Week 5 Flashcards
Some Freud Ideas
- Disagreed with the perception of the day that the brain is hardwired and localised
- Believed brain was dynamic and could reorganised itself.
- First to promote brain plasticity
Hebb’s Law & Freud
- Neurons that fire together, wire together
- Freud did propose this theory 60 years before though - Law of Association
- Freud said: that patients came up with interesting connections if he did not interfere
- These were thoughts and feelings usually pushed down
Neuro Concepts and Psychodynamic Approach
- Early Relationships & Brain Development - Attachment Theory
- Consciousness - Instinctual Drives
- Memory Systems - Repressed Memories
Freudian Concepts
ID, Ego & Superego
Conscious, Preconscious & Unconscious
Amygdala & Hippocampus Oppisite Processing
Metacognition
- We are only species that can think about our thinking
- We can pause to reflect at anytime during information processing to evaluate thoughts
- We can ask “why” about thinking and doing
Unconscious and Threat Systems
- Unconscious is activated when threat is experienced
- Perceived through our 5 senses
- Could be a gut instinct as well
- When amygdala triggers fight/flight or freeze actions are largely involuntary
Memories & Experience
- Memories are not the recollection of an experience
- Rather recollection of the last time you recalled the experience
Memory Plasticity
- Freud moved away from the idea that memories are permanent
- Memories can be changed by subsequent events
- Memories can be retranscribed
- To change memories they have to be in our conscious
Transference & Freud
- Social Memory and unconscious
- Can be made conscious within the therapy process
- When an individual redirects emotions from one person to another
- Freud said it was a good thing as it can bring emotions to consciousness
Transference
- Freud found patients would view him as the client
- Relived experiences rather than remembered them
- Transference of early trauma could be altered if attention was drawn to the current situation
- Neural networks and associated memories could be retranscribed
Types of Memory
- Procedural Memory
- Fear Memory
- Episodic Memory
- Semantic Memory
- Explicit Memory
- Implicit Memory
Procedural Memory
How to do things manually
Key for taking actions without conscious thought like driving or typing
Fear Memory
Can be conscious or Unconscious
Episodic Memory
Also called Autobiographical Memory
Based on narratives with a beginning, middle and end
Semantic Memory
- Alsco called Declarative Memory
- Stand alone facts
- Largely disconnected from emotion
Explicit Memory
Requires conscious rehearsal
Implicit Memory
- Involves thoughts and feelings and events
- Unconsciously encoded to memory
State Dependent Memory
- Depression creates a negative bias for remembering
- Selective scanning of environment that focuses on the negative
- Implicit dysfunctional memories can cause us to recreate negative patterns in behaviour
- This can even occur if the patterns are unsuccessful
- Our perception of the world is based on past experience
Trauma and Memory
- People who experience trauma in first three years can have little explicit memory of the trauma
- BUT Implicit memories can be triggered when similar events occur
- Procedural memories of emotive experience can get repeated in transference or in life
Uncovering Trauma Memories
- Therapist can help people to bring unconscious memory into explicit conscious context
- This way they are retranscribed into conscious explicit memory
Dream Analysis
- Dreams are related to traumatic memory - nightmares
- This is reactivated during sleep
- Brain regions for emotion, sex, survival & aggressive instincts are very active
- Prefrontal cortex is inhibited
- In this way dreams can reveal impulses usually blocked from conscious awareness
Dream States & Neural Plasticity
Sleep affects Neural Plasticity by consolidating learning & memory
We remember better after a good nights sleep
Connected to enhancing emotional memories
Allows hippocampus to turn short term memories to long term memories
Laterality & Psychotherapy
Left & Right brain integration relies on secure attachments
Also on co-construction of narrative for labelling feelings
Therapy can reintegrate disconnected hemispheres by testing reality
Puts words to feelings within a caring relationship context
Therapy & Hippocampus
- People who improve in psychotherapy also find their memories improve
- This may be due to stimulated neural growth in Hippocampus
- Hippocampus shrinks with depression
Memory 3 broad categories
- Conscious
- Preconscious
- Unconscious
Conscious Memory
- Remembering the past
- Content of previous experiences
- Reports of day-to-day life
Preconscious Memory
- Holds memories that don’t need immediate attention
- Can be easily brought to conscious awareness
Unconscious Memory
- Memory unavailable to conscious consideration
- Can manifest in behaviours, attitudes, feelings
- Can be more complex - defenses, self-esteem and transference
Memory - Role of the therapist
- Identify and Decipher unconscious memory and make it available to the patient
- Freud said this was the role of the therapist
Rebuilding the Brain
Increasing interconnection and integration of neural networks between unconscious and conscious memory
Resistance to Therapy or Memory Deficit?
- Many psychological disorders result in memory deficit.
- Involve high rates of cortisol and small hippocampus size
- Depression leads to vulnerability to negative bias when remembering events
State Dependent Memory
- Depression causes scanning of the environment
- We seek information to reinforce negative bias
- Patients say if they wake up depressed they feel worse
- Even if nothing has changed.
Multiple Memory Systems
- Two Broad Categeories - Implicit & Explicit
- Each type of own domains, focus of learning, neural architecture and development timeframe.
- Developing Hebbian Synapses - fire together wire together
- Dendrite remodeling and long term potentiation
Long Term Potentiation
- Persistent strengthening of synapses
- Leads to a long-lasting increase in signal transmission between neurons.
- Important process for synaptic plasticity.
Explicit Memory
- Conscious learning of semantic, sensory and motor experiences
- Some of these lay just below consciousness until they become important
- Like the tip of an iceberg
Implicit Memory
- Visible in patterns of learning stored in hidden layers of nerual processing
- Mostly not connected to or accessible to the consciousness
- Can be everything from riding a bike to repressed trauma
- Like the vast iceberg beneath surface of the water
Triune Brain & Memory
- Reptilian Brain has genetic memories controls implicit actions and is non verbal
- This acts like the Freudian Unconscious
Early and Late Memory
- This is implicit memory and explicit memory
- Called this because this is the order and timing in which they develop
- Implicit memory begins before birth and combine with body function after birth
Childhood Amnesia
- Due to delay of maturation of explicit memory
- Also as development of hippocampus and cortical structures happens later
- But we still learn to walk and talk with underdeveloped explicit memory
Amygdala Memory Networks
- Central hub of fear processing
- Located within the limbic system
- Fully developed by 8 months gestation - We can experience fear in the womb
- At first we depend on others to moderate fear until we learn to regulate by ourselves
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Basolateral Amygdala
- Evolves alongside expansion of cerebral cortex
- Supports ability to assess and appraise the world
Appraisal for Danger
- Amygdala Connectivity integrates with the senses - Especially Vision
- Assesses danger, safety, familiarity and approach-avoidance situations
- Remains attentive to survival assessment
- Can create emotional bias by colouring our experiences - fears/sure based biases
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Two Circuits of Sensory Input to Amygdala
- First travels directly from Thalamus
- Implicit - allows for fast response survival decisions with minimal sensory input
- Second loops through cortex and hippocampus then amygdala
- Adds Cortical Processing to appraise context, inhibition, perception and behaviours
Hippocampal Memory Networks
- Sustained stress leads to excessive glucocorticoids in the hippocampus
- Too much causes dendrite degeneration, cell death
- Causes vulnerability to neurological problems, and poor hippocampus function
- Connected to poor memory
Amygdala & Hippocampus Relationship
- Contributes to Top-Down and Left-right integration
- Amygdala does Right-Down - Emotional & somatic organisation of experiences
- Hippocampus does Left-Top - conscious, logical and cooperative social function
- This connection supports affect regulation, reality testing, resting states and arousal anxiety
Opposites of Amygdala & Hippocampus
- Amygdala heightens awareness of specific attention, can generalise
- Hippocampus inhibits responses, attention and habituation, involved with discrimination
Flashbacks & Amygdala
- Flashbacks are multi-sensory
- Often experienced as if they are happening in real time
- Stereotyped and repetitive so possibly not connected to the hippocampus
Prozac & Paxil
May be effective in treating depression because the boost hippocampus
Also helps moderate amygdala action
Memory is Malleable
- False memories occur suggesting that episodic memories are less reliable
- Most therapists are aware of false memories and care needed to minimise this experience
- False memories can be planted and seem very real
Explanatory Coherence
- When the memory is distorted by: -
- A need to provide an explanation
- Can assimilate it when explaining other propositions
- Can offer analogous explanations.
Nachtraglichkeit
- Provides the memory, not the event with traumatic significance
- Means a circular complementarity of both directions of time
- Reconceptualise a memory based on evolving maturity
- An Idea developed by Freud
- Memory is evolving and can be influenced for the positive
Nachtraglichkeit
Nachtraglichkeit
- Provides the memory, not the event with traumatic significance
- Means a circular complementarity of both directions of time
- Reconceptualise a memory based on evolving maturity
- An Idea developed by Freud
- Memory is evolving and can be influenced for the positive
