[Martin Taylor 971217 1&;44]
Bill Powers (971217.0929 MST)] to David Goldstein
About the therapy strategy in Brainlocked, Bill says:
Why should this approach have any effect if the real problem is a chemical
imbalance in the brain? If all deviant behavior is caused by a surplus or a
deficit in certain neurotransmitters, what is the point of encouraging a
person to change his awareness or tell things to himself? Words and
thoughts are just secretions of the brain; when the brain is set right
chemically, the proper words and thoughts will result. Isn't that pretty
much the medical view?In the case of OCD, the effective drugs seem to involve the
neurotransmitter Serotonin. People with OCD say that the drug helps
them to follow this strategy. If the urge is too strong, they find it
hard to ignore the obsession or compulsion.
Serotonin is just a neurotransmitter; it is part of the process
of neural computation, and has nothing to do with the _meaning_ of any
particular computation. Implicating seretonin is like implicating a
shortage or excess of electrons in a computer bug.
And so forth. If I understand David correctly, he is talking about
a disorder characterized by a locked-up positive feedback loop, for which
the appropriate technical solution is to reduce the loop gain below unity,
allowing the elements of the loop to be influenced by signals outside
the loop. At one point in one of his messages, he even says straight out
that the therapy "reduces the coupling." That's exactly the right therapy
if the problem is too tight a coupling.
Only when the positive feedback loop is broken can reorganization take
place effectively. With luck, the reorganization will be such as to prevent
the same or another positive feedback loop from becoming so locked that
outside data can't break it. But one can't guarantee that, especially if
the global environment (i.e. chemical concentrations related to neural
coupling) is such that tightly coupled loops are likely to develop.
How do you know that the change in
seretonin level is not part of an attempt to correct an error that's being
caused elsewhere?
You don't know that, but again, reading David's descriptions, it sounds
as if the therapy at least does change seratonin levels temporarily, even
if there _is_ another control system that will bring them back to where
they were. And if this temporary break suffices to allow the loop to
unlock, that sounds like a good thing, at least it does to me.
The content of the OCD symptoms seems to be unimportant.
That's what people say when they don't understand what is going on. If they
don't understand it, it must be unimportant.
What it says to me is that the phenomenon has been observed to occur with
a wide variety of content, suggesting that something other than the
content is what one should try to understand if one is to understand
what is going on. I read David as saying that if you hear a squeal
when you put a microphone too close to a lodspeaker it feeds, the
frequency is unimportant; what is important is to reduce the coupling
between the microphone and the speaker, regardless of the frequency.
In the case of OCD, the anxiety is not useful, functional.
How the hell do you know that? Are you saying that returning to your house
to see if you shut off the gas is not useful or functional?
I _think_ he's talking about returning to the house every time you get as
far as the front steps on your way out. That's not useful or functional
if you do it more than once, is it?
Disclaimer: I know no more about this than I have learned from the messages
on CSGnet. This message is based just on how I read what David is saying,
coupled with what I know about how coupled systems can behave.
Martin