Tag: Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML)

Metaphors, words associations, and paralinguistics

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If we consider spoken language as a complex linear system, we will be able to use it as a pretty good standard for understanding individual psychology as well as interpersonal communication.

All words have words associated with them. Though we all share many of the same word-associations (coffee/beverage; booze/drunk; etc.), we also all have an abundance of word associations that belong only to us. I suppose this is fairly obvious, though I am not so sure it is well enough appreciated.

For example, we all know that coffee is a beverage and that booze can make people drunk, but beyond that each one of us has many other associations connected with these words, unique associations which have been gathered through years of experience. You may have pleasant associations with coffee and unpleasant ones with booze, or it could be the other way around. You may visualize the Caribbean when you think of either of these words, or Alaska. As the associations become richer and get further from the word which generated them, the psycholinguistic network they create will become increasingly complex.

If we could put diagrams of these associative networks on paper–including all of the images and feelings which go with them–I am sure that each person would be uniquely identifiable from just a few of them, in much the same way that we can be identified from our fingerprints. No two of us are alike in how we use and understand language.

The ways in which words, phrases, word-associations, gestures, tones of voice, expressions, dramatic poses, and so on strike each one of us are unique. This point is more than touched upon by an Emory University study, Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex, which demonstrates that “texture-selective somatosensory cortex in the parietal operculum is activated when processing sentences containing textural metaphors.”

What this means is that when people hear a tactile metaphor (soft as silk), the brain responds, at least in part, as if the person is feeling silk. I would contend that this and similar sorts of extended responses within the brain (and body) are a huge part of virtually all interpersonal communication. In this context, what FIML does is allow partners to access these deep associations and sort them out rationally and artistically without becoming lost in different associative versions of the “same” linguistic event.

FIML does not have to always depend on language, but it helps to bring it back to the actual words spoken as much as possible because the other sorts of associations and emotions that are generated during speech events are simply too complex to sort out without a stable reference point most of the time. Actual short bits of speech provide partners with the best data that both can readily agree upon. The many associations connected to that short segment of speech are often a big part of the material of an extended FIML discussion.

Self-deception

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Self-deception begins within seconds of listening or speaking.

Once committed to an interpretation or tending toward one, the brain builds on it quickly.

Once an interpretation has been built upon, the brain remembers it as what truly happened even if that is false.

This is normal. The human brain has evolved to use self-deception.

This probably happened because truer forms of communication are complex and use a lot of time. They can also be confusing and difficult.

Confusion, difficulty, and complexity interfere with social cohesion and motivation.

Strong self-deception deceives others better than weak self-deception or no self-deception. In this way, it promotes social cohesion and motivation.

Self-deception can be observed and understood if it is caught quickly. The best way to catch it is through a technique like FIML.

Self-deception is a kind of neurosis, delusion, false cognition. Nevertheless, we are so used to it, we can feel lost without it.

But you do not need self-deception, unless you are a card-carrying member of a rigid or unwholesome group and are afraid to grow bigger.

If self-deception is discovered many times through FIML practice, it does not present as a philosophy or attitude or whole picture of the mind. Nor does it present as a neurosis, delusion, or false cognition.

Rather it presents as a composite of many pixels—many small instances—of observed and corrected mistakes.

Thus seen as an aggregation of many small instances, self-deception gradually is lessened.

Self-deception is something Buddhists seek to train themselves out of.

Consciousness as reality itself

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In Buddhism the idea that consciousness is reality and reality is conscious is called “mind only” or Yogachara.

David Ray Griffin, a process theologian, has come to similar conclusions—that reality is fundamentally conscious.

As has Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine.

Hoffman came at this subject from a mathematical angle, but arrived at a similar conclusion to Yogachara Buddhism. Hoffman says:

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. (The Case Against Reality)

I tend to reach similar conclusions when I think about everything in terms of signals.

The advantage of thinking in terms of signals is we get a good picture of “reality” without needing to say what is real beyond the signal itself.

This kind of thinking is helpful for metaphysics but it is also extremely practical when it comes to human psychology.

Rather than posit personality types and what goes wrong or right with them, we analyze how people send and receive signals instead.

In thinking along these lines, I have come to the conclusion that most psychology as most people understand it uses “arms-length” language, the language of meso and macro signals rather than the much more precise language of the micro signals that actually comprise our shared experiences, or shared “realities.”

The difference can be illustrated in this way: Rather than explain your most recent signal (sent or received) in terms of personality, explain it by accessing the micro-signals of short-term memory to find its true antecedents, its real-time, real-world experiential basis.

If you do this again and again by doing FIML, you will probably come to conclusions similar to the above—that there is no deeper substance to psychological reality than your consciousness of it.

Semiotics and psychology

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[Semiotics, also known as semiology, is the interdisciplinary study of signs, symbols, and sign processes, examining how meaning is created and communicated. It encompasses both linguistic and non-linguistic signs—such as words, images, gestures, traffic signals, and cultural artifacts—and analyzes their relationships to objects, concepts, and interpreters].

A semiotic analysis of a person’s “internal and external signaling” often can be more conducive to understanding than a “psychological” analysis.

From a semiotic point of view, it is not at all necessary that even a very significant adult behavior will have started with a significant trauma or any other sort of strong influence.

The smallest thing can constitute the start of a “semiotic slope” that, once begun, will tend to persist.

For example, your mom may not have understood that as a three-year-old it was normal for you to prefer the company of your father. Her misunderstanding may then have led to her withdrawing from you very slightly, and this snowballed between the two of you. When, years later, you wanted a closer relation with your mom and were not able to get it, it may have seemed to you that the cause was some trauma in her relation with her mother. But the actual start of the whole thing began with nothing more than your mom never having learned the simple fact that toddlers often prefer one parent over the other for a period of time.

What happened was she misunderstood the semiotics of toddler behavior and many things followed from that. There was no trauma, no ideal state not attained due to some seriously bad thing having happened to her.

Another way to put this is most people do not remember very much before the age of five or so. But didn’t a lot of formative things happen back then? Some probably were traumatic, and we do tend to remember those experiences more clearly than others, but much of what started our paths of development also began with very simple, often accidental, interpretations or misinterpretations of what was said or done to us or around us.

In a semiotic analysis, we recognize that a good deal of what we think/feel/believe began with a small thing, a random or accidental interpretation that got us going in some direction that we likely today see as a major component of our “personality.”

Once your mom began to interpret, even very slightly, your toddler behavior as “meaning” that you did not love her as much as your father, many things followed for all of you. But there was no trauma, no glaring formative event, no Freudian ghost from her past coming to haunt your life. Rather, she simply made a mistake due to her ignorance of toddler behavior.

Ironically, the fact that many of us still today tend to understand much of human “psychology” as being determined by unconscious Freudianesque forces is a good example of how a “semiotic slope” once begun tends to continue. Freud started us down a “semiotic slope” that still shapes much of our world today.

The persistence of what is simply a wrong interpretation in an individual can be compared to what happens in cultures. Something begins, then it snowballs, then it becomes a tradition or an established idea. The semiotic network that is culture is hard to change once it is established. Something very similar is also true for individuals.

I am not claiming that emotional traumas do not happen and that they do not affect people. I am claiming that what we are is often due to small accidents as much as large traumas. And that people who are “resilient” after having suffered significant traumas may be so because their semiotic development led them to view the “meaning” of their trauma in a more “resilient,” or useful, way.

FIML practice is designed to focus on real-world, real-time semiotic understanding. It’s a lot of fun once you understand what you are doing and how to do it. Communication between two mutually caring adults very often can go deeply wrong due even to very small misunderstandings. Not everything we do comes from childhood. A great deal of adult life is conditioned by semiotic misunderstandings. I can’t help but think of Amber Heard as I write this.

FIML changes your personality and sense of group allegiance

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FIML practice changes your personality, your sense of yourself, because the basis of who you tell yourself you are changes. It changes from a more or less set story or static ideal of an elusive ‘me’ to an active function.

This happens because when you do FIML you interact with your partner on a dynamic, experiential basis. This basis is guided by a mutual agreement which admits far more objective data into your core self-assessments than is possible without FIML.

FIML teaches both partners the value of micromanaging their communication and being completely honest about every moment of communication, every ‘psychological morpheme’ that transits between them.

FIML practice changes your sense of group allegiance by gradually allowing partners to shift their sense of allegiance away from the static ideals of an external group to the dynamic, and deeply truthful experiences discovered through FIML practice,.

For example, if both partners are Buddhists, they will be able to gradually shift their understanding of the Dharma away from static, imitative notions of how to be, to much richer insights based on their honest interactive experiences.

They will grow away from reliance on two-dimensional ideals toward a mutually understood, multidimensional experience of Buddhist truths.

There is nothing wrong with ideals at the right place and time, but individual Buddhists must advance beyond merely acting them out, pretending they feel ways they don’t. The core of the mind is accessed in FIML practice because FIML accesses core communication processes. An individual all alone can gain many insights, but without the help of a FIML partner how can they check their insights?

Buddhists who practice FIML will find their practice informed by Buddhism at almost every turn, but this is different from modelling a static personality on static Buddhist ideals. It is so radically different, I suspect it is much closer to what the Buddha actually meant and probably a major reason monks traveled in pairs for most of the year. How can you know yourself, your being, your reality, if you aren’t sure of what people are saying to you or how they are hearing you? Not only not sure, but wrong much of the time? The answer is you cannot. It’s not possible.

FIML will wake you and your partner from that aspect of the dream. As the Diamond Sutra says:

All conditioned things
are like dreams, like illusions,
like bubbles, like shadows,
like dew, like lightning,
and all of them should be contemplated in this way

Psychology recapitulates sociology and vice versa. Groups of people when they are bound by static ideals/beliefs can be worse than individuals. Bad groups—and there are many of them—act like psychopaths.

Individuals within such groups may be ‘nice’ to other group members, but the group itself rarely will eschew all ‘callous disregard’ for other groups, the very definition of a psychopath. Even Buddhist groups can become like this.

The only ones that don’t are so small and weak, they dare not.

This is true of all groups, not just religious ones. National, ethnic, gender-based, racial, political, whatever; virtually all groups are based on static ideals and stories, which when internalized, reduce the functionality of the individual and corrupt their morality and capacity for deep insight, original being.

Science in many ways is an exception because as a group ‘science’ is objective, rational, parsimonious, evidence-based. In practice of course, the sociology of how science is actually done can be fraught with delusion. Science works very well at a high level of abstraction, but many individual scientists will feel low-grade sociological pressures and many of them will belong to groups that are based on ideals that are very different from science and that are sociopathic.

Yes, I believe all large groups are dangerous and will lead individuals to make serious ethical mistakes. And yet, we have to belong somewhere. It is difficult to be all alone. This is where FIML can help greatly. You can fulfill many of your group needs by making your FIML partner your core group.

FIML partners should continue being deeply informed by other groups—science, Buddhism, good politics, your friends and neighbors, wholesome religious beliefs, etc.—but they should not take in the sociopathic ideals of those groups.

Go to your temples, enjoy them, do the meditations, participate, but don’t be a robot. With the help of your partner, you will be able to separate out the dreams, illusions, shadows, and lightning of the Dharma from the profound reality of your actual lives as you are actually living them. You will discover, with the help of the Dharma, the suchness of your actual being, not someone else’s.

How to evaluate something you don’t know

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A post by Robin Hanson—We Add Near, Average Far—describes some of the difficulty of presenting an idea like FIML to an Internet audience.

The problem is lots of detail and many bits of evidence make it difficult for people to evaluate the overall worth of a complex idea because people tend to evaluate information of that type by averaging the data rather than adding it up.

Should we just say that FIML will make you and your partner smarter and happier? Maybe we should when discussing it online, though I prefer providing more information.

In person, we have found people quite receptive, but that is probably due to the same effect — in person we focus on one or two results of FIML practice and we only do that if people show interest.

I think Buddhism probably has a similar problem getting it’s message across through books or film. You really have to go to a temple or spend time with people who understand the Dharma to fully comprehend Buddhism as a way of thinking or living. This is why Buddhism is called a “mind-to-mind” teaching.

Up close and personal, most of us realize that we live in a very complex world and that our capacities for understanding our conditions cannot be taken for granted. But when it comes to learning how to hone or augment our skills for dealing with speech and symbolic communication, we tend to look for simple answers, or abstract ones, that do not include the kinds of detail we must pay attention to.

Broad extrinsic theories that provide a general picture without essential detail—and these are everywhere in psychology, religion, sociology, the humanities—simply cannot do for you what a technique like FIML can because FIML is entirely based on the actual data of your actual life, and there is a great deal of that.

I do understand why it is hard to see this. At the same time, I wonder why it is so obvious in the physical sciences and engineering that we can’t do anything properly if we don’t make sure of our data.

Why should the humanities be different? We simply cannot communicate well or understand ourselves well without good data. FIML provides good data.

first posted OCTOBER 2, 2012

A few notes on FIML

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  • Historically, all languages and communication strategies developed/evolved without FIML. Thus communication all but everywhere and with all but everyone relies entirely on non-FIML strategies. As languages evolved/developed, non-FIML strategies proliferated, in many ways making it more difficult for FIML strategies to arise. People became accustomed to non-FIML communication strategies, learned to enjoy them, and wanted to perpetuate them. This is still the case today. People are so used to non-FIML strategies, they cannot imagine anything else.
  • In many ways, it is because people understand only non-FIML strategies that they communicate to their loved ones by using public semiotics rather than clear interpersonal speech. They buy things, go on trips, go out to dinner, achieve status, and so on as substitutes for real interpersonal communication. Lack of FIML is also an important reason why many people enjoy their professional or public lives more than their private ones. Many people do like to bowl, but many of those same people also join bowling leagues because their private lives are unsatisfying.
  • If you do not do FIML practice with your primary interlocutor, you will be neurotic. Sounds bold to say that, but how could it be otherwise? Without FIML, you will not have clear communication with your primary interlocutor (spouse, SO, best friend, etc.); and without clear communication you will be forced to imagine what they mean and you will make mistakes and the mistakes will compound. In a short time, you will have a mistake-riddled, self-centered understanding of your primary interlocutor rather than a clear understanding of them. And the same will be true for them. This is why so many very loving, very compatible couples have problems within a few years.
  • Do you want to have clear communication with your SO? Do they want to have it with you? If you don’t do FIML, how can you get it? I don’t think you can. Do you think you can rely on feelings? On love? On good will between you? How will you prevent misunderstandings from developing if you have no way of knowing with great clarity what you are saying to each other? What is your strategy? Do you have one?
  • Make an arbitrary list of, say, ten words. Ask your SO to free-associate on each word; just have them say what first pops into their mind when you read each of the words. Have them do the same for you. Is it not clear that your associations are not the same? Maybe a few of them are, but most will be different. Now what happens when you speak sentences to each other? Can you see that you are always going to be making assumptions about what your SO is saying based on your own self-generated associations? How can you be sure you know what is in their mind when a certain tone of voice issues forth? Can you be certain you know why they chose that word or that phrasing? Of course you cannot be sure.
  • You can only know with clarity what your SO is saying if you ask them. But if you are only accustomed to non-FIML strategies, you will find that hard to do. As mentioned, communication all but everywhere and with all but everyone relies entirely on non-FIML strategies.
  • A wonderful result of FIML practice is it removes the need to wonder whether your partner has been bothered by something you did or said. This result occurs because you will gradually become confident that your partner will say something if they feel bothered.
  • Best of all, they will say something right away before whatever it is grows into something large and unmanageable. For example, if you use a way of saying good-bye that makes them feel lonely, they will bring it up right away and you can figure out what the cause was and/or how to do things differently if need be. This is a much better way to deal with something like that than for them to wait months or years before telling you, if they ever do. Imagine how just that one bad (also wrong) feeling might grow in them over time and lead to negative thoughts and actions that could have been avoided.
  • The best way to learn FIML is to break the practice down into small skills. Try the word list described above with your partner. Or start by just pointing to things. After you have had some practice, ask how some phrases make them feel or what they associate with them. Doing that will be fun and it will help you develop the skills needed for FIML practice. Stop, ask, hold your emotions in abeyance, listen, think. It gradually will become second-nature.

Psychiatry still has big problems and so does our model of the human mind

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This interview with Robert Whitaker— Psychiatry Now Admits It’s Been Wrong in Big Ways – But Can It Change?—is well worth reading. Whitaker has been an influential critic of psychiatry’s misuse of antipsychotic drugs as well as its models for diagnosis and treatment.

In addition to all of the problems Whitaker describes in the linked article—failed diagnostics, failed theories, failed “disease models,” failed treatments, making matters worse for the mentally ill, and drugging children and minors without their consent—I would further submit that our generally accepted model of the human mind itself is as deeply flawed.

Rather than starting with the idea that humans have or develop personalities that do or don’t adapt well to some ambiguous social standard, we would do better to start with the idea that humans are fundamentally interactive beings, beings that communicate.

If our interactions are good, we will be well enough. If our communications with even one other person are deeply satisfying and as truthful as we are able, we will be even better than well enough.

People go crazy because their relations to no one are satisfying. In a very real sense, poor communication and shallow interaction condemn most humans to a sort of solitary confinement, where the inner network of semiotic reality cannot interface satisfactorily with the network of any other person’s semiotic reality.

For individuals who are fortunate enough to have a suitable partner, FIML practice will likely fix this problem while also fixing most emotional dissatisfaction. It accomplishes this by providing a means for people to fully engage their inner semiotic networks with each other.

The dead end of the traditional mental health model of a “personality-being-well-adapted-to-a-group-or-culture” is, sadly, best illustrated by the profession of psychiatry itself. I believe Whitaker is right in saying that

… it is going to be so hard for psychiatry to reform. Diagnosis and the prescribing of drugs constitute the main function of psychiatrists today in our society. From a guild perspective, the profession needs to maintain the public’s belief in the value of that function. So I don’t believe it will be possible for psychiatry to change unless it identifies a new function that would be marketable, so to speak. Psychiatry needs to identify a change that would be consistent with its interests as a guild.

If even psychiatry as a group needs to “identify a change… consistent with its interests as a guild,” it is clear that groups cannot be taken as a standard for wellness.

If even a group of doctors of the mind cannot get it right, how can any other group be expected to?

And if groups cannot, neither can cultures. And if none of that is right, neither is the notion of a “personality” that “adapts” to those vague standards.

This is an important point: groups can be and are just as crazy as individuals. In fact, many groups are crazier than individuals. The idea that people have “personalities” that must “adapt” in a way that is “satisfying” to an extremely dubious group standard is bankrupt and cannot be fixed. Of course individuals can adapt to laws and clearly stated mores and taboos, but adaptations based on such emotionally unsatisfying generalities will never produce wellness.

The individual can only be well when the individual can communicate their authentic semiotic reality with another, and in turn, receive similar communication from that other.

Semiotics is the right word to use here because its definition includes communicative signs and the meanings of those signs as they are variously interpreted by the individuals using them. Furthermore, the term semiotics implies, or necessarily extends to, networks of communicative signs and their inevitably differing individual interpretations.

Non-FIML sociology and Buddhism

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Non-FIML sociology cannot but be based on and imbued with vagueness and uncertainty. Individuals make their ways in this foggy social environment according to their upbringing, experiences, and the different ways they have learned to negotiate ambiguity. Each non-FIML individual cannot but conform to or accept a position somewhere on the spectrum of private neurosis-public semiotics.

This is so because non-FIML individuals cannot attain interpersonal certainty; they can only attain a semblance of interpersonal certainty that is necessarily made up of many erroneous interpretations of the world around them, their loved ones, and themselves. Their understanding of themselves and of others will necessarily be made up of either private interpretations (that are sure to be largely false and thus neurotic) or public/cultural interpretations that are similarly just as false and/or too narrow or generalized (science, mainstream psychology, professional societies, religious or ethnic allegiances, etc.) to be fully satisfying to the profound needs of the individual. This is not to say that many individuals living in conditions like that are not happy, but rather that their sense of who they are and what they are doing is false, utilitarian, exploitative, slavish, or otherwise limited in one way or another. Individuals in conditions like that cannot but offend their deep-seated needs for interpersonal honesty/certainty by compromising their individual understanding of what the world around them means by accepting either prepackaged public explanations (public semiotics) or making up their own (private neurosis).

Most individuals in the world are, thus, contorted in some way. Some are deeply unhappy because they can sense something is wrong but have no way to grapple with it. Others decide to make their way in the world as it is, fully accepting, even enjoying, their perceived “need” to deceive themselves and others, to manipulate others, to take advantage of them, etc.

I think the above roughly describes a big part of what is meant by delusion and suffering in Buddhism. Delusion and suffering constitute the first two of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth says unenlightened life is characterized by suffering or dissatisfaction. The second explains the first by saying, briefly, that people suffer because they become attached to delusions. Delusions can be egocentric, sociocentric, or both. They can be a private neuroses or the very public madness of a whole society, or both. However you look at it, individual human beings will suffer and experience discontent under these conditions because their core sense of what is true is almost constantly being violated.

In the Buddha’s day, you fixed this problem by becoming a monk. You can still do that today, or you can practice Buddhism as a lay person. My feeling is that if you only practice Buddhism and do not do FIML practice, you will make a lot of progress but remain unsatisfied. Societies today are so large and complex, it is nearly impossible not to be influenced constantly by them. If you can join a monastery or build a cabin in the woods, lucky for you. Most of us, though, will continue to live among unenlightened people and will continue to have deep needs for highly satisfying interpersonal communication with our loved ones and close friends. FIML practice fits in right there. Since so many monasteries today are burdened with the weight of their own semiotics, FIML practice probably would be a very good practice even for monks, if it can be arranged.

In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, there is a story about heaven and hell. In hell people sit at a dinner table to eat but are forced to use chopsticks that are so long they cannot put any food in their mouths, and so they go hungry and feel miserable. In heaven, conditions are exactly the same, but people there use their long chopsticks to feed each other, so everyone if well-fed and very happy.

FIML practice is like heaven. By doing it we feed each other and grow more satisfied as we come to understand what the real conditions of this world are.

How the Science of Memory Reconsolidation Advances the Effectiveness and Unification of Psychotherapy

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Abstract

Memory reconsolidation research by neuroscientists has demonstrated the erasure of emotional learnings.

This article reviews these historic findings and how they translate directly into therapeutic application to provide the clinical field with an empirically confirmed process of transformational change. Psychotherapists’ early use of this new, transtheoretical knowledge indicates a strong potential for significant advances in both the effectiveness of psychotherapy and the unification of its many diverse systems.

The erasure process consists of the creation of certain critical experiences required by the brain, and it neither dictates nor limits the experiential methods that therapists can use to facilitate the needed experiences. This article explains memory reconsolidation, delineates the empirically confirmed process, illustrates it in a case example of long-term depression, indicates the evidence supporting the hypothesis that this process is responsible for transformational change in any therapy sessions, describes the differing mechanisms underlying transformational change versus incremental change, and reports extensive clinical evidence that the basis and cause of most of the problems and symptoms presented by therapy clients are emotional learnings, that is, emotionally laden mental models, or schemas, in semantic memory.

link

FIML practice works most of all because it focuses directly on memory formation and reconsolidation, thus allowing beneficial changes to be made quickly in real-time. Discussions of how this is done can be found here: Memory reconsolidation as key to psychological transformation and here: Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice.

Below is an excerpt that explains how memory reconsolidation works. FIML does precisely what is described below in real-time, real-world situations as they arise between partners, or when they are together and something else arises. ABN

The Erasure of an Emotional Learning

MR research by neuroscientists has demonstrated that an emotional learning is nullified by the following set of three experiences, which have therefore been termed the empirically confirmed process of erasure (ECPE) (Ecker 2018). Hundreds of MR research studies have used a vast range of different procedures and protocols to produce these experiences (reviewed by Ecker 2015, 2018), which means that what the brain requires for erasure of an emotional learning is not any particular external procedure, but rather the internal occurrence of these three subjective experiences, whatever may be the external procedures that create them. Therefore the ECPE does not dictate or favor the use of any particular therapeutic techniques, and psychotherapists are free to facilitate these critical experiences using any of the therapy field’s vast array of experiential methods.

  1. 1.Reactivated, Symptom-Generating Target Learning Experienced in Awareness This is the deliberate use of salient cues or contexts that reactivate the target emotional learning or schema underlying the client’s presenting symptom or problem. For example, a woman in therapy for depression and absence of motivation was cued into reactivation of her lifelong schema that had newly come into awareness and was verbalized as, “Mom sees and knows everything I ever care about or do, and then takes over and takes away everything I ever care about or do, which feels devastating for me, and my only way to be safe from her pillaging is for me to care about nothing and do nothing.” To assure that the schema is being directly accessed at its roots in the emotional learning and memory system and is not merely a cognitive insight, it is critically important that the emotions accompanying the reactivated schema are fully felt affectively and somatically while the schema also is cognized verbally and conceptually. Note that the schema is at core a mental model, from which are generated particular emotions, which in the example above would include helplessness, hopelessness, fear, desperation, despair, aloneness, and the deep pain of feeling used, pillaged and eclipsed in this way by her own mother. How that schema was found, brought into awareness, and then disconfirmed and unlearned is described in the case vignette in the next section.
  2. 2.Experience of Mismatch/Prediction Error Destabilizes the Target Learning’s Neural Encoding While the target schema is reactivated in awareness as described above, this is an additional, concurrent experience or knowing that contradicts what the client knows and expects according to the schema. This is termed a memory mismatch or prediction error experience by memory researchers. In response to this experience of the world differing from the target learning’s expectations, the client’s brain rapidly transforms the neural encoding of the target learning from its stable, consolidated state in long-term memory into a destabilized, de-consolidated, labile state, which is susceptible to being updated and re-encoded by any relevant new learning that may occur next. This destabilization, which requires and is triggered by the mismatch/prediction error experience, begins the reconsolidation process.Footnote2 The labile, destabilized condition persists for about 5 h, widely termed the reconsolidation window, after which the neural encoding automatically reconsolidates, that is, it returns to a stable state in long-term memory. The case vignette below describes how a contradictory knowing was found for the schema of the depressed woman, creating the needed mismatch experience.
  3. 3.Experience of Counter-Learning Drives Unlearning, Nullification, Re-encoding and Replacement of Target Learning This experience consists of just a few repetitions, during the rest of the therapy session, of the same mismatch experience created in the previous step. Each mismatch is a juxtaposition experience, in the sense that the client experiences both reality according to the target learning and a contradictory perception or knowing, with both in the same single field of awareness. Two or three repetitions of that juxtaposition experience serve as counter-learning that functions as an experiential disconfirmation of the target learning. Because the counter-learning is occurring while the encoding of the target learning is labile, the counter-learning rewrites and replaces the encoding of the target schema in memory. As a result, the target learning no longer exists in memory, so it cannot be reactivated and cause a relapse. The target learning is a model of the world in semantic memory, not an episodic memory of specific events and experiences; the latter is not erased. The unlearning of the target learning’s version of reality is the profound resolution of a core emotional issue in the client’s life, as noted earlier.Footnote3 Successful erasure of the target learning is then verified by observing the markers of transformational change beginning to appear immediately: the symptom(s) driven by the target learning cease to occur; the target learning itself, which previously was felt as a potent and horrible truth of the world, no longer feels true or real and is not reactivated by situations that formerly did so, eliminating a problematic, distressed ego state; and those changes persist effortlessly and permanently. If the same counter-learning occurs without first finding, reactivating and destabilizing the target learning (steps 1 and 2 above), the counter-learning only creates its own encoding separate from that of the target learning. In that case, the two learnings compete for control of behavior and state of mind, producing at best only incremental change that is prone to relapse when the emotionally more intense target learning becomes newly retriggered by current circumstances.
ibid

An advantage of FIML as therapy for unwholesome or unwanted schema is FIML is mostly done in real-time, real-world situations so the schema is right there in front of you clear as a bell in your own mind. You can see it and see very clearly how it is distorting reality.

Therapies that work by recalling unwholesome schema in a professional settings have the advantage of: 1) relying on a professional; 2) avoiding doing this work with your spouse or best friend; and 3) aiming for wholesale erasure of the schema once and for all.

FIML practitioners could use a schema method to do this but generally FIML works by focusing on the unwholesome schema the moment it arises and whenever it arises in the real-world (conditions permitting). This method erases or extirpates the unwholesome schema by observing its maladaptive dysfunction as many times as needed.

FIML is also able to deal with more than one maladaptive schema, and in real-life there are many, without causing confusion because when unwholesome schemas are encountered in real-world, real-time, their structure and origins are generally easily seen for what they are.

Many unwanted schema can be extirpated with just a few FIML exchanges. Some are more stubborn and may require more time and multiple occurrences.

Another advantage FIML has is it prevents new schemas from arising and taking hold. Unwholesome schemas do not all come from the deep past or from childhood. Schemas also arise later in life and often are based on serious misinterpretations. FIML is very effective at stopping schemas of this sort immediately, before they can consolidate and cause harm.

I would add that unwholesome schemas exist in virtually everyone and often we are dealing not with our own schemas but those of others. FIML partners can eliminate problem schemas between themselves, but often can do no more than recognize them in others. However, understanding ourselves through FIML practice does help us understand others much better, and how deal with them more compassionately due to that understanding. ABN

Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world

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Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one’s mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation. (source)

Very much agree with this statement, which is the intro to a short scholarly opinion piece on interpersonal cognition.

The very basis of FIML practice is the interaction of two people. The FIML technique is designed to allow two people to become deeply aware of the (normally) elusive, idiosyncratic, and highly complex signaling mechanisms that are always functioning whenever they interact.

As partners become richly aware of this dynamic system, they will find they are able to change it for the better by removing mistakes and ambiguity. Mistakes and ambiguity are prominent—indeed, characterize—virtually all normal interpersonal communication. By largely removing these factors from their interpersonal communication, partners will experience significant improvements in communication, general awareness, and feelings of well-being.

The linked essay asks the following question: How to further develop principled methods to explore information transfer across two (or more) brains?

One answer is do FIML practice. Rather than study themselves from outside, FIML partners will study themselves as they are in all of their own unique complexity as uniquely “coupled brains.” In the terms of the linked paper, FIML practice is “brain-to-brain coupling” that leads to “complex joint behaviors” that cannot possibly “emerge in isolation.”

FIML practice provides a general “shared set of rules” that allows “complex behaviors” to “emerge” between two (or more) people. These “complex behaviors”, in turn, give partners the opportunity to control and transform how they “shape” their minds.

Me on the outside vs me on the inside

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This image was used on a social anxiety site to illustrate what it says. My take on it is virtually everyone in the world is like this if you expand social anxiety to mean inner confusion.

Under current worldwide social norms, inner confusion reigns because there is no way for individuals to communicate with profound authenticity, no way to connect on authentic levels. The closest most people can get is shared ideals, shared vows, shared beliefs, all mere pale shadows of true authenticity.

Those who lack profound authentic interpersonal communication must needs necessarily also lack authentic self-knowledge.

You cannot know thyself all alone.

You must be able to communicate it, communicate with it, interact with it to know it. And you must be able to do this with a knowing other who is doing the same with you. This is so because our psychologies are based on interpersonal communication. There is no other way.

FIML practice can correct virtually all interpersonal communication problems between two people. FIML optimizes interpersonal communication and by so doing optimizes self-knowledge as well.

Blue Brain Team Discovers a Multi-Dimensional Universe in Brain Networks

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Using mathematics in a novel way in neuroscience, the Blue Brain Project shows that the brain operates on many dimensions, not just the three dimensions that we are accustomed to.

For most people, it is a stretch of the imagination to understand the world in four dimensions but a new study has discovered structures in the brain with up to eleven dimensions – ground-breaking work that is beginning to reveal the brain’s deepest architectural secrets.

Using algebraic topology in a way that it has never been used before in neuroscience, a team from the Blue Brain Project has uncovered a universe of multi-dimensional geometrical structures and spaces within the networks of the brain.

The research, published today in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience__, shows that these structures arise when a group of neurons forms a clique: each neuron connects to every other neuron in the group in a very specific way that generates a precise geometric object. The more neurons there are in a clique, the higher the dimension of the geometric object.

Topology in neuroscience: The image attempts to illustrate something that can not be imaged – a universe of multi-dimensional structures and spaces. On the left is a digital copy of a part of the neocortex, the most evolved part of the brain. On the right are shapes of different sizes and geometries in an attempt to represent structures ranging from 1D to 7D and beyond. The “black-hole” in the middle is used to symbolise a complex x of multi-dimensional spaces, or cavities. Courtesy of the Blue Brain Project

When the researchers presented the virtual brain tissue with a stimulus, cliques of progressively higher dimensions assembled momentarily to enclose high-dimensional holes, that the researchers refer to as cavities. “The appearance of high-dimensional cavities when the brain is processing information means that the neurons in the network react to stimuli in an extremely organized manner,” says Levi. “It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.”

link

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Sent by an alert reader. This describes what probably happens when a FIML query interrupts a stimulus, thus preventing an erroneous interpretation, either habitual or just arising, to flourish in the mind. If the querier’s interpretation is correct, a FIML query will confirm that to the benefit of both partners. If it is incorrect, the wrong interpretation can be corrected, also to the benefit of both partners. Hundreds of FIML queries increasingly establish a very secure ground for communication and mutual psychological understanding. There is not another way to get there but through FIML practice. FIML will completely change how you understand human psychology because the practice is based on real-world, real-time objective (agreed upon by both partners) data. ABN

We do not experience our world continuously but in discrete snapshots, a Buddhist therapeutic interpretation

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This report — Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously — supports the core activity of FIML practice, which entails noticing the first instant(s) of the arising of an emotional sensation (that is typically tied to a much more involved “mistaken interpretation” within the brain). By interfering with the first instant(s) of arising, FIML practice forestalls the habitual wave of neurotic interpretation that normally follows. Instead, new information — better data obtained from the FIML partner — is used to replace the cue that led to the initial sensation, thus redefining that cue.

Professor Gregor Thut of the University of Glasgow, where the study was conducted, says of its results: “For perception, this means that despite experiencing the world as a continuum, we do not sample our world continuously but in discrete snapshots determined by the cycles of brain rhythms.”

I would further hypothesize that the same holds true for our “perceptions” of inner emotional states. In this context, recall the five skandhas of Buddhism — form, sensation, perception, activity, consciousness. A form can arise in the mind or outside of the mind. This form gives rise to a sensation (which is the first possible initiation point of a FIML query), which gives rise to perception, followed by activity (mental or physical), and lastly consciousness.

In Buddhist teachings, the five skandhas occur one after the other, very rapidly. They are not a continuous stream but rather a series of “discrete snapshots,” to use Thut’s words. In FIML practice, partners want to interfere with what has become a habitual “firing” of their five skandhas based on (neurotic) learned cues. FIML practice strives to prevent full-blown neurotic consciousness (the fifth skandha) from taking control of the mind by replacing the source of that consciousness with a more realistic interpretation of the neurotic cue. The cue corresponds to form in the five skandhas explanation while our emotional reaction to it begins with the second skandha, sensation. The more realistic interpretation of that cue is based on the true words of the partner.

The five skandhas can also help us understand how FIML is different from more or less normal psychological analysis. In normal, or traditional, analysis we use theories and schema to understand ourselves. In FIML we use a specific technique to interfere with habitual neurotic “firings” of the five skandhas. FIML partners are encouraged to theorize and speak about themselves in any way they like, and it is very helpful to do this, but the core FIML activity cannot be replaced by just theorizing or telling stories.

Here is a link to the study itself: Sounds Reset Rhythms of Visual Cortex and Corresponding Human Visual Perception.

A psycholinguistic “process philosophy” combining both theory and action

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I just learned the term “process philosophy” and am happy to say that FIML is “a psycholinguistic process philosophy combing both theory and action to both understand and improve what we are.”

Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative.

Process Philosophy

Another fundamental point is FIML is super objective within an area of cognition, perception, and belief that has traditionally been inaccessible to objective assessment and measurement.

first posted APRIL 23, 2021