Research Snapshot: March 2023

Below I’ve copied over rough notes on my psychology research as of mid-March. I’ve written it to be fairly readable, so I’ve avoided use of jargon wherever I can.

• therapy is this interesting profession where, in the course of merely having a conversation with somebody, you change things in their brain, in an occasionally dramatic fashion.
• Bruce Ecker and others propose the idea that memory reconsolidation is the common mechanism that underlies all the various mechanisms of therapy that exists. well, not all therapy actually, but specifically transformational therapy.
• the adherents of this view distinguish counteractive change from transformative change. counteractive change is incremental, effortful, and easy to reverse. let’s say you have stage fright. counteractive change looks like: finding ways to cope with the stage fright when it arises. it’s kind of like putting the lid on a boiling pot: it’s still releasing heat, but it’s just a lot slower.
• transformative change looks quite different: it’s finding the underlying cause of the symptom (“symptom” is a loaded word but you get the point), eliminating its cause, such that the symptom is no longer activated. transformative change is: lasting, sudden, and does not require effort to maintain. it’s turning off the stove so the water stops boiling.
• what Ecker et al want to do is: find an explanation for how lasting change occurs. and this is where we get to the meat of the theory. I can explain it in the context of Coherence Therapy, which is the therapeutic technique that Ecker and colleagues have created.
• in Coherence Therapy, the premise, like in lots of therapy literature, is that you engage in undesired behaviors for a reason. there is some underlying adaptiveness to your apparently “maladaptive” behaviors; in other words, there is a coherence to your behavior. this adaptiveness comes from certain constructs in your subconscious mind – your subconscious mind has certain memory structures which we could reasonably call “beliefs” or “models” of the world.
• an example of such a model is: “If I act confidently, people will hate me.” or, “If I throw a bad event, my friends will be embarrassed of me.” these constructs underlie your behavior, but often they are not conscious or verbalized. verbalizing them allows you to, potentially, reconsolidate them.
• in particular, once you verbalize them—make them conscious and vivid in your present awareness—you expose them to modification. the tenet of Coherence Therapy is that once a schema is activated, it needs to be juxtaposed with contradictory evidence in order to be modified or erased. merely reactivating the schema does not necessarily change it.
• so, they have this process of (1) activate the schema; (2) find disconfirming evidence to the schema and juxtapose the two; (3) have repeated juxtapositions of schema and disconfirming evidence, consciously. as you do these repeated juxtapositions, you update the memory structure.
• one other key point here is: your brain inherently detects contradictions between memory structures. “contradictions” or perhaps “prediction errors”. if the schema says “Y will happen”, but actually something else happens (or e.g. you have a different memory structure says “Z will happen”), and those two are fundamentally different things, your brain will detect that, and it will correspondingly update the original memory structure.
• it’s a fairly simple and elegant idea. bring subconscious constructs into memory, present disconfirming evidence to destabilize them, and repeatedly present disconfirming evidence to update or erase them entirely.
• within Coherence Therapy, there are all kinds of techniques for:
  • (1) finding the actual memory structure that underlies your problematic (or “presenting”) symptoms;
  • (2) finding disconfirming evidence;
  • (3) activating and “integrating” the original memory structure as much as possible (before we begin modifying it) – integration is key so that the memory is very easy to access, and thus easier to modify;
  • (4) activating the disconfirming evidence and juxtaposing it with the memory. for example, you can tell the patient, I want you to say this out loud and see if it feels true: “if I act confidently, people will hate me”. and this has the effect of making the target memory structure more salient.
• now, Ecker et al claim that this memory reconsolidation process is the core process of transformational change. again, this is contrasted with counteractive change, wherein we paper over preexisting memories in a process of retrieval competition. (keep in mind that counteractive change is totally fine and valid! and it’s actually very useful under specific circumstances¹). the idea is that for transformational change—to actually update the underlying memory—there is only one known brain process for this, and that’s memory reconsolidation.
• and, by virtue of being the only process of transformational change, this gives us a common conceptual framework for understanding all kinds of therapy: emotion-focused therapy, Alexander Technique, focusing, psychoanalysis, and so on. Ecker et al do point out though that some therapies—like cognitive behavioral therapy and behavioral therapy (e.g. exposure therapy)—are actually fundamentally counteractive. these therapies generally do not result in transformational change.
• one other note I find interesting in all of this is: the crucial role that conscious awareness plays—specifically mindful, vivid, nonjudgemental awareness. consciousness seems to be a “global workspace” in which various memory structures can be brought together to engage in a competition or juxtaposition, and also, the nonjudgemental aspect is crucial for actually enabling the memories (schemas, beliefs, etc.) to be fully activated, rather than suppressed.