Summary of Mark Solms's The Hidden Spring

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was born on the Skeleton Coast of the former German colony of Namibia, where my father administered a small South African-owned company called Consolidated Diamond Mines. The holding company, De Beers, had created a virtual country within a country, known as the Sperrgebiet.
#2 The nature of consciousness is the most difficult topic in science. It matters because you are your consciousness, but it is controversial because of two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries. The first is the mind/body problem, which asks how the physical brain produces your phenomenal experience. The second is the problem of other minds, which asks how we can know if other people have minds.
#3 The experimental method is used to generate best guesses about what might plausibly explain the observed phenomena. Then predictions are made based on those hypotheses. If those predictions are confirmed, the hypothesis is considered to be provisionally true.
#4 The behaviorist approach was able to accommodate internal mental processes, but they did not consider them acceptable scientific data. The cognitive revolution was spurred on by the advent of computers, which allowed psychologists to treat the mind as though it were a computer.

Sujets

• Neuroscience
• Life science

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669372431
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Mark Solms's The Hidden Spring
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was born on the Skeleton Coast of the former German colony of Namibia, where my father administered a small South African-owned company called Consolidated Diamond Mines. The holding company, De Beers, had created a virtual country within a country, known as the Sperrgebiet.

#2

The nature of consciousness is the most difficult topic in science. It matters because you are your consciousness, but it is controversial because of two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries. The first is the mind/body problem, which asks how the physical brain produces your phenomenal experience. The second is the problem of other minds, which asks how we can know if other people have minds.

#3

The experimental method is used to generate best guesses about what might plausibly explain the observed phenomena. Then predictions are made based on those hypotheses. If those predictions are confirmed, the hypothesis is considered to be provisionally true.

#4

The behaviorist approach was able to accommodate internal mental processes, but they did not consider them acceptable scientific data. The cognitive revolution was spurred on by the advent of computers, which allowed psychologists to treat the mind as though it were a computer.

#5

The third major scientific response to mind/body metaphysics is cognitive neuroscience, which focuses on the hardware of the mind. It arose with the development of a plethora of physiological techniques that make it possible for us to observe and measure the dynamics of the living brain directly.

#6

The brain is different from any other part of the body, because it is capable of sensing, feeling, and thinking things. Yet in the 1980s, scientists were beginning to ignore this fact, and instead just focus on the brain’s function.

#7

The brain mechanism of wakefulness versus sleep was a respectable scientific topic in the 1980s. The only aspect of consciousness that was a respectable scientific topic was the brain mechanism of dreaming. Dreams are a paradoxical intrusion of consciousness into sleep.

#8

The brain goes into what is now called slow wave sleep, and the eyes move rapidly. The body below the neck is temporarily paralysed. There are dramatic autonomic changes, and dream reports are elicited by awakenings from REM sleep.

#9

The dream theory of Freud was that dreams are attempts to meet our biological needs, which are released during sleep. However, dreams are difficult to study empirically, and so the behaviorists ruled them out of science.

#10

The sleep/waking cycle is controlled by a small number of brainstem nuclei. The neurons that switch REM sleep on are located in the mesopontine tegmentum, and release acetylcholine. The brainstem neurons that switch REM sleep off are located deeper within the pons, in the dorsal raphe and locus coeruleus complex, and release serotonin and noradrenaline.

#11

The question at the heart of my doctoral research was how damage to different parts of the forebrain and its cortex affected the actual experience of dreaming. I found that the forebrain did something in dreams, but it was not what Freud had thought.

#12

I was able to wake people up during REM sleep, when they were most likely to be dreaming. I was surprised to find that patients with damage to the part of the brain that generates REM sleep still experienced dreams.

#13

The brain had been confusing correlation with identity for almost fifty years, when I began to take neuroscientific interest in the experience of dreams in neurological patients. I found that dreaming was obliterated by damage in a different part of the brain than the part that generates REM sleep.

#14

The prefrontal leucotomy treatment reduced positive psychotic symptoms, motivation, and caused loss of dreaming. The neurosurgical treatment of hallucinations and delusions was abandoned when it became clear that equivalent therapeutic results could be obtained with less morbidity and mortality by using some drugs that block the neurochemical dopamine at the terminals of the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine system.

#15

The brain’s reward system is the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuit, which is responsible for dreaming. It is also the circuit that drives foraging behavior.

#16

The core nuclei of the brainstem send long axons upwards into the forebrain, and their output fibers terminate in the cortex. These nuclei are responsible for arousal, and they were damaged in my nine patients.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I made the decision to train as a psychoanalyst in 1987. I was interested in the content of dreams, which Freud had discussed in his 1895 manuscript Project for a Scientific Psychology. I was following in the footsteps of my great teacher, the physiologist Ernst von Brücke, a founding member of the Berlin Physical Society.

#2

Freud’s psychological investigation assumed that manifest subjective phenomena have latent causes. He observed that patients were unwilling to become aware of their inferred unconscious intentions, and this led him to conclude that feelings are driven by bodily needs.

#3

Freud’s quest was to discern the laws underpinning our rich inner life of subjective experience. He realized that the psychological phenomena he studied were not straightforwardly reducible to physiological ones. He therefore sought to explain psychological phenomena by means of metapsychological functional laws.

#4

Freud’s theory of the forebrain being a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body was not unlike Müller’s vital energy, but it was rooted in bodily needs. The driving force behind dreams, which was latent in the subjective reports of Freud’s patients, was manifest in the objective evidence obtained by modern in vivo physiological methods.