Misunderstandings from the Neurosciences

In preparation for my next work, Unconscious Thinking, I recently read, The Neuropsychology of the Unconscious: Integrating Brain and Mind In Psychotherapy (2015). Written by a psychoanalyst, Efrat Ginot, she wrote a book attempting to integrate psychoanalysis with the current trends in the neuro-sciences. It seems that she has several objectives in mind as she wrote the book. One was to update psychoanalysis and reframe some of the doctrines of Sigmund Freud to make them more acceptable today. I thought she was creative and insightful in that. Another objective was to integrate some of the new things in psychotherapy such as reframing and narrative therapy. She mentioned a few things outside of traditional psychoanalysis.

There is also her attempt to use the neurosciences as the all-validating source of everything she proposes. But while doing that, she often fails to distinguish some of her guesses with what the neurosciences have actually discovered. While I like what she did with her title by separating “brain” and “mind,” in the text itself, she did not separate them. Most of the time she wrote “brain/mind” thereby confusing the two.

Now as if confusing those two phenomena did not contribute enough confusion, she constantly wrote that this or that anatomy of the brain would “think” this, “conclude” that, “figure out” X, “understand” Y, etc. For example, “The amygdala mediates both cognitive appraisal of threats as well as emotions of fear and rage.” Here the person cognitively appraises something as a threat which then shows up as fear or rage, but she writes as if the amygdala does it! So where’s the person?

That’s like saying, “The engine drove us to Susie’s house.” “The transmission brought us to a standstill at the red light.” By confusing the brain with the mind, this author writes as if she assumes that by knowing the brain parts—thalamus, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, etc.—you then know what the person is thinking, concluding, believing, etc. But the brain is the hardware for the mind, and not the mind itself. She writes: “The unconscious systems left to their own devices, they do not ‘learn’ from reality” (67).

Actually, it is the person who thinks, believes, learns, and appraises meaning, not the brain. Certainly it is true that when there’s damage in certain parts of the brain, we will not have the necessary neurological resources to do certain things. Damage to the Werke section leads to various linguistic problems, aphasias.

Yet this author pictures things operating within the human person as if it operates only by the neurology processes, and that it does not occur via cognition or linguistics. “Much of what the brain learns occurs without awareness and without the help of the neocortex.” Actually it is not the brain that does the learning, it is the mind—the person’s mind. It is the person who has a brain that learns, the brain provides the neurological basis for learning.

She quotes Bounomano, a neuro-scientist, “Much of what we learn is absorbed unconsciously as a result of the brain’s tendency to link concepts that occur together.” (2011, p. 183). Here again the idea is that it is the brain that does this, not the person.

In writing about the neurological basis of thinking, she writes that it is within the lower brain nerve centers in the sub-cortical regions (e.g., brain stem, midbrain, basal ganglia, limbic system, cerebellum, thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala) that thinking begins. Yet this is where she confuses the information processes of the brain with what a person does, namely, thinks.

There are good sections in the book. She writes that “The amygdala mediates both cognitive appraisal of threats as well as emotions of fear and rage. Affect and cognition always work together. As determined by evolution, the brain’s default position is to learn, especially in the service of adaptation and survival.” (p. 24). Well, not exactly, the brain processes information and because we all learn different things and conclude different things, the brain only provides the data, you and I interpret it and give it meaning.

What seems today to be the new fad is to accredit “the neurosciences” as substantiating just about anything we wish were true in the human mind and personality. All you have to do is quote some research from “the neurosciences” and that seems to tidy up all questions about legitimacy. But, of course, in truth, it does not. What’s often asserted is still just the most current best hypothesis of the writer and give it another six months and all of that may change. It’s always good to “test all things, hold fast to that which is good.”