Choosing the right course is a much more complicated affair than I once thought it was.
A fairly new and not well known field, decision neuroscience, is emerging as an important asset in our growing understanding of why people do what they do. People make choices every day. Some of those choices cause harm to themselves and/or to others.
In the field of change therapy, I’ve often heard it said, “Just make the right choices…” Some people, however, have a faulty or ineffective (for them) choice making strategy. Others have a faulty choice making mechanism. Those involved in decision neuroscience have discovered that there may be genetics behind choice making as well. It’s much more complicated than I thought it would be. Darn!
“When people face the same decision, they tend to make different choices,” said Lee. “Some of that is due to their different experiences and learning environment. There are also fundamental genetic differences that give rise to different decision making styles. Getting a better understanding of the neurobiological basis for those individual differences in decision making will have enormous implications. It can explain a lot of problems in our society, including differences in the tendency to develop psychiatric illnesses.” – Daeyeol Lee, PhD., Department of Neurobiology and Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine.
Basically, I’d tell clients/patients to simply, “choose again” – meaning, the first choice resulted in an outcome other than they wanted, so it seemed obvious to me that one could simply choose a different strategy and that was that. Simple.
Ah, but not so says the decision neuroscientists. Those pesky genes play a role, too, and are not to be denied.
“If you’ve ever had a friend or family member with depression, you can see they are not making decisions the way they normally do. So there clearly has to be dysfunction in the neurocircuits of psychiatric patients affecting their decisions, and we need to understand this better in order to come up with better treatments for mental disorders.” – C. Daniel Salzman, MD, PhD., Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Kavli Institute for Brain Science, Columbia University School of Medicine.
My, oh my – it’s never as simple as we hoped it would be. Still, if one is engaged in a change therapy, one will make changes. To optimize those changes, it occurs to me that using a therapy that affects the central nervous system and thus those brain structures involved in genetic expression, might be useful.
“Which therapies might those be?”
I like Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Rapid Eye Technology (RET), and hypnosis. Each uses a slightly different paradigm and methodology, yet each definitely touches deep brain structures associated with genetic expression (specifically amygdala and hypothalamus). Okay, I can’t PROVE these therapies actually touch genetic expression – to date I’ve found no studies to demonstrate this ability. However, in my own practical and professional experience, significant changes at fundamental mental levels occur with these therapies. SOMETHING must be happening – and it sure does LOOK like genetic expression change. (if it looks like a dog, sounds like a dog, wags its tail like a dog…)
Source: The Kavli Foundation
