The peptide story has now overwhelmed the amine or APUD idea, because these peptide factors are many, and are made and used for signaling in every part of the body, including the brain. The basis of the APUD classification is outlined below, because it helps explain aspects of pathology. |
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And the whole matter popularized in books as these:
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