This paper explores whether there are any guiding reasons for the loss of heart that seems to have afflicted Marketing and its various sub-disciplines over the last few years. Just witness the outp...

Phantoms in the Brain

The Science of the Brands: Alchemy, Advertising and Accountancy:

Until recently it was thought that vision shows us what is actually 'out there' at any moment. It was supposed that all the images printed on the retina are coded and transmitted to the cortex; thus every detail of our visual experience would mirror faithfully the ongoing events in the stimulus field. The first clues that things are not that simple came from clinical investigations by Ramachandran and others.1 These showed that visual scotomata are not experienced as blank areas in the visual field but that the brain fills them in with (hallucinatory) sensations that the brain computes would most probably have been in this locus if there had been no scotoma. Clearly the brain mechanisms responsible for this 'filling in' were not evolved merely to fill in scotomata. They must have some wider function. Next, experiments in visual psychology have revealed that the brain will often construct sensations that override the visual input if the brain judges that the latter is too improbable. A notable example is reported by Kovacs et al.2 These workers took two photographs, one of a monkey's face and the second of a leafy tropical jungle. They converted these into two pastiches each composed of portions of each photo so that in the location where one photo showed part of the monkey's face the other showed leafy jungle. Then each pastiche was shown separately to each retina so that retinal rivalry occurred. Under these circumstances, the subject did not see what was actually there—i.e., the two pastiches alternating—but rather a complete monkey face alternating with a complete leafy jungle. Clearly the brain had suppressed the improbable mixed pastiche in favour of what it was familiar with (and thus computed what was more probable).

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How the brain decides what we see.

........................................................................................................................... 8 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 9 The Study ........................................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter Outline .................................................................................................................................. 15 Chapter 1 Methodology and Methods ......................................................................... 18 The Evidence-Based Medicine Model ................................................................................................ 18 Systematic Literature Reviews ........................................................................................................... 20 Systematic literature review vs. Integrative reviews .............................................................................................. 21 The EBM Question(s)......................................................................................................................... 21 Combining Science and Psychotherapy Research ............................................................................... 22 Chapter 2 – Neuroplasticity (an overview)............................................................................................................. 22 Chapter 3 – Neuroimaging (a systematic literature review) ................................................................. 24 Inclusion / Exclusion Criteria ................................................................................................................................. 25 The Literature Search .............................................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 4 – Session frequency (a systematic literature review) ........................................................... 26 Inclusion / Exclusion Criteria ................................................................................................................................. 27 The literature search ............................................................................................................................................... 27 Explanation of Terms and Definitions ................................................................................................ 28 Chapter 2 Neuroplasticity ............................................................................................ 29 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 29 Basic Anatomy ................................................................................................................................... 30 Long Term Potentiation and Long Term Depression (LTP & LTD) .................................................... 32 Brain Matter ....................................................................................................................................... 33 Mirror Neuron System ........................................................................................................................ 38 Neurogenesis ...................................................................................................................................... 40 Stress, Neuroplasticity and Neurogenesis ........................................................................................... 41 Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 43 Chapter 3 Neuroimaging Studies and Psychotherapy ............................................... 45 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 46 Neuroimaging Studies ........................................................................................................................ 47 Behavioural therapy (BT) ........................................................................................................................................ 49 Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)..................................................................................................................... 50 Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) ......................................................................................................................... 57 Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (PDT).................................................................................................................... 58 Limitations of the Neuroimaging Studies ............................................................................................ 66

Was Freud right? Is intensive psychotherapy needed to harness the brain’s natural plasticity?

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine if persons with a diagnosis of schizophrenia lack insight into their illness because cognitive deficits prevent them from applying an internal schema of mental illness to themselves. The study examines the ability of subjects to “insightfully” classify a series of short, fictional vignettes from a third‐person perspective. Method: Investigators wrote 20 one‐ to three‐sentence stories, 11 illustrating subtypes of psychotic symptoms, 3 illustrating non‐psychotic psychiatric diagnoses, 3 indicating medical problems, and 3 no illness. The investigators read these stories to a sample of inpatients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and a random community sample control group, and asked if subjects considered the person in each story to be mentally ill. Results: Subjects and controls were able to make accurate, fine distinctions among medical illness, no illness, and psychiatric illness categories. Conclusions: Patients did not demonstrate a deficit in the co...

Phantoms in the Brain

Citations

The Science of the Brands: Alchemy, Advertising and Accountancy:

How the brain decides what we see.

Was Freud right? Is intensive psychotherapy needed to harness the brain’s natural plasticity?

Lack of insight and conceptions of “mental illness” in schizophrenia, assessed in the third person through case vignettes

What Happens To Religion When It Is Biologized

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