This is the fifth in a series of articles on Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth.

Probably all of us have asked our self from time to time if our thoughts, feelings, or behavior at any single moment is "normal". Actually, there are different answers for each one of these.

Normal behavior is, like it or not, defined by our legal, community (family, neighborhood, social group) and religious institutions. The law is enforced by our local police, and sanctioned by our courts. Religious values might be said to be collectively defined by our church going population and it's leadership. If we are observed behaving outside of legal boundaries, we may find ourselves in a court room facing a judge. If we stretch our community or religious values, we might be ostracized, and separated from the kind of support we have been reliant on through our life.

Our internal life, our thoughts and feelings, that which goes on within ourselves may be our last real privacy. And that is indeed fortunate. Our internal creativity is uncomfortably broad. We are capable of thinking and feeling most anything from time to time. Under provocation, we are capable of thinking about things we would never do. Angry enough, we may think of assault, even murder. Seeing a pretty woman, a married man might think about cheating on his wife, but never act on that thought. Shocked about a death in the family, our first thoughts may be directed at the inconvenience of disrupting out usual routine and our feelings might be closer to annoyed. Our thoughts and our feelings often contradict each other. In a real sense, we live a dual existence.

Duality

Our body speaks to us through our feelings. Messages are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, not available to reflection, and often emotionally charged. Messages are also governed by habit and are therefore difficult to control or modify without time and significant effort. Curiously, since the messages do not require conscious awareness, they do not cause or suffer much interference when combined with other tasks.

Our thoughts, however, are relatively slower, serial, effortful, more likely to be consciously monitored and deliberately controlled. Compared to feelings, thoughts are relatively flexible and thus change readily and can be directed by conscious or habitual rules. Because thoughts are effortful, they tend to disrupt each other. Thus monitoring mental operations for quality interferes with monitoring overt behavior. People who are occupied by a demanding mental activity are more likely to respond to another task by blurting out whatever comes to mind.

Intuitive judgments combine the function of feelings and thoughts. The perceptual system and intuitive about perceptions generate impressions of the attributes of objects. These impressions are neither voluntary nor verbally explicit. Judgments are always intentional and explicit even when they are not overtly expressed. Thus, thinking is involved in all judgments and can be reflected upon, whether they originate in impressions or in deliberate reasoning. Monitoring of intuitive judgments is normally quite lax and allows many to be expressed, including some that are erroneous (Kahneman, 2003).

We perceive reality by these two interactive, parallel processing systems.

"The rational system , a relative newcomer on the evolutionary scene, is a deliberative, verbally mediated, primarily conscious analytical system that functions by a person's understanding of conventionally established rules of logic and evidence. The experiential system, which is considered to be shared by all higher order organisms (although more complex in humans), has a much longer evolutionary history, operates in an automatic, holistic, associationistic manner, is intimately associated with the experience of affect, represents events in the form of concrete exemplars and schemas inductively derived from emotionally significant past experiences, and is able to generalize and to construct relatively complex models for organizing experience and directing behavior by the use of prototypes, metaphors, scripts, and narratives. Although the experimental system is generally adaptive in natural situations, it is often maladaptive in unnatural situations that cannot be solved on the basis of generalizations from past experience but require logical analysis and an understanding of abstract relations.

[B]ehavior is guided by the joint operation of the two systems, with their relative influence being determined by the nature of the situation and the degree of emotional involvement. Certain situations (e.g., solving mathematical problems) are readily identified as requiring analytical processing, whereas others (e.g., interpersonal behaviors) are more likely to be responded to in an automatic, experientially determined manner. Holding such situational features constant, the greater the emotional involvement, the greater the shift in the balance of influence from the rational to the experiential system (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994). "

One might ask, why are there two systems? Many of us have at times wished that our emotions could quiet themselves or even go away. Our culture has a bias towards logic and is suspicious of our emotional side. To quote Ayn Rand:

"A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a bail and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown..."

Not matter how much we wish we could be logical and rational, there is a burgeoning literature that says otherwise. Our decisions are evident in our brain activity long before we are consciously aware (For example, see Libet et al., 1983 and Dennett, 2003). We have a dual system of decision making because it works. Think about it. How often to we make decisions where we have all the information we need to be absolutely sure that our logical deduction is correct? I would venture to say that being sure is limited to only our most simple and concrete decisions. Most every other decision involves weighing facts, impressions, intuitions, and feelings and making as best a decision as possible.

Phineas Gage is perhaps the most famous neurology patient of all time. After a gruesome injury in which he was impaled through his skull by a metal rod and then miraculously recovered, poor Phineas retained all the logic he ever had, but was completely unable to make a decision. He was also left without any awareness or expression of emotion (Demasio, 1994). The very act of making a decision is an emotional process. We choose our decisions among competing alternatives based not only the evidence, but what feels best to us, our "gut level" reaction.

The story behind this dual system is most evident in normal social development.

The Attachment Relationship

John Bowlby (1969/1982) is credited as the founder of Attachment Theory, based on his observations that the quality of a child's social development was largely determined by the quality of the child's relationship with her caregiver. Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main began the research that would ultimately follow children over their first 20 years of development demonstrating Bowlby's concepts to be true and elaborating that theory to account for how, as a child and adult, how freely and effectively she can think, feel, remember, and act (Ainsworth et al., 1978, Main et al., 1985 & Fonagy et al., 2002). Fonagy went on to find that a parents style of attachment before birth predicts their one year old child's attachment style. The parent's ability to mentalize strongly predicted their child's subsequent security. Perhaps most importantly, the the strength of the adult's ability to mentalize enables her to strengthen their attachment style.

"Attachment is not an end in it's self; rather it exists in order to produce a representational system that has evolved, we may presume, to aid human survival. The quality of our attachment enables us to understand, interpret, and predict the behavior of others as well as our own behavior. It is the cornerstone of social intelligence (Wallin, 2007)."

It is through attachment experiences as a child that she develops rudimentary affect regulation. In the loving care of her caregiver, the child senses that connection to others can be a source of relief, comfort, and pleasure. The child ultimately learns that she -- in expressing its full range of bodily and emotional experiences and needs -- is good, loved, accepted, and competent.

One of the more interesting parts of the process is the role of imitation, mirroring and empathy. There is growing evidence that the same brain areas involved in the execution and observation of motor actions also become active when people listen to sentences that describe the performance of human actions using hands, mouths, or legs, or when people imagine performing an action without actual movement. It would appear that the processes of motor control, mirroring, and mental simulation (or imagination) rely on shared neural circuits (van Gog et al., 2009). While a mother interacts with her child, they interact in a largely non-verbal body-based union. This process of attunement builds within her child a largely emotional communication system that becomes the foundation of intimacy in all future relationships.

"[T]hrough a kind of "social biofeedback," the child comes to associate the initially involuntary expressions of her emotions with the responses of the caregiver. That is, the infant comes to "know" that her affects are responsible for evoking the caregiver's affect-mirroring responses. Thus, in the most desirable scenario, the infant is learning a number of very useful things: (1) that expressing her feelings can bring about positive outcomes--which generates positive feelings about the self and others; (2) that she can have impact on others--which generates a dawning sense of agency or self-initiative; and (3) gradually, that particular affects elicit particular reactions-- which helps her begin to differentiate and eventually name her feelings (Fonagy et al., 2002) A relationship of secure attachment can thus be seen as a school in which we learn to effectively regulate affects not only in early childhood but throughout our lives (Wallin, 2007)"

Through the secure attachment experience, the child learns to reflect on her feelings and thoughts. Her sense of security, flexibility, and internal freedom becomes very much enhanced. Secure attachment embodies a quality of attunement and contingent responsiveness between mother and infant that is close but imperfect. By the very process of attunement, distraction and reconnection, the child learns that her own internal states are sharable and, at the same time, distinct from those of her caregiver, she recognizes herself and her caregiver as a separate persons, rather than objects. From the loss and regaining of attuned connection emerges from the discovery that the other, and the relationship itself, can survive anger and conflict, and learn to balance the needs for self-definition and relatedness. The parent must reflect on emotion, her's and her child's, so as to make sense and inform her responses. She effectively regulates her own emotions while modeling how the child can regulate hers. Raw feelings become namable and integrated in interaction with her. The child creates representations of her emotion, then the parent names those emotions through her body, feelings and finally words.

Much learning is acquired in non-verbal form while the child acquires language skills. Some learning may be stored unconsciously, for example, when thought, felt, or spoken, this information could threaten vital relationships, especially formative and traumatic experiences. The center of verbal memory, the Broca's area of brain doesn't come on-line until 18-36 months, remains a secondary process until after a child enters school and continues to mature well into adolescence. Traumatic experiences cause overwhelming emotions, which effectively shuts down Broca's area, limiting verbal learning. So much emotional learning happens after childhood during highly emotional experiences.

Explicit memory, the verbal memory of Broca's area of the brain, can be consciously retrieved and reflected upon. This memory can be readily turned into words, it is symbolic, and it's content is information and images. Implicit memory is present from birth and includes reflexes that are not learned as well as emotional learning acquired in childhood or traumatic learning at any age. It is largely nonverbal, nonsymbolic, unconscious in the sense that it can't be reflected upon. The content includes emotional reactions, patterns of behavior, and skills related to knowing how to do things without thinking. These memories cannot be recalled, but they can be recognized, for example, like deja vois. From implicit memory comes our personal style, implicit relational knowing (gut-level knowledge) and some relational expectations. Perhaps most significant to this article, implicit memory includes the internal working model of attachment. Our attachment style is often enacted without awareness, especially in non-verbal communication.

Ultimately, through our early intimate relationships, we make sense of ourselves and others in terms of a "coherent autobiographical and biographical narrative", a personal story (Wallin, 2007).

Adult Experience - Duality Integrated

We have a built in need to be around people. Our social nature has been built in for thousands of generations with genetic and biochemical support. We feel pleasure just being around people with whom we feel safe. Our social group also influences our behaviors and values. We are reminded by our knowledge of social expectations within the
Continue reading The Essence of Human Experience: What is Normal? Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part V.

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I've been a skeptic about self-help books as have many of my colleagues. Self-help concepts often represent the home grown philosophy of the author. Seldom is there comprehensive research documentation of the foundations of the concepts shared. And so you can never be sure you are reading something that applies real science to every day needs.

This book is an exception. Buddha's Brain - The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. is the catchy title. Actually, there is little about Buddha or Buddhism in the book. Written by Rick Hanson Ph.D. with Richard Mendius MD, it uses some concepts of Buddhism as a frame of every day experience to convey the main themes. It thoroughly summarizes for the layman the latest neuroscience research as it relates to happiness, love, wisdom and peace of mind.

The book details proven methods to transform your brain using conscious thought to challenge our beliefs and assumptions as well as body focused imagery to access and change the implicit memory of emotion.

Did you know that suffering has two parts, one that is inevitable and inescapable, and one that entirely voluntary yet we seldom have the awareness to avoid?

Learn how to enhance your positive feelings, and cool your hot negative emotions and to focus your mind and body towards achieving your goals. Find peace and centeredness and maintain it even under stress.

Applying recent neuroscience and psychological research to teaching emotional intelligence has been a passion of mine for a number of years. And the topic has been common on my blog. I was curious about what inspired the authors to write this outstanding book, so I emailed Rick Hanson to ask about his motivation.

"As a child, I saw what seemed like a lot of needless unhappiness around me, and wondered about what led to lasting happiness. That question took me into the human potential movement, spiritual studies and practices, clinical psychology, and now brain science. At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative practice (especially Buddhism, the tradition I know best), there's a rich source of insights and tools for happiness, love, and wisdom. The brain is the final common pathway into the mind of all the causes and conditions that lead to joy or sorrow, helpfulness or harm - so understanding with increasing clarity, dexterity, and precision how to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better is a fantastic new way to improve one's own life and the lives of others.

And hopefully this offers a way as well to nudge the world altogether away from greed and fear, poverty and war, since ignorance of how the brain works - both its dark tendencies and wonderful promise - is a major factor behind the mess the planet is in, with caveman/woman brains armed with nuclear weapons. So I am actually very hopeful, taking the long view, while also believing that we have a lot of work ahead of us."

It's apparent that Dr. Hanson and I have a similar view of the potential for emotional intelligence. The human being is a paradoxical creature. Believing we have transcended our animal nature, we alternate between being full of ourselves, inflated by false assumptions about ourselves and our world, to crushing self-punishment and shame about our natural foibles. For many of us, our moods swing with abandon, influencing our judgment, our decisions and our sense of fairness from self-serving to over-generosity. We idealize logic and often assume we are capable of it. And thus we allow the subtleties of emotion to distort our perceptions beyond our awareness.

We generally lack an ability to read the language of our body. Built into our genetic make up is thousands of generations of knowledge from our ancestors. Our implicit memory contains the painful learnings from our past that communicate their meanings in a similar language of emotion. We often ignore the more subtle feelings that are in fact deep in wisdom and act on intense compelling feelings. We make the erroneous assumption that slightly felt feelings are unimportant, and act on the compelling emotions. The result is poor judgments due to dismissing gut feelings and impulsive passion driven actions we soon come to regret.

Our self understanding is critical to our success in relationships and the foundation to our quality of life and ultimately our very survival. Learning about how our brains work will guarantee us a happier and more successful life. Buddha's Brain could be the beginning of your journey towards greater success and happiness.

Aaron Beck, considered the Father of Cognitive Therapy, is an American psychiatrist and a professor emeritus at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research that is directed by his daughter, Judith S. Beck, Ph.D.. He is noted for his research in psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics, and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), one of the most widely used instruments for measuring depression severity. At age 87, the man is still publishing, building on his pioneering work on the cognitive model of depression. In his latest article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he recalls his early work:

"Caught up with the contagion of the times, I was prompted to start something on my own. I was particularly intrigued by the paradox of depression. This disorder appeared to violate the time-honored canons of human nature: the self-preservation instinct, the maternal instinct, the sexual instinct, and the pleasure principle. All of these normal human yearnings were dulled or reversed. Even vital biological functions like eating or sleeping were attenuated. The leading causal theory of depression at the time was the notion of inverted hostility. This seemed a reasonable, logical explanation if translated into a need to suffer. The need to punish one's self could account for the loss of pleasure, loss of libido, self-criticism, and suicidal wishes and would be triggered by guilt. I was drawn to conducting clinical research in depression because the field was wide open--and besides, I had a testable hypothesis.

I decided at first to make a foray into the "deepest" level: the dreams of depressed patients. I expected to find signs of more hostility in the dream content of depressed patients than nondepressed patients, but they actually showed less hostility. I did observe, however, that the dreams of depressed patients contained the themes of loss, defeat, rejection, and abandonment, and the dreamer was represented as defective or diseased. At first I assumed the idea that the negative themes in the dream content expressed the need to punish one's self (or "masochism"), but I was soon disabused of this notion. When encouraged to express hostility, my patients became more, not less, depressed. Further, in experiments, they reacted positively to success experiences and positive reinforcement when the "masochism" hypothesis predicted the opposite (summarized in Beck).

Some revealing observations helped to provide the basis for the subsequent cognitive model of depression. I noted that the dream content contained the same themes as the patients' conscious cognitions--their negative self-evaluations, expectancies, and memories--but in an exaggerated, more dramatic form. The depressive cognitions contained errors or distortions in the interpretations (or misinterpretations) of experience. What finally clinched the new model (for me) was our research finding that when the patients reappraised and corrected their misinterpretations, their depression started to lift and--in 10 or 12 sessions--would remit."

We owe a lot to Dr. Beck. His cognitive model of depression still dominates how I and most of my colleagues write treatment plans for persons suffering with depression. Our goal is to inspire and teach our clients to change their negative self-evaluations, correct distorted memories, and create an expectation of success. The only problem is depression is not that simple.

Try as they might, many clients are able to recognize what they need to do, understand how their thoughts about themselves and their world need to change, are able to state those changes, and diligently practice them. But when they really need to be able to master their fate, when ruminative thoughts spiral downward into the depths of depression, their efforts quickly collapse and they succumb.

So is the Cognitive Model of Depression wrong? No, I think it's incomplete. There is the biomedical model of depression involving errant neurotransmitter levels treated by various anti-depressants. That discussion is beyond this article's purpose. I'm more interested in what we as therapists can do differently in the counseling office. Of course we need to be sure a severely depressed client is referred for a medication review. But I want to know how we might better facilitate our clients attempts to master their mood. To this end, I will review my recent reading on the subject of emotion and argue to include emotion in a new Cognitive Theory.

With elections just around the corner, I thought we could all use a reminder about just how easily we are influenced beyond our awareness by election campaigns.

The Frontal Cortex

"In reality, we voters -- all of us -- make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. "People often act without knowing why they do what they do," Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, noted in an e-mail message to me this week. "The fashion of political writing this year is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible."

...we're really an emotional animal, guided, for the most part, by our adaptive limbic system. At any given moment, our political beliefs emerge from the quarrel inside our head, as different brain areas are triggered by different cues. Instead of basing our votes on a careful analysis of the issues, we make political choices via emotion and intuition, which leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of biases, frames and fleeting associations."

This is not to say that we can't make a reasonable decision without bias about our candidate. The best way to be sure we are at our best is self-knowledge. Know how we react emotionally to our hot button topics, and be aware of how campaign ads can influence us.

PsycPORT.com

"The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls. Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like "I think I read somewhere" or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke - or about a presidential candidate. Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to "stop the smears," the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students' impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs. In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true."

Here is a concrete way to consider what you hear. Consider what you hear may not be true. Consider the implications if you believe what is false. Now reconsider this information in view of your new perspective.

I don't believe humans are capable of being objective. Our culture encourages us to believe otherwise and this opens us up to undue influence by disreputable information sources. It's better for all of us to assume we are fallible and biased. Frankly, I don't see any reason why we can't enjoy our biases, as long as we know they just that. We also have hot button issues that will evoke strong emotions from us. It's good to remember that our initial emotional response should have the benefit of time and thought to digest.

This story is truly astonishing. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Neuroanatomist who had an remarkable experience of self-discovery. In this experience, she found Nirvana, that place of total peacefulness we all seek. At the same time, she discovered it's neuroanatomy. She effectively defined mindfulness.

TED | Talks

"Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for.

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ...

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist."

"How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career." - Jill Bolte Taylor

"

Scientific American has a very interesting article on growing evidence that implicates the immune system. The body's reaction to infection from the flu virus or even strep in pregnant woman and their unborn children may play a role in the development of schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, autism and other brain diseases.

"More than 200 studies have suggested that schizophrenia occurs between 5 and 8 percent more frequently than average in children born in the winter or spring. Scientists realized that viruses, which are most prevalent in the cold, dry winter months, could be one of the factors influencing this correlation.

In 2004 Alan S. Brown, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, analyzed blood samples collected from 1959 through 1966 from 189 pregnant women, 64 of whom had later given birth to children who became schizophrenic. The women had had their blood drawn multiple times during pregnancy, allowing Brown and his colleagues to compare if and when the women had been exposed to the flu. "We showed that if [flu] infection occurred in the early to middle part of pregnancy, the risk of schizophrenia was increased three times," Brown explains. "For first-trimester exposure, it was increased seven times."

[..]Some studies suggest that infections per se are not responsible for disrupting brain development; rather the body's immune response to infection affects the nervous system and does the damage. "When the immune system becomes activated, it can influence the functioning of the brain and, in turn, emotional and behavioral responses," explains Christopher L. Coe, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the effects of psychological and environmental factors on the immune system.

For example, recall how you typically feel the day before you come down with the flu. "You just don't feel right--you're more achy, you lose your appetite, you have a sense of fatigue," Coe says. It is not the flu making you feel that way--it is your immune response to it. "You're feeling cytokines," he says, referring to the small molecules produced by many cell types, including immune cells, for signaling purposes.

Cytokines are produced in large numbers during infection, but their functions are not limited to the immune system--they are also important for brain development. When scientists culture neurons in the lab and then add cytokines to them, the neurons do not grow properly. "We know that high levels of cytokines interfere with growth and connections of neurons," Coe says. "A maternal infection--could that affect the immature brain in a way that sets the stage for mental illness?"

It is possible, according to Coe; a pregnant mother's immune response may affect the way the placenta functions. The placenta's job is to pass hormones and nutrients to the fetus, but when the mother's body is fighting an infection the placenta likely behaves slightly differently. In some cases, it may prompt the fetus to produce its own cytokines; in other cases, the mother's cytokines will cross the placenta themselves. "There's sort of a reverberation, a harmonic--so as the mother is responding, it causes the baby to respond, even though there's no virus there," Coe explains.

Bolstering the idea that cytokines play a key role are a number of studies showing that the levels of certain cytokines, such as one called interleukin-8, were markedly increased in the blood of mothers who gave birth to schizophrenic children, based on blood samples taken from pregnant women decades ago and the psychiatric profiles of their adult children. Genetic research has uncovered two genes associated with schizophrenia that are also involved in cytokine function, and animal research has lent support as well. Patterson of Caltech recently performed an experiment in which he injected pregnant mice not with a flu virus but with a dose of synthetic double-stranded RNA. Although this molecule of viral genetic material does not behave like a virus on its own, it is recognized as foreign by the body, eliciting an immune response without other infection-related effects. He found that the mice born of mothers injected with RNA behaved exactly like the offspring of flu-infected mothers--suggesting that the immune response, not the virus, is what actually affects the brain.

[..]The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommend that all pregnant women get flu shots--a dangerous proposition if immune response, rather than infection itself, is responsible for harming the fetal brain. "I don't think they have considered this risk. In fact, I know they haven't considered this risk," Patterson says, referring to the CDC. "If you take it seriously and vaccinate everybody, then what's going to happen?" Researchers cannot yet predict how often a prenatal immune response might lead to fetal brain damage, but even if it happens less than 1 percent of the time, vaccinating an entire population of pregnant women could affect thousands of children."

Read the whole article.

I've previously complained about research that so often is focused on small parts and pieces so small that they mean very little to the average person, or even the practitioner in the field. Worse yet, few authors seem willing to reach beyond the data and advance theoretical knowledge. It is at the level of theory development that research reaches into application and education. There seems to have been few willing to work on a new grand theory of psychology based on the nearly 50 year old previous attempts that integrates the research results since that time. There has been some important new knowledge with broad applicability that may foretell a integration of divergent and contradictory psychological models into a single grand theory.

"The so-called "objective" human sciences reduces people to parts and pieces so small that we can't recognize commonality or identify our own experiences within the narrow concepts in the models espoused. Science has somehow become primarily inductive. The deep understanding of theoretical deduction seems to have fallen into disfavor. Could it be because it is so easy to pick apart the substance of theoretical systems? I suspect so. The more reductionistic the model, the less likely it can be criticized."

Jonah Lehrer, editor at large for Seed Magazine and author The Frontal Cortex, a neuroscience blog on Science Blogs, wrote a similar point of view in the Los Angeles Times.

"Our sensations have been reduced to a set of specific circuits. The mind has been imaged as it thinks about itself, with every thought traced back to its cortical source. The most ineffable of emotions have been translated into the terms of chemistry, so that the feeling of love is just a little too much dopamine. Fear is an excited amygdala. Even our sense of consciousness is explained away with references to some obscure property of the frontal cortex. It turns out that there is nothing inherently mysterious about those 3 pounds of wrinkled flesh inside the skull. There is no ghost in the machine.

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces.

[..]If neuroscience is going to solve its grandest questions, such as the mystery of consciousness, it needs to adopt new methods that are able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren't built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. "

He qualifies his comments in his blog The Frontal Cortex.

"I think reductionism can be startlingly beautiful and will always be our primary method of understanding everything. But I think it's important to note that reductionism is not our only method. There are some questions, and these questions happen to include the grandest questions of neuroscience, that can't be answered in such strict and narrow terms."

Gregg R. Henriques talks about the conflict between science and the humanities and offers a unique solution to the problem. He proposes the reason we have difficulty examining the "grandest questions" is to the gap between science and the humanities, so far inadequately filled by psychology. He proposes a gap filling philosophy called the Tree of Knowledge

Click to enlarge.

"...psychology connects to each of the "three great branches of learning." More than any other discipline, it is an admixture of natural science, social science, and humanism. Thus a coherent vision for psychology will provide the conceptual infrastructure for a coherent linkage between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The Enlightenment dream can be realized through the synthesis of psychology.

[..]The unification of psychology was developed through the construction of a new philosophy called the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System. The ToK System articulates a new vision regarding the nature of objective knowledge. Specifically, it depicts knowledge as consisting of four levels or dimensions of complexity (Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture) that correspond to the behavior of four classes of objects (material objects, organisms, animals, and humans), and four classes of science (physical, biological, psychological, and social). Each dimension of complexity is connected to the dimension beneath it via a theoretical "joint point." A joint point provides the causal explanatory framework how the dimension of complexity evolved. For example, the modern synthesis (which is Darwin's theory of natural selection operating on genetic combinations through time) offers the conceptual framework for the evolution of life. A major and novel feature of the ToK System is the proposition that there are four such fundamental joint points and, correspondingly, four dimensions of complexity. Ultimately, the ToK System is a proposal for the theoretical unification of scientific knowledge.

The ToK System is not just about building bridges within psychology, but is about constructing effective interrelations between psychology and the other sciences and, at its largest scale, between the institution of science and other societal institutions, such as law, health care, governance, the arts, and religion.

In a fascinating text, The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information, Haefner (1999) makes the point that most comprehensive theories of information now recognize the need for a formulation that includes both an information processor and the data being processed. Said differently, information can only be understood as the interaction or product of the data and the processor. This formulation resonates with my views regarding the nature of knowledge. Specifically, it suggests that Knowledge must be thought of as the product of the Knower (processor) and the Known (data being processed). This basic formulation lends itself usefully to the construction of a scientific humanistic philosophy. The two components, the scientific and the humanistic, reflect two different valuations of the knower. In attempting to construct general laws that objectively describe complexity and change, the scientist works to de-value the influence of the specific knower in the knower-known interaction. In other words, the task of the basic scientist is to describe "reality" in as knower-independent terms as possible. Scientific methodology can be thought of as the tools by which this knower-independent knowledge is acquired. However, pure knower-independence (i.e., pure objectivity) is an impossible ideal. Indeed, some of the most crucial developments in modern physics raised enigmatic questions about the relationship between observation, measurement, and knowledge.

In accordance with the analysis offered by Wilson (1998), I believe that the quest for objective truth (defined as accurate models of complexity and change) should remain the idealized goal of the institution of science. But, science is not the only way of knowing. And in the ToK System, science is seen as one particular type of justification system, which has particular strengths (accuracy) and limitations (amorality). Other justification systems (e.g., legal, religious, or political) are explicitly prescriptive, moral systems. I am not alone in isolating the language game of science from the language game of morality. Consider that the Humean is-ought distinction is legendary. The split between science and ethics is well summarized in the following quote from Pinker (1997, p. 55): "Like many philosophers, I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the same world, just as poker and bridge are different games played with the same fifty-two card deck."

It must also be recognized that de-valuing the knower and striving for knower independent knowledge is obviously, at one level, a value-laden stance. And it is here that we find the need for the humanistic side of the philosophy. In this system, the humanist values the knower and all of her idiosyncratic subjective elements that contribute to the uniqueness of her knower-known interactions. In other words, the humanist embraces knower relativism and all of the possibilities that emerge with such an embrace. In the process of valuing the uniqueness of the knower, humanism defines humans as the most valued of subjective objects and, thus, unlike the "cold" formulations of basic science, the humanist side of the equation functions as a prescriptive value system. Furthermore, the institution of science is seen as emanating out of, but also being constrained by, humanism. At its most general and abstract level, this constraint is found in acknowledging the impossibility of a "view from nowhere." It is more concretely recognized when one considers ethical constraints and Internal Review Boards that (appropriately) prevent scientists from pursuing particular avenues of investigation. Despite this constraint, the humanist values scientific knowledge as essential to promoting humanity, and is not threatened by the ever-increasing power of scientific explanations. In the end, the scientific and humanistic positions are seen as existing in dialectical tension with one another, and there is the recognition that there is value to be had in both valuing and de-valuing the knower."

Henriques proposes the "Behavioral Investment Theory" to bridge the gap between the life sciences and the sciences of the mind.

"Key BIT Principles

1)The nervous system evolved as a computational control center that coordinates the behavior of the animal-as-a-whole.
2)Genes that tended to build neuro-behavioral selectors that expended behavioral energy in a manner that positively covaried with inclusive fitness were selected for, genes that failed to do so were selected against. Thus, inherited tendencies toward the behavioral expenditure of energy are a function of ancestral inclusive fitness.
3)In ontogeny, behavioral investments that effectively move the animal toward animal-environment relationships that positively covariedwith ancestral inclusive fitness are selected for (i.e., are reinforced), whereas behavioral investments that fail to do so are extinguished.
4)The current behavioral investments of an animal can be understood as a function of the two vectors of phylogeny and ontogeny (Figure).

"

Simplistically, the link between genetics and individually learned behavioral tendancies is expressed in evolutionary selection across multiple generations. How we behave is based in part on what our ancestors passed on genetically and in part our learning history.

Henriques then describes the link between "Mind" and "Culture" with what he calls the "Justification Hypothesis (JH)".

"The JH is the notion that humans have an elaborate self-awareness system because the evolution of language created the problem of justification. Humans became the only animal that had to explain why it did what it did.

1.Freud's fundamental observation was that the human consciousness system functions as a justification filter for behavioral investments.
2.This justification filter evolved because language creates the "problem of justification."
3.The Justification Hypothesis provides the psychological foundation for a unified theory of culture and links the natural to the social sciences.

What Does the JH Do?
• Provides the framework for understanding evolutionary changes in mind that led to the emergence of human culture
• Links self-awareness at the individual level to cultural belief systems at the group level
• Defines what makes humans unique
• Provides functional conception of self-awareness
• Links the natural and social sciences

"

In essense, our conscious awareness is required to conceive of the need to justify our behavior to others. We not only have to see our behavior, we have to imagine how it impacts others, what their perspective might be and how we might influence their relationship with us by an explanation. Obviously, we don't have nearly the information to make a totally rational judgment about a justification in most situations. Yet, every relationship is dependent upon our success in building a place for ourselves in our community through our justifications.

Our ability to reach beyond a rational decision is critical. We don't have complete information, but we do have experience, instinct and emotional memories that can and do influence decisions. The time we spend considering our actions allows us to access all aspects of our decision making apparatus, both conscious, unconscious and between (preconscious). All of these various mechanisms weigh in on our decisions. This is because this process was selected by evolution due to how it has enhanced our survival for a million years. We can not and perhaps never will be able to measure all of our decision making apparatus. It's unlikely we will have a complete set of all the internal and external influences anytime soon.

The very nature of the mind and culture is beyond much meaningful measurement. Current research that is widely accepted by rigorous reviewer is not likely to measure much beyond the basic data itself and therefore have little application in the field. Most of all, as we step into the mind or social spheres, our "processor" (brain) is already engaged and a truly objective measurement is impossible. We've already influenced the outcome by our very presence. Theory however, becomes an important bridge for gaps in the data. Formulating hypotheses needs to become much more than an academic exercise. It needs to provide a bridge from the data to the field.

That is not to say research into human social behavior is not helpful. It is by it's very nature not reductionistic, and so is fraught with greater perils in drawing broad conclusions. But the end result of such research is likely to have meaning for a much broader audience. Researchers need to be willing to step beyond the laboratory and create useful models for broad applications.

Henriques, G. (2003). The tree of knowledge system and the theoretical unification of psychology.. Review of General Psychology, 7(2), 150-182. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.7.2.150

A while back, I had characterized a post in Deric Bownds' MindBlog detailing how brain biochemistry had entered the internal experience of the scientist. I'd called it possibly unfairly as "largely devoid of meaningful self-exploration". My frustration is with the reductionistic flavor of research reports. Talk about a brain "awash in glucocortocoids..., full of adrenaline, and ... endogenous opiates" may well not lend itself to meaningful self exploration. However, that was not the point of the original article. It did illustrate my point indirectly. Deric Bownds responded quite appropriately.

"We don't deny the relevance of phenomenology of the whole system, of emergent properties, holism, etc. We simply think that it helps to know something about the parts!"

In this November's Scientific American, Michael Shermer, "The Skeptic" columnist says much more eloquently what I was trying to say about the sad state of research reports and the lack of any real theory building from meta-analysis in the recent literature.

"Data and theory are not enough. As primates, humans seek patterns and establish concepts to understand the world around us, and then we describe it. We are storytellers. If you cannot tell a good story about your data and theory—that is, if you cannot explain your observations, what view they are for or against and what service your efforts provide—then your science is incomplete. The view of science as primary research published in the peer-reviewed sections of journals only, with everything else relegated to “mere popularization,” is breathtakingly narrow and naive. Were this restricted view of science true, it would obviate many of the greatest works in the history of science, from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, the evolutionary biologist’s environmental theory about the differential rates of development of civilizations around the world for the past 13,000 years.

Well-crafted narratives by such researchers as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, the late Stephen Jay Gould and many others are higher-order works of science that synthesize and coalesce primary sources into a unifying whole toward the purpose of testing a general theory or answering a grand question. Integrative science is hard science."

Here is an excerpt from Deric Bownds' MindBlog titled "A New Description of Our Inner Lives."

"Paul and Pat, realizing that the revolutionary neuroscience they dream of is still in its infancy, are nonetheless already preparing themselves for this future, making the appropriate adjustments in their everyday conversation. One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. "She said, 'Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocortocoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I'll be down in a minute.' " Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way - their students now talk of psychopharmacology as comfortably as of food.""

Deric is drawn to this article because of what he sees as a similar experience within himself.

"I rarely mention my internal experience and sensations on this blog - first, because I have viewed readers as "wanting the beef," objective stuff on how minds work. Second and more important, because my experience of noting the flow of my brain products as emotion laced chunks of sensing/cognition/action - knowing the names of the neurotransmitters and hormones acting during desire, arousal, calming, or affiliation - strikes me as a process which would feel quite alien to most people."

Alien, yes. But it is also largely devoid of meaningful self-exploration as well. Science at it's worst takes itself too seriously. New discoveries are considered automatically as an advance in understanding. A dialogue about the known facts of internal experience contains about as much meaning in moment to moment experience as reciting the letters in a bowl of alphabet soup!

The so-called "objective" human sciences reduces people to parts and pieces so small that we can't recognize commonality or identify our own experiences within the narrow concepts in the models espoused. Science has somehow become primarily inductive. The deep understanding of theoretical deduction seems to have fallen into disfavor. Could it be because it is so easy to pick apart the substance of theoretical systems? I suspect so. The more reductionistic the model, the less likely it can be criticized.

Psychological research in general seems to have drifted from it's roots. Thirty years ago, when I was in training, there was a plethora of theoretical articles and books that discussed at length theoretical frameworks for constructs that serves as the building blocks of theory. Concepts in psychological measurement were verified in a process called "construct validity". Construct validity refers to ability of a concept to explain what is known about the phenomena. Construct validity can seldom be proven because in order for a concept to be meaningful, it must generalize to many similar circumstances. The more meaningful a concept is, the more difficult it becomes to measure. So construct validity can only be supported by repeated measurement from different perspectives.

Word Net defines "theory" as a:

"a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory""

A theory connects several constructs into a cohesive whole. A hypothesis is a:

"tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory""

Theoreticians deduce hypothesis from accepted theoretical frameworks and suggest how such hypotheses might be verified by research. Deductive reasoning involving inferences from general theoretical principles has been considered the preferred way to build hypotheses to be tested. Attempting to generalize to theoretical principles from research results (inductive reasoning) has limited value in that there are often numerous possible explanations for each research result. In other words one needs a theoretical framework to make sense out of individual research results.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little integration of theory and research. While the research I've been reading includes a literature review of similar research, there is less discussion of relevant theories. Discussions include speculation about theory, but the concepts suggested are less likely to apply to a broad theory, and so meaningfulness is limited. Some would call this "dust bowl empiricism."

The following research presents a good example of research that lacks a firm footing in theory.

Recent genetic research has found genetic links between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The researchers are surprised, but clinicians are not. It is common to find both illnesses in the same family. And it is common to find the two diagnoses in the history of the same client!

From a clinical point of view, mental illness appears to be more of a process that has functional properties, rather than a phenomena implied by calling it an illness. In fact, ALL illnesses are processes that evolve with internal and external feedback. It's only the venerable old "Medical Model" that misleads us to think of illnesses as an "entity".

So since illness evolves, one would expect diagnosis to evolve with it. To apply a phenomenological name to an illness is descriptive of the present. That description may or may not apply in the future.

The other problem with separating schizophrenia and bipolar illness is it's hybrid presentation, called schizoaffective disorder. This disorder is manifest in having a prominent mood disorder at the same time a major thought disorder. But severe depression and mania have a psychotic component that can look very much like schizophrenia at times. The symptom based differential diagnosis guidelines in DSMiV require documenting a thought disorder, like a delusion or halucination presenting without an affective component.

Now think about it. How could someone experience a delusion or an halucination without being either depressed, grandiose, or paranoid about it? The answer is you can't. Some clinicians will argue that the grandiosity doesn't manifest a true mania which includes high energy and a lack of sleep. But then remember, bipolar disorder has a milder cousin called Bipolar II. Then some will argue that the client is scared about their halucination, not depressed. If you stay scared or paranoid long enough, anyone would get depressed about it. Psychoanalysis has thought of grandiosity as an escape from depression for a long time. This is not confusing diagnoses with common sense. The problem is diagnosis sometimes lacks common sense.

The literature is full of examples of people who have become immobilized by their illness and feel like if they moved, the whole world or important parts of it would fall apart. They used to be diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia but now are commonally diagnosed with psychotic depression. Catatonia has all but disappeared. This isn't just about "new understanding", this is about evolving understanding about the mental illness process.

This is not to say everyone with schizophrenia is at risk for mania or those with bipolar at risk for schizophrenia. It's just to say you can't separate the two as mutually exclusive phenomena. They are in fact processes manifest in an individual with a unique genetic background that could manifest multiple clinical syndromes from time to time, or not.

Recent talk about moving from a phenomenalogical diagnostic system to one that is more based on dimensions of symptoms for DSMV makes all the sense in the world, even for Axis I. I just don't think the field is ready for such a dramatic switch, even though it is more accurate.

Psychiatry Weekly

"“Over the last few years, linkage scans have allowed researchers to identify specific areas of the genome that likely contain a gene for a particular illness,” Dr. Gershon says. “We’ve been surprised to discover that several regions of the genome are implicated in both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.” Linkage scans, in essence, look for chromosomal regions containing genetic variants shared between unrelated people. If patients with bipolar disorder are statistically more likely to share a particular gene variant with each other than they are with people who do not have bipolar disorder, that gene variant may well play a role in disease onset or maintenance (and, if it plays a part in neither, can still serve a predictive function). In short, while they are not yet conclusive, the linkage scans referenced by Dr. Gershon have lent credibility to the hypothesis that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia may share some genetic risk factors. "

Perhaps the most common problem I see in my clients is pervasive avoidance of emotion. I suspect that the American culture encourages us to value rationality above all else and hide our emotional "weakness". I recall as a teen hearing guy talk about girls and their intuition about things how irrational and erratic that process made them. My Norwegian extended family certainly modeled stoicism, but paradoxically also demonstrated in a grand fashion why emotion was perceived as a problem of dramatic excess. Indeed, most people who find themselves persistently avoiding and suppressing emotions are those who have experienced emotional excess at it's worst and been traumatized as a result.

All human beings share a neurological system that produces the manifestations of rational thought and florid emotion. We have all experienced how often our thoughts and feelings contradict. Perhaps we can recall times of particularly lucid convergence of emotion and thought that provided us with a depth of insight and decisiveness we seldom experience.

Human beings evolved into the most highly successful organism that has walked this Earth. We have both a rational and emotional capacity for a good reason. Millions of years of natural selection has developed a wholistic experience that better prepares us to make sense of our environment, especially our social community. We need our emotions as much as our rationality to survive.

Yet it is striking in the industrialized human community we are not taught about emotions or how to make the most of them. Instead they remain the manifestation of a culture transmitted parent to child based on a family oral tradition. Moral and religious books and stories passed from generation to generation reflect on the "lessons of life". People talk about "common sense" more in reference to it's absence. Few would dare to attempt to define the principles of "common sense", but most people seem to claim an ability to detect it.

Why does such an important part of daily human experience gets such little attention? Why is emotion all but absent from formal education? I suspect we all are spooked by the manifestation of emotional excess. And trusting the emotional parts of experience is counter intuitive. Negative emotions hurt, no one wants them and few of us voluntarily experience them. But they are a critical part of our survival.

There is an important new research study on treatment of schizophrenia. They have found delayed or interrupted treatment is associated with permanent lost brain function and less success in recovery. That is indeed my clinical experience with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Any kind of chronic brain dysfunction makes permanent changes to brain structures and functioning. PTSD has been associated with permenent changes in emotion intensity and increased difficulty in emotion regulation. Chemical abuse has been associated with brain changes as well.

When the brain is involved, respond quickly, ask for help and persist to be sure the treatment is effective. Anything less will cost you in brain function. This applies to any serious mental health or neurological problem.

Psychiatric Weekly

In summary, it appears that there are benefits to be gained by identifying psychotic exacerbations early and bringing effective treatment to bear quickly (Table).11 If patients do not respond within the first 2 weeks to the initially prescribed antipsychotic, consider switching antipsychotics until you find something that works. When patients respond, our work is not finished. Optimize the response. Try to reduce psychopathology to a minimum. Attend to side effects; think of this task in terms of how you would feel if you had to take a medication every day for the rest of your life. Repeatedly inquire about patients' judgments as to their need for medication and the value of the medications they are presently taking. Treat their viewpoints with respect, express your point of view on these issues with clarity and persistence, and make it clear that their feeling better is the goal for both of you.

Mind Hacks is a great blog by a couple guys who have a passion for cognitive neuroscience. There is always something interesting to read there. Today I found a quote from PSYCHE, a journal about consciousness. They make what may sound like a face valid statement about what is perception. When I was in graduate school, perception was described as physiological and psychological means to sense and understand our environment. Attention and awareness while mentioned and studied as a mediating function hardly gained the prominence implied in the following quote.

Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. Think of a blind person taptapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skillful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. The world makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction.

While they make a good point. To understand perception, it is important to consider the function of awareness and attention of the individual who is percieving. Perhaps it's true that there has been insufficient attention to this in the literature. I've been out of the loop since grad school, too long ago. But I do think that it would be simplistic to say that perception is solely an act of attention. Much is percieved beyond that which we are aware. Subliminal learning and that which is recalled when prompted with a question about an event but is not remembered spontaneously are two examples.

However, the concept has some important implications on what is part of perception, especially how awareness mediates and directs the analysis and integration of the new data in memory.