(From Dr. LeDoux) "...So the amygdala is critical to this pathway. It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it's not taking advantage of all the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala."
"The cortex - the high road - also processes the stimulus, but it takes a little longer. You need the cortex for high-level perception in order to distinguish one kind of music from another... or to distinguish between two speech sounds But you don't need the cortex to carry out some of the emotional learning involved in the fear system. Thus we can have emotional reactions to something without knowing what we're responding to - even as we start responding to it. In other words, we're dealing with the unconscious processing of emotion. This is a neurological demonstration of at least part of what Freud was trying to get at when he talked about the unconscious."
"...What we're saying is that unconscious emotions are probably the rule rather than the exception."
[Comment - There is a bias inherent in the previous perspective. More specifically, according to that bias, any form of understanding which does not arise in conjunction with cortical functioning is said to constitute a “low road” simply because such understanding does not take “advantage” of so-called ‘higher’, cortical functioning. This is like saying that the auditory pathways are the low road because they don’t take advantage of visual pathways which, arbitrarily, someone is labeling as ‘higher’ because such a system of labeling fits in with some preconceived notion of what Being is all about.
Emotions do not involve just negative possibilities such as: jealousy, enmity, envy, pride, greed, and the like. Emotions also involve positive orientations such as: courage, integrity, compassion, love, kindness, and humility.
Loving someone and having a rational concept of love are not necessarily the same thing. The former has an understanding inherent in it that does not readily fit into various rationalistic categories, concepts, and theories ... and similarly for the other sorts of positive emotions which were mentioned.
Emotions are not unconscious just because they may not have any counterparts in so-called rational consciousness. Moreover, rational consciousness in not necessarily the only kind of awareness one can have.
Emotionally we can often intuit another person’s existential condition, even as our rational faculties remain oblivious to what is going on. This emotional intuition is not something which happens in the unconscious, but, rather, something which takes place in a realm of consciousness that is not readily translatable into linguistic-conceptual terms and, as a result, often times, the latter forms of processing information remind blind to the presence of such data - much as auditory processing remains blind to visual data.
It is not the bringing of repressed memories into conceptual/linguistic awareness which leads to healing in therapy. Rather, it is the emotional catharsis that arises through coming to understand - on an emotional level - the structural character of the hermenutics of trauma which have been pushed out of so-called ‘normal, waking consciousness’ even as such trauma continues to make its presence known through the symptoms that emerge as a result of the manner in which ‘normal, waking consciousness’ seeks to continue to remain unconscious toward such feelings and awareness.
To say that psychological symptoms form as a result of unconscious activity is a contradiction in terms. The very existence of the symptoms is proof that a conscious decision making process has not only taken place, but continues to take place so that ‘normal, waking consciousness’ does not have to deal with that which the rest of the individual’s being is all too aware is present.
So-called ‘normal, waking consciousness’ is afraid of looking into the darkness which lies beyond its familiar landscape of meanings, identity, values, and understandings. Nevertheless, the ‘darkness’ is well-aware of what is going on with ‘normal, waking consciousness’ and attempts in any number of ways of breaking through the defenses - not of the unconscious - but of ‘normal, waking consciousness’ anxiety about the possible ramifications (e.g., dissociation) which might arise if 'normal, waking consciousness' were to look beyond its own parameters of coping and understanding.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) We all know that there are many times in normal, day-to-day experience when we don't understand where our emotions are coming from - why we feel happy, sad, afraid.
[Comment - The foregoing is not the right way of saying things. The issue is not that “we don’t understand where our emotions are coming from”, but, rather, the identity of the “we” is our ‘normal, waking consciousness’, and this is what doesn’t understand where emotions are coming from.
Emotions know where they are coming from and to what they are responding. However, the understanding of emotions is in a form which does not readily translate into terms that ‘normal, waking consciousness’ will comprehend.
One has to attend, very carefully, to what is going on during an emotional experience, as well as do a lot of reflective analysis to finally be able to arrive at a rational understanding of what is going on emotionally. Good therapy or counseling is about, in part, this process of forensic reconstruction based on a variety of experiential clues, but none of this is about making the unconscious conscious - at least in any neo-Freudian sense.
Instead, the processes which therapy or counseling involve - if they are successful at what they do - are a kind of translating from one kind of understanding to another modality of understanding - both of which are, each in its own manner, conscious phenomena. Unfortunately, when an individual is dominated by a particular way of processing information - as we are in the modern world are in relation to linguistic and rational conceptual modalities of engaging experience - then, it becomes very hard to become aware of that - e.g., emotion - which is there in plain sight all the time ... but we just are not attending to it in the right way, so, we treat it as being from the unconscious, when, in truth, ‘normal, waking consciousness' is being unconscious toward such phenomena due to the way in which 'normal, waking consciousness' goes about its hermeneutical activity and, thereby, does not attend - i.e., treats as non-existent - to certain facets of experience.
The learning, conditioning, and association which goes on is a conscious process. But, the form in which the memory of this learning or conditioning is carried is not necessarily readily translatable into rational forms or linguistic structures.
Nonetheless, something is aware that the learning has gone on and that is why there is a memory which can affect the way ‘normal, waking consciousness’ functions even though the latter may be largely unaware of the presence of such learning. On the other hand, ‘normal, waking consciousness’ is sufficiently aware of the existence of such a memory to develop defenses to keep such data at the periphery of 'normal waking consciousness'.
Defenses are an admission that ‘normal, waking consciousness’ is aware that someone or something is trying to make contact, and defenses are an admission that ‘normal, waking consciousness’ knows something about what the nature of that communication is about. However, defenses are also an admission that ‘normal, waking consciousness’ has made a choice about how it wishes to cope, and this coping strategy includes provisions for keeping such information or understanding at arms length. Soon, an individual habituates to what is there along the horizons of normal, waking consciousness but to which we choose not to attend in any overt way (even as symptoms form due to the awareness which is there about the presence of such threatening forms of understanding.
A person doesn’t continue to choose, for example abusive partners or inappropriate marital partners due to unresolved unconscious issues. There is an active process of choice which is going on, and such an individual chooses - due to things which are not understood by ‘normal, waking consciousness’- to align herself or himself to a certain hermeneutical take on various aspects of reality ... takes which are not always easy to translate into conceptual-linguistic terms.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) "Listening to your gut" ...might simply mean you are responding to past learning.
[Comment - Listening to one’s gut is to attend to forms of understanding that either are not easily translatable into the forms with which ‘normal, waking consciousness’ usually operates, or which are not being permitted to be fully translated by the defenses which have been constructed - and actively maintained - by an individual’s ‘normal, waking consciousness’ in order to keep such understanding at a distance. Listening to one’s gut is to attend to a form of understanding which is rooted in hermeneutical modalities that are other than rationalistic or linguistic, but which are no less valid, necessarily, just because they are being expressed through such non-rationalistic and non-linguistic modalities.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) Another important player in the fear response is the prefrontal cortex. In rat studies, as well as in human experiments, when you give the sound over and over again, without the unpleasant event occurring, it eventually loses its ability to elicit the emotional fear reactions. This process is called extinction. But if the medial part of the prefrontal cortex is damaged, emotional memory is difficult to extinguish. So, for example, a rat that has a lesion in the prefrontal cortex tends to continue to respond to the sound as if it were still associated with the unpleasant event' the learned response is resistant to extinction.
[Comment - In human beings, the kind of learning which is most resistant to extinction or modulation tends to revolve around hermeneutical systems that have risen which offer various motivations or inducements which persuade an individual to hang on to such learning, despite the possible presence of problems which may exist as a result of such learning. Attitudes, prejudices, opinions, biases, and so on are often resistant to extinction because they play an important role in some larger hermeneutical system in which there is one, or more, forms of reinforcement or reward or payoff for retaining such attitudes, biases, prejudices, and the like.
In many individuals, the reinforcement contingencies surrounding learning that is resistant to extinction or modification have to do with the potential threat of the advent of dissociative states should certain attitudes, opinions, feelings, and so on, be abandoned. One’s sense of identity, core values, framework of assigning meaning, and methods of coping with experience would be brought into doubt, and with such doubt comes anxiety and the specter of the onset of: identity diffusion, de-realization, and de-personalization which are characteristic of dissociation.
There is a double whammy to such potential threats. Not only does one risk sliding into the dark abyss of dissociation if one were to give up certain dogmas, biases, attitudes, and the like, but, as well, one would loose the sense of peace and well-being which one has when one believes that one has the truth about things.
There is a tendency in human beings to maintain the status quo, because upsetting the ‘usual’ way of doing things tends to entail too many problems - problems which are capable, at least potentially, of undermining our whole hermeneutical way of engaging life. Consequently, there are strong systems of contingent reinforcement present which we chose in the past, and which we continue to choose on an on-going basis, in order to maintain stability and to keep the wolves of dissociation away from our living space.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) However, it's important to know that even without damage to the prefrontal cortex, fear memories are hard to extinguish completely. Many studies show, for example, that weeks after a rat has ceased to react to a sound that had been paired with a shock, it might suddenly react fearfully to the sound again. Of if the animal goes back into the chamber where it had the conditioning experience, the fear behavior can be reactivated. Stress can reactivate extinguished fears in humans as well. A patient with a phobia can be treated, apparently successfully; then something happens - say the patient's mother dies - and the phobia comes back.
What certain types of therapy can do - and what the extinction process does - is train the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the output of the amygdala. This training doesn't eliminate the unconscious fear; it simply holds it in check.
[Comment - The goal of therapy is not necessarily to “inhibit the output of the amygdala”, per se. The goal of therapy is to get people to explore the assumptions, biases, attitudes, opinions, ideas, and feelings which color, shape and orient that person’s way of hermeneutically engaging experience and life.
Changes in the underlying hermeneutical framework may lead to a chnage in the character of the output of the amygdala. However, the reverse scenario is not necessarily the case which is why drugging people to inhibit or encourage certain kinds of ligand-receptor activity oftten never really addresses the actual, underlying life problem.
Unless one is talking about some form of disease process (such as is caused by malfunctioning genetics, or the invasion of a given virus or bacterial infection, or the ingestion of a psycho-active or toxic substance, or some manner of substance-abuse), physiology and brain chemistry do not just randomly, arbitrarily go haywire, and, then, such changes lead to alterations in hermeneutical outlook which are, in clinical terms, problematic. Instead, in the vast majority of cases, it is the hermeneutics of choice that have led to existential difficulties, and these difficulties are often reflected by (after the fact) physiological functioning through symptom-formation.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) Therapists find this both depressing and informative; they now understand that fear memories can't be completely eliminated, but at least they know what battle they're up against. ...I don't know of any animal that can't be conditioned ...and in any animal that has an amygdala, that structure seems to be involved in fear conditioning. The fear system, therefore, is probably a very basic, fundamental learning mechanism that's built into the brain.
In this sense then, we're emotional lizards. We're running around with an amygdala that's designed to detect danger and respond to it. This system is very efficient, and it hasn't changed much in terms of how it works. What has changed, of course, are the kinds of things that will turn it on, the things that humans [are taught and conditioned] to respond to that have the same effect on us that seeing a cat has on a rat. [LeDoux, States of Mind, 1999]
[Comment - One enters into realms which have not, yet, been shown to be reducible to purely biochemical and physiological processes when one begins to talk about the sorts of things which change with respect to what turns our amygdalas on and off. We may not be able to change the way fear is rooted in the structural properties of the amygdala, but through courage, nobility, integrity, patience, love, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, and various kinds of spiritual understanding one can stand up to the way the body is pre-wired to deal with fear, once it arises, and one also can learn to broaden one’s horizons so that one understands that certain kinds of experience need not cause for fear, and, thereby, not give the amygdala any reason to act up.
The very fact that the amygdala can, in a sense, be programmed or oriented in such a way that the kind of hermeneutical data which is likely to trigger autonomic response can be altered suggests that the amygdala is like a tool. We are the ones who, through our choices or the choices which we permit to be foisted on us, determine, to a large extent (but not necessarily entirely) what the parameters of our fear-space is going to be.
We can make that fear-space very large through our choices. Or, we can make that fear-space very narrow through such choices.
We choose, not the amygdala. In very important ways, the amygdala merely operates in conjunction with, and in accordance with, the parameters we assign to it through our choices.
The amygdala is part software and part hardware. Human beings have the capacity, within certain limits, to program and, when necessary, re-program that software.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) The hippocampus in involved in the system whose job is to create the memories we mean when we say "I remember." You remember your first day at school, your vacation last year, Sunday dinner last week, and so on. These are your memories and they involve the hippocampus.
People with damage in the hippocampus have poor "conscious" memory. There is a famous case of a woman who had severe amnesia. Every day when her doctor came to see her, he had to reintroduce himself because the woman couldn't remember having seen him the day before. If he left the room for even just a few minutes, she would forget having met him. One day, the doctor came in and held out his hand for the oft-repeated reintroduction. But, this time he had a pin in his hand which he used to prick her hand. She jerked her hand back immediately. The doctor left the room for a few minutes and then returned, offering his hand again. But the woman refused to take it. She had no conscious memory of the doctor, but her amygdala remembered, and she protected herself.
[Comment - The foregoing tends to indicate there are different ways of engaging and understanding the world in a conscious manner. However, while one could agree that the amygdala plays a role in such remembering, it is a little premature to say that it is the amygdala, per se, which remembers.
Memory is rooted in consciousness. If consciousness can be induced to believe (say, through hypnosis) that something did not happen, then, it will continue to behave as if the event did not happen. The memory is not necessarily in the body, but rather a given biochemical/physiological configuration in the body is interpreted to mean something or other by the conscious understanding - that is, meaning, significance and value must be assigned through a hermeneutical process, and it is not just biochemistry or physiology which remembers in and of itself.
Pain/fear thresholds change as a function of beliefs, values, and motivational direction, and not necessarily as just a function in changed physiology or biochemistry. Interpretations must be conferred on such changes for them to given a place in the hermeneutics. In amnesia, aphasia and other somewhat similar conditions, we lose conscious contact with the biochemical and physiological configurations that are necessary templates to trigger, in specific ways, appropriate memories and responses which have formed in association with such configurations.
Some of the patients with different versions of the foregoing disabilities are often frustrated because there is a sense that part of them knows even as they are unable to generate desired responses, words, concepts, and the like. This frustration may be a reflection of the fact that more than one kind of understanding, consciousness, awareness, and memory may exist simultaneously, and when co-ordination has been disrupted through trauma, disease, and the like, then, one is not able to give expression to what one knows in the usual way (e.g., words, concepts, behavior, or memories which are accessible to normal waking consciousness)].
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Conversely, people who have damaged amygdala's and intact hippocampuses, can't be "fear conditioned." They may know all the details: that the doctor was in the room, that they were stuck with the pin; but they won't hold back their hand when the doctor offers his.
The hippocampus and the amygdala mediate different kinds of memory. Normally, they work together so that emotional memories, and memories of emotion are fused in our conscious mind so tightly that we cannot dissect them by introspection.
A traumatic or stressful situation has separate consequences for these two memory systems. When stress hormones are released into the body, such as cortisol, they tend to inhibit the hippocampus, but they excite the amygdala. In other words, under stress or during trauma, the amygdala will have no trouble forming an emotional, unconscious memory of the event - and will, in fact, form even stronger memories because of the presence of cortisol - but these same chemicals will interfere with and prevent formation of a conscious memory of the event.
[Comment - As indicated previously, the emotional memory is not necessarily unconscious. Different memories may be understood in different ways and accessed through different modalities of awareness.
Just because some understandings are not always translatable into a given hermeneutical mode of awareness does not relegate the foregoing to the unconscious. Rather, 'normal, waking consciousness' becomes unconscious, to varying degrees, toward such a modality of understanding.
To whatever extent a given, say, emotional understanding can make its presence felt along the horizons of ‘normal, waking consciousness’, then, to that extent will the latter have some degree of awareness of the former. Defenses, symptoms, and pathological behavior arise in the context of such partial or limited forms of awareness on the part of ‘normal, waking consciousness.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) This has a strong bearing on our early childhood programming. It is thought that the hippocampus is not fully formed and functional in early childhood, and, as a result, we are unable to develop long-term, conscious memories before that time.
Yet, the amygdala is fully formed and functioning. And it is for this reason that abused children form very strong emotional memories that cause them to react strongly to many things, while having no access at all to any conscious understanding of why they feel as they do. Unconscious emotional memories affect us all our lives, powerfully, and it is extremely difficult to work through them without conscious recall. The mere sight of anything that is associated with an early traumatic or stressful event can activate the emotional response, whether it is of a positive or negative nature.
[Comment - I would tend to disagree, to some extent, with the foregoing way of saying things. As a variety of multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder cases indicate, the age at which the ‘core self’ may be subjected to unbearable abuse and, as a result, protective fracturing steps are taken, this can take place fairly early in childhood.
In many patients, the memory of the abuse of very early childhood is present. However, being able to translate this into linguistic or rational terms may not be all that easy.
Furthermore, whenever fear is present, there too is consciousness. The presence of fear always belongs to some conscious entity which has a sense of self that is sufficiently developed and self-aware to feel threatened by that toward which fear is being directed.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) Now, all animals have the fear-learning mechanism which enables them to survive. They can detect danger and respond to it appropriately. But these animals don't have what we call fearful feelings the same way that human beings can "feel afraid." When the basic "fear program" system is activated in a brain that also has self-consciousness, a new phenomenon occurs: subjective feelings. Feelings of fear are what happen in consciousness when the activity generated in the subcortical neural system involved in detecting danger is perceived by certain systems in the cortex, especially the "working memory."
[Comment - What does it mean to say: “when the activity generated in the subcortical neural system involved in detecting danger is perceived by certain systems”? What is the nature of this detection process? What is the nature of this perception process? What are these “certain systems” and what are their dynamics and how do they interact with “working memory”? How does consciousness fit into all of this and how does the hermenutics of the detection and perception process arise? How does the individual select or choose from the universe of memory what is to be used as the “working memory” subset?]
(From Dr. LeDoux) But thinking with the cortex, it turns out, is basically a way to rewire your brain. It is like working on the back roads to develop them into the commanding interstate system of the brain they were meant to be. Research shows that changes in the brain are the result of learning experiences, and it seems that learning - acquiring knowledge - is the path of rewiring the synaptic connections in the brain.
[Comment - While it may be true that the synaptic connections in the brain get rewired and/or grow in relation to learning experiences, perhaps the dynamics of the learning process itself, which is subsequently reflected in such synaptic changes, is not reducible to such changes. In other words, the synaptic changes are a response to learning, not the cause of it]
(From Dr. LeDoux) It seems that the key to this is the fact that learning, hard thinking and pondering, requires that certain brain chemicals - usually acetylcholine - be squirted out at just the right place and in the right quantities. It is becoming clear that the molecules of memory are blind to the kind of memory - whether it is conscious or unconscious - that is occurring. What determines the quality of different kinds of memories is not the molecules that do the storing but the systems in which those molecules act. If they act in the hippocampus, the memories that get recorded are factual and accessible to our consciousness. If the chemicals are acting in the amygdala, they are emotional and mostly inaccessible to conscious awareness.
[Comment - One important question to ask with respect to the foregoing is this: what determines what “just the right place and in the right quantitities” will be that certain brain chemicals, such as acetylcholine, are to be squirted out? What are the dynamics of this process?
As much as those neuro-chemists who are reductionistic would like to claim otherwise, there is not, yet, sufficient evidence available to indicate that it is biochemical and physiological processes which are the cause of such determinations. Indeed, as tempting as it may be to want to make the jump from what is currently known about brain chemistry and physiology to the claim that consciousness, language, thinking, intelligence, logic, and creativity may be all self-regulating physical/material processes, the fact of the matter is, such a jump is not warranted at this time.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) So, what happens is that even if we don't know what has triggered a given emotional response until after the fact, we do have an awareness that we are "feeling" a certain way. This awareness is called our "working memory."
Working memory, or awareness, involves the frontal lobes of the brain just above and behind the eyebrows.
[Comment - Nevertheless, while the awareness that is referred to as ‘working memory’ may be colored and shaped by biochemical and physiological processes, the awareness, itself, is not necessarily caused by those processes, nor can one conclude necessarily that the hermeneutical activity which structures such awareness is caused by the processes taking place in the frontal lobes of the brain, anymore than one can suppose that a television set is what causes a television program simply because the former device has the capacity to receive the programming which originates from outside the set.]
(From Dr. LeDoux) It seems that this "working memory," or "awareness," is - if not consciousness itself - at least a window to it.
It is in working memory that "conscious feelings" occur. In working memory, three things come together to create conscious feeling: present stimuli, activation of the amygdala in some way and activation of conscious memory in the hippocampus.
[Comment - Among other things, what is missing from the foregoing description is: (1) some reference to what makes consciousness possible through which one is not just able to register stimuli but to be aware, at different levels, of the presence of such stimuli; (2) any account of how and what makes the ‘decision’ concerning how to invest such stimuli with meaning, value and significance; (3) an explanation of the hermeneutical dynamics which result in selecting the activation of the amygdala as the best way to proceed under the circumstances; (4) and, finally, how memory - wherever it may actually be stored - comes into conscious awareness.
There is the simulation of an explanation being given expression in the paradigm of brain chemistry and physiology without the actual substance of real understanding. In effect, one has a description of certain aspects of so-called higher functioning but no real explanation of the hermeneutical dynamics taking place within the phenomenology of experience.]
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