This is kinda a divergence - but still kinda related to the idea that cognitive/emotional "intelligence" are handled in separate parts of the brain:
This month's Wired magazine has a big article on PTSD and it's called "The Forgetting Pill". The article covers some of the latest neuroscience on PTSD, and no the author isn't convinced that taking a pill to "erase" a traumatic memory is such a good thing. For a magazine article, it was a pretty long read - but I like that about Wired. Point of crossover, overlap or intersection with the article Ales posted is the idea that there are these two areas of the brain that handle the "narrative" of memories... and the "emotional sequence" of memories.
As I've chatted with some of y'all about PTSD, I think we kinda stumbled on this idea ourselves and the point is made in the Wired article, that in PTSD, it's not the narrative memory that is the problem: it's not the "he said - she said - this happened" part of memories that needs "fixing" or that "breaks" us. Rather, it's the emotions that are associated with the memory that are the "problem" - that kinda stop us in our tracks from participating in our lives and moving on... or that "come back up" to knock our feet out from under us because it was never resolved, it was stuffed, or repressed or... whatever.
It appears that the key to getting better from PTSD is separating the narrative memory from the emotions - disconnecting the emotional jolts associated with that story and disrupting the neural pathways - the routine same old emotional "track" in our mind - that emotionally, always leads us back to insurmountable grief, or pain... learned helplessness... outrage... total panic... futility... etc crap. Talk Therapy gets a mention - along with how difficult it is; how long it takes to "rewire" those memories to less intense emotional levels. Mention is made - I don't know how true it is - that some people respond better than others to this kind of rewiring process. For whatever set of complex reasons, some people simply can't "go there" that easily (not that it's not excruciatingly difficult, for those who can)... so talk therapy simply doesn't seem to "work" as well. After all, the process does involve re-traumatizing ourselves under the watchful care of our T... who is there precisely to supply the empathy, understanding, comfort and consoling that we needed for the original emotional wound. What I've called re-breaking a poorly set broken bone... in order to heal. That's a mighty big risk to take - to retraumatize oneself - in order to heal. There aren't - can't be - any guarantees going into the process.
And that's where the search is on for some other kind of "cure". What has been discovered, is that if the emotional part of the memory is blocked during the retelling - the neural connection of emotion to the narrative memory is weakened. The more this is weakened, the more one can "let go" of deep down, personal emotional constrictions associated with the memory. The narrative memory remains - you don't forget this happened, in other words. But you don't react emotionally, as intensely as if you were still going through the original trauma. And this seems to work for people who've tried talk therapy and didn't get the results they wanted... faster than the process of therapy.
MAYBE: This could also apply to non-traumatic, but still life-affecting emotional neglect/abuse/poor parenting as a child - those poor primary attachments... because in some ways, this kind of emotional issue isn't much different than trauma - it's just that trauma usually happens in a condensed, short time frame, very intensely... and the other happens over the course of years, repetition on repetition, drip by drip by drip... but in our brains - both are simply connections of neurons from one part of our brain to another. Those neuron connections do change; can be changed... change simply by being alive... but not a whole lot is known yet, about this works. There is some current debate about "neural plasticity" and what the mechanisms of it are... how it works... and trying to find out if there are any limitations to what is possible. I think it works, but then whaddooIknow? Just thought I'd pass it on...
